not there. I was on the quarter deck, where I
had no business to be, I suppose, with just a little bit of a low rail,
and when the vessel took a sudden roll I went overboard."

"Jack saw you up there," said Percival, who was walking with the others,
"and spoke about warning you that it was dangerous. In fact, he was on the
way to tell you when you got ahead of him and rolled overboard."

"Jack is all the time thinking of some one," said young Smith. "That's
what makes him different from the other Hilltop boys."

"Oh, then you don't think I think of others, eh? That's one on me."

"Oh, you haven't had to, Dick, you have always had some one to think for
you," said Jesse W. wisely, and both Dick and Jack laughed.

"That young fellow will be doing something for you, Jack," said Percival a
few minutes later when the two happened to be alone. "He is thinking of it
now, and later you will hear from it."

"I suppose he will," said Jack thoughtfully, "and I don't know how I can
stop him. I could not help doing what I did, but you would have done the
same if you had seen the danger before I did."

"But I did not," returned Dick, "and that is just young Smith's line of
argument. It is nothing that you could have done something if you don't do
it. Well, you deserve all that can be done for you, and that is all there
is about it, old chap."

Two days later in the middle of the afternoon, the day having been warm
with very little air stirring so that the boys were glad to seek the
shelter of the awnings spread across the decks, the breeze suddenly fell
away and the air became fairly stifling.

The captain looked anxious, and ordered the awnings taken down, and told
the boys that they had better go below.

Dr. Wise and the professors got the boys below, and none too soon, for all
of a sudden a funnel-shaped cloud appeared on the horizon, spread with
startling rapidity until it covered the entire heavens, and then from it
shot out a fierce flash of lightning, while the wind which had died out
now blew from an unexpected quarter with the greatest fury.

Being under their own steam they, of course, had no use for sails, which
would have been blown away.

For all that the waves dashed them ahead with great rapidity and the
propellers were now high out of water and now buried deep in the sea, the
yacht being almost unmanageable.

The wind was behind them, and there was no chance of going about in such a
blow and with such gre