"How many men have you got aboard?" he kept asking, as plainly as he could for the chatter of his teeth.
"He's bughouse," flatly asserted the man at the oars. "Lord, he's blue as my shirt. Git him down into the engine-room. Spike, an' give him a slug o' whiskey.—What'd ye try to swim it fer?—No use askin', he's bughouse."
Then all that Archer remembered was being lowered into the warm depths of the tug, and standing before the red blaze of the furnace door, with the water forming inky puddles round his feet in the coal dust. And the deck-hands choked him with vile Irish whiskey. Then he found himself talking lucidly with a fat, jovial, and astonished captain, and, by a last effort of the will, making him understand that he, Archer, this naked swimmer, could pay a hundred dollars to have a posse of men taken over at once to the island. And then they had touched at a wharf, where dozens of men had sprung aboard, shinning down the slimy green spilings. The tug was off again. The
