You, Jim, look to this.
R-r-r--mortal cold water, friends!" He stood for a moment, clenching
his teeth--a fine figure of a youth for all to see. Then, shouting for
plenty of line, he ran twenty yards down the beach and leapt in on the
top of a tumbling breaker.

"When a man's old," muttered the parson, half to himself, "he may yet
thank God for what he sees, sometimes. Hey, Farmer! I wish I was a
married man and had a girl good enough for that naked young hero."

"Ruby an' he'll make a han'some pair."

"Ay, I dare say: only I wasn't thinking o' _her_. How's the fellow out
yonder?"

The man on the wreck was still clinging, drenched twice or thrice in the
half-minute and hidden from sight, but always emerging. He sat astride
of the dangling foremast, and had wound tightly round his wrist the end
of a rope that hung over the bows. If the rope gave, or the mast worked
clear of the tangle that held it and floated off, he was a dead man.
He hardly fought at all, and though they shouted at the top of their
lungs, seemed to take no notice--only moved feebly, once or twice, to
get a firmer seat.

Zeb also could only be descried at intervals, his head appearing, now
and again, like a cork on the top of a billow. But the last of the ebb
was helping him, and Jim Lewarne, himself at times neck-high in the
surf, continued to pay out the line slowly. In fact, the feat was less
dangerous than it seemed to the spectators. A few hours before, it was
impossible; but by this there was little more than a heavy swell after
the first twenty yards of surf. Zeb's chief difficulty would be to
catch a grip or footing on the reef where the sea again grew broken, and
his foremost dread lest cramp should seize him in the bitterly cold
water. Rising on the swell, he could spy the seaman tossing and sinking
on the mast just ahead.

As it happened, he was spared the main peril of the reef, for in fifty
more strokes he found himself plunging down into a smooth trough of
water with the mast directly beneath. As he shot down, the mast rose to
him, he flung his arms out over it, and was swept up, clutching it, to
the summit of the next swell.

Oddly enough, his first thought, as he hung there, was not for the man
he had come to save, but for that which had turned him pale when first
he glanced through the telescope. The foremast across which he lay was
complete almost to the royal-mast, though the yards were gone; and to
his left, j