“Tommy!” Erica called, urgently. “Tommy, is that you? Can you make the ladder—it’s right beside you—or do you want us to find a rope?” “I’ve got a man here,” came Tommy’s voice, slightly muffled by a too inquisitive wave that hit him squarely on the mouth as he opened it to answer. “He’s either dead or unconscious. There—I’ve hold of the ladder now. I can keep us both afloat till you get help. He’s too heavy for Rick and you, and I can’t do much toward lifting him. Hit something when I dived, and hurt my knee.” “Here comes some one now,” Lister cried in relief. “Hang on a minute longer, Tommy, and we’ll have you out.” Both Erica and he raised their voices in vociferous shouts to attract the attention of the two figures he had noticed farther up the wharf. “Aye, aye, there! Coming!” a hearty bass voice responded, and the still night echoed to the clumping of heavy boots hurrying along the wharf planking. The events of the next few minutes moved so fast for Erica that afterward she never could quite fill in, by the aid of memory, what actually happened between the time Lis and she called and that when they stood on the wharf, looking down at the inert, drenched figure of a strange sailor stretched out on the ground, and at Tommy slumped back, curiously white and limp, but conscious, in the arms of a burly man whom she now recognized as Captain Joy himself, master of the _Narwhal_. “Is—is he dead?” she asked, fearfully, pointing a shaking hand at the stranger. The man with Captain Joy, who had been bending over the sailor, glanced up, shaking a disgusted head. He was Mr. Stebbins, Captain Joy’s mate, Erica saw. How very, very lucky for Tommy, and for all of them, that the captain and Mr. Stebbins had decided to stroll down to the wharf also, for a good-night look at their ship. “He—looks so awfully dead,” Erica insisted. “Not he. No thanks to himself, though, that he ain’t,” the mate growled. “He’s been celebratin’ our last night ashore, and likely enough just walked plumb off the end of the wharf here, without knowin’ he was headed for Davy Jones’s locker.” He added, apologetically: “He ain’t one of our Nantucket lads. He’s a new hand—a furriner we shipped on the Cape, last voyage. You jus’ leave him to me, missy, an’ don’t worry. I’ll see he gits out to the _Narwhal_ an’ into his bunk; an’ in the mornin’ I surely aim to give him a talkin’ to that’ll turn his hair plumb gray—leastways, if he’s any sense of the danger he’s been in this night.” “And Tommy’s hurt his knee,” Erica went on, anxiously, reassured as to the stranger’s fate. “Captain Joy, you have to doctor men on your cruises. Can’t you look at it and see how bad it is, please?” The boy winced once or twice, in spite of his most herculean attempts at stoicism, as the captain’s big hands gently prodded his leg here and there. “It—it feels like it was broken,” Tommy hazarded, his hands clenched into tense fists at his side.