A dory is the safest small boat that the craft of man has yet devised for living in troubled waters. Handled properly, it will live where ships will founder. And yet, though Patsie Oddie and Malachi Jennings were the two men to the oars, it was too much even for the dory in that sea; and over she went before they were half-way to the _Eldorado_. The crew of the _Delia_, seeing them bob up, and for the time safely clinging to the plug-strap, whisked another dory to the rail and ready, but their Skipper waved them back. “Pay out an empty dory!” came his voice above the wind’s opposition. Which they did, and speedily, and Patsie and Malachi got into it; and with great care, the two men lying in the bottom of it were hauled alongside the _Delia_ and helped aboard. “No man can row a dory this day,” was Patsie’s first word. “And a man with big boots and oilskins overboard in that sea--too small a chance. But put a longer line on that same dory and pay it out again.” Which they did also, and in that way began to take the gang off the _Eldorado_. Five trips of the dory were made, two of the _Eldorado’s_ crew coming back each trip, one crouched in the stern and the other lying flat on the bottom amidships. It was the roughest kind of a passage, and even when the dory would come alongside the _Delia_ the most careful handling was needed to get them safely aboard. Orcutt, of course, was the last man to come aboard. Bad as he was, he could do no less than that--stand by his vessel to the last. When he came alongside the _Delia_, he rose from the bottom of the dory, his companion having safely boarded the _Delia_, and lunged for the rail. Never a quick man on his feet, nor quick to think and act, and now trembling with anxiety, Orcutt made a mess of boarding. He had to stop long enough, too, to look up at Oddie and think what a fool of a man Oddie was altogether--a mind like a child! So, in the middle of it all, he did not get the rise of the dory to throw him into the air. He waited just that instant too long--it took nerve--and then he had to hurry, and the uprise of the dory was not there to throw him into the air and on to the _Delia’s_ rail. Clothes soaked in brine and heavy boots, a man is not a buoyant thing in the water, and this was a heavy sea. So Orcutt, falling between dory and vessel, went down--deep down--and when he came up it was where the tide swept down under the vessel’s quarter.