“When she’s all ready to go about on the short tack is the time to yell loudest.”

But the next short tack seemed to bring the boat no nearer than before, and the long leg carried it so far away that it was no more use shouting to the orange sail than to a stupid old herring-gull.

“Could you wave for a bit, Chris?” Jerry said.  “My arms are off.”

So I took the shirt and waved it by its sleeves, and the catboat began another short tack.  It was just then that we saw something black flap-flapping against the sail.

“They’ve tied a coat or something to the flag halyard, and they’re running it up and down,” Jerry said.  “They’re trying to get here, but they have to tack.  Don’t you see, Chris?”

Of course I saw, but I didn’t blame Jerry for being snappy at the last minute.

The next tack showed very plainly that the boat was really coming to the Sea Monster, and somebody stood up in the stern and shouted.  We shouted back—­one last howl—­and then stood there panting, because there was no use in wasting any more breath and our throats were quite split as it was.  When the catboat came a little nearer we saw that there was only one man in it, and, sure enough, an old blue jersey was tied to the flag halyard.  The man turned the boat around very neatly—­I don’t know the right sailing word for it—­and anchored.  Then he climbed into the dinghy that was trailing along behind and began rowing to the Sea Monster.

I sat down on the rock and I had to keep swallowing, because I felt as if my heart were bumping up against my throat.  To save time, before the man landed, Jerry started to shout what had happened.  There wasn’t much left of his voice, but he managed to do it somehow.

“We’ve been here all night,” he called huskily.  “We came out to explore this thing, and our boat got away, and our little brother fell off the top and is hurt awfully, and” (this was just as the man climbed ashore on the sea-weedy rocks) “and we’d always called this place the ‘Sea Monster’ because it looked like one, but now we know it is one.”

The man was looking at us very hard, particularly at me, and he said: 

“The ’Sea Monster’!” Then he looked again and said “Oh!”

He was a nice tall man, with a brown, squarish face, quite thin, and twinkly blue eyes and a lot of dark hair that blew around like Jerry’s.  He looked from one to the other of us and nodded his head to himself.  I suppose we did look very queer,—­quite dirty, and Jerry with the tin-foil-buckled belt still around him and no shirt; and my bloomers dangling down like a Turkish person’s because of the elastics having burst when I fell down.

“It seems,” said our man, “that I have arrived in the nick of time to perform a daring rescue.”

He said it in a funny make-believe way, as if he were doing one of our plays, and then suddenly the twinklyness went out of his eyes and he said: