“I’ll go back to that when I’m forced to, and not before,” he told Dave, filling his pipe contentedly. “Sailoring is sailoring, and I don’t mind anything that comes along to be done, even if the ship is trying to stand on its head in a gale, but I do bar turning myself into a perambulating steam winch.” It was not merely the sheer hard work that Bruce Tempest objected to. There is a traditional feeling among sailors that dock laboring is not their job. Tempest disappeared several evenings in succession, saying he was looking for work. In reality he was earning good money with strenuous labor on those occasions, for funds to keep them going, but it was his whim not to mention that fact to Dave. Although a good many years the lad’s senior, he found Dave a congenial companion in many ways, and was looking forward to the trip with him in the South Seas. They had been in Sydney a week, and Dave and Tempest were walking along the wharves when the boy happened to notice an extremely fat man attempting the somewhat perilous feat of walking across a very narrow gangway to a steam tug. The gangway consisted merely of a plank, which had never been intended for traffic. The wind was blowing in violent gusts, and the plank wobbled in alarming fashion when the fat man reached the middle of it. Suddenly either his foot slipped, the wobbling of the plank was too much for him, or a puff of wind upset his balance. Waving his arms like a windmill, and emitting a hoarse cry of alarm, he toppled over, disappearing into the water. The whole thing occurred in a few seconds, while Tempest was looking in another direction. With a shout, Dave leaped forward, and arrived at the side of the dock just as the fat man bobbed up to the surface like a very animated cork. He splashed furiously and bellowed, but Dave could see at a glance that the man was not able to swim a stroke. Without pausing a second, he jumped off the pier, landing within a few feet of the drowning man. “Heave a line,” he shouted to Tempest; “then I can manage him all right!” Dave knew better than to let the heavy man in the water clutch him. He took a couple of strokes forward and grabbed the back of the fat man’s coat with one hand, keeping himself afloat with the other, while Tempest bounded across the plank on to a tug. In less than half a minute the boy heard a shout from his friend and saw a rope shoot out. He grasped the end of it, and then, taking a firm hold of the fat man’s arm, was drawn to the side of a dory. “Jumping Cæsar!” spluttered the rescued man, when his paw had closed on the “gun’le.” “Me, at my time of life, too! Now, young man, I’ll trouble you and your friend to heave on me a bit. I’m not so thin as I was. That’s better. Phew!” He sat on a seat in the dory and regarded his saturated figure with a quaint expression.