CHAPTER XI.

ANOTHER DISCOVERY.

Perce’s eyes wandered up and down the beach, and finally, with thoughts of shipwreck, he stood leaning on his fork and gazed abstractedly out to sea.

“What’s the matter with you?” cried Moke.

“Why don’t you start up the team?” demanded Poke. “We’re waiting!”

Perce left his fork sticking in the sand, and starting suddenly, with his face turned toward the sea, uttered an exclamation:

“My gracious, boys! Look!”

“Where? What?” cried the twins.

“On the ‘Old Cow!’ There’s somebody there!”

“That’s nothing strange,” Moke replied.

“Some fisherman,” Poke added.

They took the discovery coolly, not having Perce’s reason for attaching to it a tragical importance.

“It’s no fisherman!” he exclaimed. “See! he is making some sort of signal!” And he added, in great excitement, “It’s somebody cast away on the rock! There’s been a wreck, boys! There’s been a wreck!”

He was so certain of this that he would have told them then and there what he had found on the beach, but for the awkwardness of explaining why he had previously concealed it. And, after all, he reflected, the castaway—if such indeed he was—might not be the loser of the watch.

Without producing that evidence, he soon convinced his companions that there had been some sort of disaster off the coast, and that the movements they saw on the “Old Cow’s” back were signals of distress.

“He has a board or something in his hand, and he is beckoning with it!” cried Perce. “He wouldn’t be waving it that way if he wasn’t in trouble!”

“I don’t see what _we_ can do,” said Moke.

“He can’t be in any great danger,” added Poke.

“But he may have been there all night; we don’t know what condition he is in!” Perce replied. “We can give the alarm, and, may be, go for him ourselves, if nobody else will.”

The twins didn’t see how they could afford to leave their work. There was another cart already at the other end of the beach, and more kelp-gatherers would probably be coming soon. They didn’t fancy the idea of giving up the advantage gained by spending the night on the shore and beginning work in the morning before anybody else arrived.

But, though Perce could do a rather underhand thing in keeping the watch from them, he wasn’t a boy to let that or any other selfish consideration prevent him from attempting the rescue of a person in distress.

“Besides,” he said, “it may be somebody we know. Don’t you remember when that man was seen clinging to the rigging of the wreck off Rocky Shoals, Tom Bowers was one of the men that volunteered to launch a boat and try to take him off. Tom’s mother said all she could to prevent him, for there was a tremendous sea running, but he went; and the man turned out to be his own father—her own husband! and the only one saved from the wreck.”

The twins remarked that it wasn’t any father of theirs on the “Old Cow’s” back, at that time in the morning, very sure! And they were reluctant to have their rich harvest of seaweed interrupted. Yet they thought something ought to be done.

“Call out and tell old Homans,” they said.

“Old Homans” was the man who had come on at the other end of the beach with his cart. But Perce didn’t see what he could do.

“He might do what we do; then he won’t be getting seaweed while we’re off,” said the twins.

“Well, you can tell him while I run up to the boarding-house,” cried Perce. “Here’s a boat; I’ll get oars, and, maybe, some men to help.”

Old Homans didn’t take much interest in the report the twins brought him of a human being on the lonely outlying ledge.

“Big ninny! He’s no business to be there!” he exclaimed.

He spent but little time in trying to concentrate his imperfect eyesight upon the figure they described.

“I can’t make out any human critter, nor any critter,” he said, and turned again to forking seaweed. “If _you_ see anybody, better find a boat and pull out, and see what simpleton it is, and what in the world he’s there fur.”

[Illustration: LAUNCHING THE BOAT IN THE SURF.]

The twins returned to their own ox-cart; and soon Perce came running with a pair of oars.

“Here are oars,” he said. “But there are no men at the house. They went off in the yacht Susette yesterday, and haven’t been heard from. And Olly hasn’t got back, though Mrs. Murcher says he ought to have come an hour ago.”

“May be it’s the yacht that’s been wrecked,” suggested the twins.

“She’s afraid it is; and the ladies are all excited about it. I tried to get a spy-glass to look through; one of the men owns one, they said, but he must have taken it with him.”

The boys turned the oxen about, and left them eating the hay that had served for a bed the night before. Then they dragged the dory down from beside the bathing-houses, and got it ready to launch. Perce took the precaution to put on board some provisions, and selected from the piles of driftwood a strip of board that would do to steer with.

Then the boat was shoved into the surf. The twins scrambled aboard and took the oars, ready to pull the moment Perce gave the word.

“Now!” he cried; and, pushing the dory over the next wave, at the same time he leaped into the stern.

The oars dipped and bent; he assisted with his strip of board; and the skiff reared and pitched on the breakers, cheered by the ladies from the boarding-house, who had hastened down to the beach to see them off.

The twins, having embarked in the adventure, were now almost as enthusiastic as Perce himself. The wind was light, the morning sun sparkled on the waves, and the dory went dashing over them as if rowed for a race.

The tide had not yet fallen much, and the ocean swells broke in a field of white foam completely over the “Calf’s” back, while the tail wagged up and down. But the “Old Cow” was clear above the line of surf about her flanks; and there, on the highest hummock, stood the castaway, now more distinctly discernible as the distance between him and his rescuers diminished.

The boys made many conjectures as to who he could be and what had become of the wreck, no vestige of which could be seen.

“He has on a white yachting-cap!” exclaimed Perce; and that confirmed them in the opinion that the Susette had gone to pieces on the ledge. The castaway had ceased to wave the object which had first attracted Perce’s attention, but every now and then he threw up both arms, as he stood facing them on the solitary rock, and made encouraging signals.

The “Cow” and the “Calf” are much farther from the coast than they look to be in clear weather. Perce took his turn at the oars, and all worked heroically; yet it seemed a long while before they came within hail of the Crusoe of that small rocky island.