He sat up and looked about him stupidly and pathetically. He was a big fellow with blond hair and blue eyes, a Scandinavian, apparently. After he had swallowed a little more brandy they put him in one of the beds in the living room which Mary had converted for hospital purposes. He did not appear to be frostbitten and, closing his eyes, he fell into a slumber that was not much lighter than the unconscious state in which he had reached the land. Mary stood for a moment regarding the first--and it might be the only--life wrested from the clutch of the sea. He was handsome in a way and evidently not very old. A mere, overgrown boy, she thought to herself, but he might not be so young as he looked with his light hair and fair skin, almost beardless. He came of a seafaring race, whether Norwegian, Swedish, or Dane; he would not think very deeply of his adventure. She wondered for a moment what he thought about the sea, how he felt about it, how he would feel about it now; but she reflected that his escape would probably present itself to him as a piece of luck, nothing more, as something all in the day’s--or the year’s--work--nothing romantic about it. XXI Mutely, working together on the slight foothold that the maintop afforded them, the few boards beneath their feet shaking to the tremendous violence of waves breaking over the decks below, Tom Lupton and Richard Hand got first one and then the other of the two men on the maintop with them into the breeches buoy and sent them ashore. In the rigging above, close to the topgallant crosstrees, were two other figures. But even as they worked, getting their second man into the buoy, one of these black huddles that was a man dropped past them and struck the deck with a noise distinct and apart from the noise of the general tumult. In the spectacle of that hopeless black clump falling down past them, in the sound of that blow as it struck the deck, in the quickness with which the shape was swallowed up by the glassy black of the ocean, raging with frothing crests, there was something to make the bravest soul momentarily faint and turn the body sick. “I’m going after the other,” said Keeper Tom by gesture. And by gesture Dick inquired if he should go, too. Tom Lupton shook his head. “Stay here,” he ordered, and started up the ratlines. From below, fearful and anxious to aid him but feeling the obligation to obey orders, Dick Hand watched.