me on one with you!" replied Dick fiercely. "Might have got that boy if you had pulled, and now those other folks have got him."
"'Those other folks' are coming after us!" observed Dab Richards.
"Oh dear!" groaned the humiliated Dick. "Make believe pull up river."
"I won't!" said John Richards.
"Pull so that they may think that we don't need them. Now!" urged Dick.
"I won't!" declared Dab.
Jimmy Davis also was going to say, "I won't;" but he remembered that his pole was in the water, and refrained. He looked rebellious, though he said nothing.
There was now not only a conspiracy among the elements, but a mutiny among the crew. Dick sulked.
"Let her drift!" he said. "I don't care!"
"She won't drift long!" remarked Dab sarcastically. "The Great Emperor, that started to pick up somebody, is now going to be picked up by somebody."
Yes, the fishermen were pulling out from the shore. They picked up the boat, attached it to their own craft, and then laboriously rowed for the vessel in the hands of conspirators without and mutineers within.
"Where you chaps bound?" shouted Dan.
"Bound for the bottom of the sea," said Dick grimly.
"We'll stave that off," said Bill. "Here, take this rope! Now, we must try to git you ashore."
It was rather a queer tug-boat that did the towing---a fisherman's dory in which, sandwich fashion, alternated piles of codfish and oarsmen rowing; Bill, Dan, and Bart's rescuer. It was a singular fleet also that was towed ashore--the Great Emperor and Gran'sir Trafton's boat.
"Who is that boy rowing with those fishermen?" wondered Dick. "Can it be--"
Then he concluded it could not be.
Again he guessed. "Must be--"
Then he declared it was somebody else.
Finally, when this strange fleet had been beached, Dick shouted out, "That you, Dave Fletcher?"
"Nobody else," answered Bart's rescuer, advancing. "I have been nodding to you, but I guess you didn't know who it was; and I don't wonder--the way I look after my bath. Haven't got on the whole of my rig yet. How is Dick Pray?"
The two shook hands warmly.
"I haven't seen you for some time, Dave. I have been from home a while, going to school and so on. I am stopping at my cousin's, Sam Whittles, just now."
"And I have been here only a few days, visiting at my uncle's, Ferguson Berry."
"All right. We will see each other again then. I'll leave the old raft here and come for it when the tide is going up river."
"And I am going to get the doctor. Oh no, come to think of it, these men will get him for that little fellow's folks--the one we picked up, you know."
"We? You, rather. You did first-rate. Well, who was that little shaver?"
"I heard somebody call him Bartie. That's for Bartholomew, I guess."
"Oh, it's 'Mew,'" explained Dab. "Bartholo*mew*; and they say 'Mew' for short--'Little Mew.'"
"His face looked like a kitten's there in the water," said Dick, "and he mewed pitifully. I've heard of him. Sort of a slim thing. Well, may sound sort of heartless, but I guess some folks would say he is hardly worth the saving. Oh, you're off, are you?"
"Yes," said one of the two fishermen who were now pushing their boat off from shore. "We must get to town with our fish as soon as we can."
"Well, friends, I am much obliged to you," said Dick Pray.
"So am I! so am I!" said several others.
"Count me in too," exclaimed Dave Fletcher. "Might not have been here without you.--Give 'em three cheers, boys!"
Amid the huzzahs echoing over the waters, the fishermen, smiling and bowing, rowed off.
"Many thanks, boys, if you will help me to turn Bart's boat over and get the water out. I must row it up to the rock where the rest of my clothes are, and then we might all go along together. We can pick up the fellows on the schooner."
The remnant of Captain Dick's crew on board the schooner gladly abandoned it when Gran'sir Trafton's boat came along, and all journeyed in company up the river.
And where was Little Mew? He went home only to be scolded by gran'sir because he had not brought the doctor, and because he had somehow got into the water somewhere. Granny was not at home, and Little Mew dared not tell the whole story. He was sent upstairs to change his clothes and stay there till granny got home.
"Gran'sir don't know I haven't got another shift," whined Little Mew. "Got to get these wet things off, anyhow."
He removed them and then crept into bed. It was dark when granny returned.
From the window at the head of his bed Bartie watched the sun go down, and then he saw the white stars come into the sky.
About that time the evening breeze began to breathe heavily; and was that the reason why the stars, blossom-like, opened their fair, delicate petals, even as they say the wind-flowers of spring open when the wind begins to blow?
"They don't seem to amount to much--just like me," thought Bartie; and having thus come into harmony with the world's opinion of himself, he closed his eyes, like an anemone shutting its petals, and went to sleep.
Don't stars amount to much? They would be missed if, some night, people looking up should learn that they had gone for ever.
And granny coming home, having learned elsewhere the full story of Little Mew's exposure to an awful peril, went upstairs, and, candle in hand, looked down on the motherless child in bed fast asleep.
"Poor little boy!" she murmured. "I should miss him if he was gone. Yes, I should terribly."
She wiped her eyes, and then tucked up Bartie for the night.
II.
Caught on the Bar
Dave Fletcher and Dick Pray were boys who had grown up in the same town, but from the same soil had come two very different productions. They were unlike in their personal appearance. Dick Pray would come down the street throwing his head to right and left, scattering sharp, eager glances from his restless black eyes, and swinging his hands.
"Somebody is coming," people would be very likely to say.
Dave Fletcher had a quiet, unobtrusive, straight-forward way of walking. Dick was quite a handsome youth; but the person that Dave Fletcher saw in the glass was ordinary in feature, with pleasant, honest eyes of blue, and hair--was it brown or black?
Dave sometimes wished it were browner or blacker, and not "a go-between," as he had told his mother.
Dave and Dick were not as yet trying to make their own way; but they were between fifteen and sixteen, and knew that they must soon be stirring for themselves.
They had already begun to intimate how they would stir in after life.
Dave had a quiet, resolute way. There was no pretence or bluster in his methods. In a modest but manly fashion he went ahead and did the thing while Dick was talking about it, and perhaps magnifying its difficulty, that inferentially his courage and pluck in attempting it might be magnified. Dick's way of strutting down-street illustrated his methods and manners. There was a great deal of bluster in him. Nobody was more daring than he in his purposes, but for the quiet doing of the thing that Dick dared, Dave was the boy. Somehow Dick had received the idea that the world is to be carried by a display of strength rather than its actual use; that men must be impressed by brag and noise.