Pete had eyed that suit until he knew every seam and button of it. Hour after hour during the cruise of the _Elephant_ he had grown better and better acquainted with the strange idea that it was to be his own. He had hardly told himself how much more it must have cost than had any clothes he had ever owned before. "Guess I'll wait till I get home," he said. "No, you don't," thundered Captain Kroom; "I want to see how you look in it. Put it on!" Pete was pretty well accustomed to obeying the Captain, and not to do so now would have been something like mutiny on shipboard. He turned very red in the face, and he put on the trousers wrong side out the first trial, but then he got them right, and the blue shirt and the jacket followed. "They fit him!" exclaimed Sam. "Make him look like another fellow." So they all said, and it made little difference that Pete was still barefooted or that his straw hat turned up in front. It was an out-and-out sailor rig, and it had taken only a twinkling, or perhaps two or three twinklings, to get it on. Meantime the _Elephant_ had tacked to and fro, and Captain Kroom and Sam had kept their trolling-lines out. As for Captain Pickering, he had again opened his valise, and was now at work with his double-barrelled spy-glass, as Sam called it. "Kroom," he remarked, "keep on fishing. Those chaps are in the inlet, out of sight, just now. One more tack and we can stretch on across the channel, not far from that buoy." They all knew that he meant the bit of white float, the life-preserver, that was continually appearing and disappearing among the waves to the eastward. "Now!" exclaimed Captain Kroom; but at that instant Sam shouted, "Oh! Guess it's a bluefish!" "Just the thing!" replied Kroom. "Pull! While you're getting him in we'll try for that float. It isn't a hundred yards away." At that moment, unknown to the crew of the _Elephant_, the four wreckers were plodding along across the dry hot sand of the bar-island, eager to reach the seaward beach, from which they might discover what was going on inside of the tossing, foaming lines of the surf. The life-preserver was nothing but a long India-rubber-cloth bag of wind, bent around in a ring. It was meant to be worn under the arms of a person in the water. There it was, bobbing to and fro on the water, but not getting along very well. The tide was strong, but there was a hitch as of something that dragged on the bottom. "Got it!" exclaimed Pickering, as the _Elephant_ swung around close to the float. "I'll fetch it up as quick as I can! Oh!" He had not caught it, for it bobbed away from him as if it were dodging. "Gaffed!" said Captain Kroom the next instant. "That's it, Pete. Now hold hard. Don't let it get away." "I won't!" almost gasped Pete, tugging with all his might. "Can't you tack, Captain?"