"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?"
"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.
"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.