Page:Young Hunters in Porto Rico.djvu/89

Rh "It's alive; don't ye forgit thet," observed old Jacob. "An' if Leander hadn't been cut away by Dick, he would have been pulled under, jest as sartin as if he had been tied to a rope. Sometimes thet seaweed covered an acre or more of the ocean. I don't know wot the scientific name is, but us old sailors used to call it Old Nick's hot-bed."

"And a hot-bed it must make," put in Don. "I don't think I want to go swimming around here again."

"The weed winds around anything that it happens to touch, and then it begins to contract, and that pulls the thing down. Many a poor sailor has lost his life through foolin' with Old Nick's hot-bed," concluded old Jacob.

On the day following, the breeze freshened once more, and the Dashaway bowled along merrily. Toward evening all hands began to watch for land, but it did not appear. Yet about nine o'clock in the evening they sighted numerous lights clustered together almost directly south of the yacht.

"Must be the lights of Manati," observed old Jacob; and his surmise proved correct, and by morning they were running straight for the harbor of San Juan.

Now that the end of the long voyage was so close at hand, the boys and Robert Menden were