“There!” he screamed, “it’s the last time I ever want to go on that pesky old sea.”

“Wort Wentworth!” shouted Tony, springing forward to meet this returned knight.

“Hullo, Tony!  Hullo, Charlie!”

“This you?” asked Charlie.

“Yes, it’s me just about drowned.  They let me come alone.  The others were not quite ready.”

“Haven’t you been through a lot?” asked Tony.

“More than I want to see again.”

“How many are on board the ‘White Shield?’”

“I feared it was she when I laid my eyes on her,” said Captain Peters.

“Five in the crew, my father, and one passenger.”

“Dis a s’prise,” said a new-comer, looking at Wort.  It was Juggie.

“It is a surprise,” was Wort’s reply.  “Catch me going again.”

“You’d rather be de keeper ob de great seal.”

“Yes, indeed!”

Among the arrivals by the life-car was the skipper of the “White Shield,” and there was also a man wrapped in a cloak.

“He aint a sailor,” said one of the station-hands, criticising the dress of the man in the cloak.

“It is the passenger,” said Wort.

He was a man still young, and his clothes had an outlandish cut.  He walked up the beach, the four young knights having preceded him.  Then he halted, and gave a look at the boys.  The boys halted, and gave a look at him.  Suddenly Tony bounded away, and bounded into the man’s arms.

What happened afterward, Charlie told Aunt Stanshy at the breakfast-table.

“Aunt Stanshy, guess what happened at the beach to Tony.”

“I don’t know, I am sure.  I give it up.”

“Well, the ‘White Shield’ had a passenger, and when he got on the beach, the first thing we knew, Tony Blanco went rushing at him, and the man put his arms round Tony, and then Tony came pulling him along to us, and said, ‘It’s my father, boys!’ And he was real pleasant, and said he’d send as some oranges.”

“Tony’s father?  How did he turn up?  I thought he was in Italy.”

“Well, you see, aunty, he was in a ship coming from Italy, and the ship, I b’lieve, had a storm and was sinking when the ‘White Shield’ and another vessel came along, and they two took the people from Tony’s father’s ship.  But that other vessel, you know, was going right to Italy, and so all but Tony’s father went back in her, because you know they were Italian sailors.  Tony’s father, though, was a passenger, and he wanted to come to America, and so he got aboard the ‘White Shield’ and came here, right where Tony was; and, wasn’t that funny?”

“I should think it was.”

“He and Tony were real glad to see one another.  Juggie called it, aunty, ‘a second s’prise.’”

The “s’prises,” though, were not all over.  Charlie had a nap after breakfast, and finishing it, went to a window to see how the outside world looked.  He stayed there only a minute, and then rushed to the head of the stairs leading down cellar, calling: