sign of my
guest's belongings. I immediately discovered both oars, which were
drifting upstream quite close to one another and only a few yards
away; but except for them there was no sign of wreckage. His boat and
everything else in it had vanished as completely as a submarine.

I salvaged the oars, however, and had just got them safely on board,
when the _Betty_ came throbbing up, and circled neatly round us.
Tommy, who was steering, promptly shut down the engine to its slowest
pace, and reaching up I grabbed hold of Joyce's hand, which she held
out to me, and pulled the dinghy alongside.

"Very nice, Tommy," I said. "Lipton couldn't have done it better."

"How's the poor man?" asked Joyce, looking down pityingly at my
prostrate passenger.

At the sound of her voice the latter roused himself from his recumbent
position, and made a shaky effort to sit up straight.

"He'll be all right when he's got a little whisky inside him," I said.
"Come on, Tommy; you catch hold, and I'll pass him over."

I stooped down, and, taking him round the waist, lifted him right up
over the gunwale of the _Betty_, where Tommy received him rather like
a man accepting a sack of coals. Then, catching hold of the tow rope,
I jumped up myself, and made the dinghy fast to a convenient cleat.

Tommy dumped down his burden on one of the well seats.

"You've had a precious narrow squeak, my friend," he observed
pleasantly.

The man nodded. "If you hadn't 'a come along as you did, sir, I'd 'ave
bin dead by now--dead as a dog-fish." Then turning round he shook his
gnarled fist over the _Betty's_ stern in the direction of the vanished
launch. "Sunk me wi' their blarsted wash," he quavered; "that's what
they done."

"Well, accidents will happen," I said; "but they were certainly going
much too fast."

"Accidents!" he repeated bitterly; "this warn't no accident. They done
it a purpose--the dirty Dutchmen."

"Sunk you deliberately!" exclaimed Tommy. "What on earth makes you
think that?"

A kind of half-cunning, half-cautious look came into our visitor's
face.

"Mebbe I knows too much to please 'em," he muttered, shaking his head.
"Mebbe they'd be glad to see old Luke Gow under the water."

I thought for a moment that the shock of the accident had made him
silly, but before I could speak Joyce came out of the cabin carrying
half a tumbler of neat whisky.

"You get that down your neck," said Tommy, "and you'll feel like a
two-year-old.