Obeying the captain’s directions and grasping his waterproof bundle of clothes, Mark thrust his legs into the breeches buoy, the signal was given, and the trip through the waves began.

Soon the strange vehicle was back again, and this time Chester, buttoning his oilskins about him closely, was ordered ashore.

In a brief time Hugh, and then Billy, Alec, and Norton had followed the others.

Meanwhile, Captain Vinton, with Dave’s help, had made everything shipshape on board the Arrow.  Then, sending Dave shoreward in the breeches buoy, the captain himself, true to tradition, waited to be the last to leave his ship.

Although they had not encountered a moment of real danger, the boys had been given an experience of actual rescue.  When Captain Vinton joined them on shore, they greeted him enthusiastically and then stood back to watch his meeting with Keeper Anderson.

The latter grasped the captain’s hand in a hearty grip.

“Good for you, Lem, you old sea-dog!” cried the keeper.  “You didn’t scare us any and it was great fun for my boy and his friends.  Mark has gone in to see his mother—–­she’ll be some surprised—–­and to tell her to fix up some hot coffee and things for you ‘survivors.’”

“Haw! haw! haw!” laughed the old captain.  “This was the easiest shipwreck I ever managed to survive!  He! he! he!”

In great good nature the two men walked toward the keeper’s house, while the boys followed, eagerly renewing their acquaintance with the stalwart men of the life-saving crew.

Roy Norton was an interested observer, and when he, too, had met Mrs. Anderson and Ruth, and heard the story of their first exciting encounter, he no longer wondered at the boys’ enthusiasm.

That night the crowd slept, as four of them had before, in hastily arranged shakedowns; and when morning dawned, they looked out upon a sea so blue and sparkling they could scarcely realize that it was the gray, angry, heaving expanse of the night before.

The Arrow dipped and rose jauntily on the sapphire water, giving no sign that she, too, had spent a restless night pulling and tugging at her deeply embedded anchor.

After an early breakfast, the four boys said their farewells to Mark and Ruth and their parents, and, with the captain and Norton, went out to the Arrow in boats manned by members of the life-saving crew.

Not many hours later, they reached Alec’s home in Santario, and there they found Mr. Sands, waiting a little anxiously for their safe return.  He had learned from the morning papers that the previous night’s storm had been severe at sea, and he had not known how or where the Arrow might have weathered the gale.

When he had been told of the “rescue” off Red Key Life Saving Station, he exclaimed impatiently, “Why in the name of sense, didn’t you telephone me from Red Key?  Here I have spent many hours in needless anxiety.”