For a space nothing happened save that he did not sink under the water again. Then all at once he saw the bank closer than it had been before. It was lower, too, and shelving. A wild hope sprang up, followed swiftly by wilder panic. For though they still moved, it was more slowly, and gasping sounds of distress came from his rescuer.
Strainingly Red’s eyes watched the bank. Would they ever gain it? It was scarcely two feet above his head and little more than that away. Suddenly he felt a little push. An instant later his clawing fingers caught at a thrusting root, his feet struck bottom, and with a strangled sob he half pulled himself, half crawled onto a slippery shelf of rock.
For a moment or two he lay motionless, drawing in the air in great gulps. He felt chilled to the bone and every muscle ached, but nothing really mattered now. Finally he struggled up and turned his head. A white-faced, panting boy in dripping khaki lay beside him, a strange expression in his great gray eyes. Garrity’s own grew wider, his jaw dropped. Somehow he felt choked and speechless.
“You!” he gasped at length in a strangled voice. “_You!_”
Bill McBride merely nodded. He was too busy getting his breath to speak. At length he sat up and presently got on his feet.
Garrity followed him without question. His mind was a turmoil of dazed thoughts. In silence they climbed the bank and pushed through the undergrowth. Presently they reached a little clearing amongst the pines. A scout axe, a hat and an open haversack lay there, and close to them a neat pile of twigs and small sticks.
McBride knelt down and with fingers that shook a little drew a box of matches from the haversack. With one of these he lit the pile of sticks and when the fire was well going, he stood up.
“Take off your clothes and dry ’em out,” he told Garrity briefly.
As one in a dream, Red obeyed. When he had wrung out his soaking garments, he followed the scout’s example and made a little frame of sticks to hang them on before the fire. And all the time he was doing this he watched his companion with furtive, curious glances. He did not seem at all like the boy he had knocked about on the street that day. There was an air of quiet competence about his every movement which roused in Red’s heart an odd, unexpected admiration. Though he would never have admitted it, he knew he couldn’t have made that fire so quickly and so skillfully. Even his frame of sticks was crude and wobbly compared with McBride’s. And as for the horrible experience in the water—