Standing up, I inspected the surrounding water for any 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.”

I don’t know if whisky is really the correct antidote for Thames water, but at all events our guest accepted the glass and shifted its contents without a quiver.  As soon as he had finished Tommy took him by the arm and helped him to his feet.

“Now come along into the cabin,” he said, “and I’ll see if I can fix you up with some dry kit.”  Then turning to me he added:  “You might get the sails up again while we’re dressing, Neil; it’s a pity to waste any of this breeze.”