Many willing hands hauled the heavy boat up upon the sands.  The rescued crew of the schooner tumbled out and lifted their injured captain ashore.  But it was Lawford who brought in Professor Grayling.  Louise had watched with the Taffy King all through the battle of the lifeboat with the sea, suffering pangs of terror for Lawford’s safety, yet feeling, too, unbounded pride in his achievement.

Now she pressed down to meet him at the edge of the sea and found that the drenched, dazed man Lawford bore up in his arms was her own father!

The meeting served to rouse the professor.  He stared searchingly over the group of rescued men.

“Where’s the man who cut my lashings and helped me down to the deck?  I don’t see him,” he said.  “Louise, my dear, this is a very, very strange homecoming.  And all my summer’s work gone for nothing!  But that man——­”

“Cap’n Amazon Silt,” said Lawford.  “He stayed behind.  There wasn’t room in the boat.”

“Cap’n Am’zon!” exclaimed several excited voices.  But only one—­and that Louise Grayling’s—­uttered another name: 

“Cap’n Abe!  Isn’t he with you?  Didn’t you bring him ashore?”

“By heaven! that’s so, Louise!” groaned Lawford.  “They must both be out there.  The two brothers are marooned on that rotten wreck!”

Already the kindly neighbors were hurrying the castaways in groups of twos and threes to the nearer dwellings.  Anscomb was getting foot after foot of “the real stuff.”  The moving picture actors and the cottagers hung on the outskirts of the throng of natives, wide-eyed and marveling.  They had all, on this day, gained a taste of the stern realities of life as it is along the shore.

Louise was desirous of getting her father to the store, for he was exhausted.  Lawford turned back toward the group of life-saving men standing about the beached boat.

“If they can get her launched again they’ll need me,” he shouted back
over his shoulder.   “Poor Cap’n Abe and Cap’n Amazon------”

“You’ve done enough, boy,” his father declared, clinging to the sleeve of Lawford’s guernsey.  “Don’t risk your life again.”

“Don’t worry, dad.  A fellow has to do his bit, you know.”

Betty Gallup came to the assistance of Louise and helped support the professor.  The woman’s countenance was all wrinkled with trouble.

“He must be out there, too,” she murmured to Louise.  “Ain’t none o’ these chaps off the Curlew jest right yet—­scar’t blue, or suthin’.  They don’t seem to rightly sense that Cap’n Abe was with ’em all the time aboard that schooner.”

“Poor Cap’n Abe!” groaned Louise again.

“And that old pirate’s with him,” said Betty.  But her tone lacked its usual venom in speaking of Cap’n Amazon.  “Who’d ha’ thought it?  I reckoned he was nothing but a bag o’ wind, with all his yarns of bloody murder an’ the like.  But he is a Silt; no gettin’ around that.  And Cap’n Abe allus did say the Silts were proper seamen.”