“It’s a-goin’ to be lively work salvin’ any hooker to-day,” said the mate.

“It is,” replied Dan, “but I’ll tell you this, Mul; we’ll land her if anybody can.  For I’ve a tug under me built under my very eyes.  I know every beam and bolt in her.  And I’ve a crew of rustlers,” he added, gazing proudly at Mulhatton’s broad back—­Mulhatton, with round, red, bristly, laughing face and eyes like raw onions.

The next minute Dan, in all the delight of the struggle, was making his way along the lower deck to the engine-room door.  The water was racing past the rail like a wet blur and the deck sloshed ankle deep.  High up a wave climbed the Fledgling, and as she paused on the top for a downward glide, Dan hastily opened the door and clambered down the iron ladder.

“Well, Sam, how are they working?” he shouted to Crampton, the chief, bending over a fizzing valve bonnet.

Sam rose, pushed back his oily peaked cap until the straight raven hair flowed out from under like a cataract, and gave his thin, waterfall moustache a twist, while his swarthy, parchment face cracked into a hundred smiles.

“Workin’,” he said, “as sweet as a babe breathin’.”

Up reared the stern, lifting the propeller clear of the water.  The engines expending their force in air, raced free.  The clatter was infernal; the pistons seemed trying to jump out of the cylinders, while the throws and eccentrics lost all semblance of good order.

“Oh, damn!” cried Sam, who, being hurled to the iron floor, swore as though he enjoyed it.

Whitey Welch, the fireman, burst into a huge guffaw, in which Sam finally joined.

“You’re all right down here,” laughed Dan, “as happy as a sewing circle!  There may be some pulling to do later.”

“You get something to pull; we’ll tend to the rest,” and Sam Crampton grinned.

Emerging on deck, Dan collided with Pete Noonan, the deck-hand, with shoulders as big as Dan’s and a bigger chest.  Pete smiled genially.

“This’ll put hair on yer teeth, eh, Cap’n, this will,” he said, while from the galley below floated Arthur’s voice in a deep sea chanty: 

  “I’ll go no more a-roaming,
  No more a-ro-o-o-a-ming with you, fair maid.”

“Go on back to harbor, you little lobster pot; we’ll take care of the wreck.”

The corpulent captain of the great wrecking tug Sovereign, lying outside the breakers off Jones Inlet, megaphoned this insult to the deck of the Fledgling, as she drew near the scene of the wreck, rising and falling on the waves like a piece of driftwood.

It was a deadly day.  The promise of the sunlight had waned with the earlier hours, and heavy blue-black clouds palled the heavens.  Not one hundred yards apart lay the two tugs, rolling and pitching in the seaway; the Fledgling trim and stanch, the Sovereign big and cumbersome, the funnel belching thunderclouds of sepia, her derrick booms creaking and rattling and slatting infernally.