A young middy lifted Staines in his arms from the wreck to the boat; he whose person I described in chapter one weighed now no more than that.

Men are not always rougher than women.  Their strength and nerve enable them now and then to be gentler than buttery-fingered angels, who drop frail things through sensitive agitation, and break them.  These rough men saw Staines was hovering between life and death, and they handled him like a thing the ebbing life might be shaken out of in a moment.  It was pretty to see how gingerly the sailors carried the sinking man up the ladder, and one fetched swabs, and the others laid him down softly on them at their captain’s feet.

“Well done, men,” said he.  “Poor fellow!  Pray Heaven, we may not have come too late.  Now stand aloof a bit.  Send the surgeon aft.”

The surgeon came, and looked, and felt the heart.  He shook his head, and called for brandy.  He had Staines’s head raised, and got half a spoonful of diluted brandy down his throat.  But there was an ominous gurgling.

After several such attempts at intervals, he said plainly the man’s life could not be saved by ordinary means.

“Then try extraordinary,” said the captain.  “My orders are that he is to be saved.  There is life in him.  You have only got to keep it there.  He must be saved; he shall be saved.”

“I should like to try Dr. Staines’s remedy,” said the surgeon.

“Try it, then what is it?”

“A bath of beef-tea.  Dr. Staines says he applied it to a starved child—­in the Lancet.”

“Take a hundred-weight of beef, and boil it in the coppers.”

Thus encouraged, the surgeon went to the cook, and very soon beef was steaming on a scale and at a rate unparalleled.

Meantime, Captain Dodd had the patient taken to his own cabin, and he and his servant administered weak brandy and water with great caution and skill.

There was no perceptible result.  But at all events there was life and vital instinct left, or he could not have swallowed.

Thus they hovered about him for some hours, and then the bath was ready.

The captain took charge of the patient’s clothes:  the surgeon and a sailor bathed him in lukewarm beef-tea, and then covered him very warm with blankets next the skin.  Guess how near a thing it seemed to them, when I tell you they dared not rub him.

Just before sunset his pulse became perceptible.  The surgeon administered half a spoonful of egg-flip.  The patient swallowed it.

By and by he sighed.

“He must not be left, day or night,” said the captain.  “I don’t know who or what he is, but he is a man; and I could not bear him to die now.”

That night Captain Dodd overhauled the patient’s clothes, and looked for marks on his linen.  There were none.

“Poor devil” said Captain Dodd.  “He is a bachelor.”

Captain Dodd found his pocket-book, with bank-notes, two hundred pounds.  He took the numbers, made a memorandum of them, and locked the notes up.