"Don't touch it! I beg of you, don't touch it!" cried Ruth, as one excited man undertook to take the butt of the branch.
"You can't hold it, Miss! you'll be pulled into the water."
"Never fear for me," the girl from the Red Mill returned. "I know what I am about——Oh, goody! here comes Tom!"
She depended on Tom—she knew that he would do something if anybody could. She gazed upon the wet, white face of the girl in the water and knew that whatever Tom did must be done at once. Hazel Gray was loosing her hold.
"Oh! oh! oh!" screamed Helen, standing in the automobile with clasped hands. "Don't let her drown, Tommy! Don't let her go down again—don't!"
Tom came, with grimly set lips, dragging about twenty feet of fence wire behind him. Luckily it was smooth wire—not barbed. He quickly made a loop in one end of it and wriggled the other end toward Ruth and the excited men.
"Catch hold here!" he ordered. "Make a loop as I have, and don't let it slip through your hands."
"Oh, Tom! you're never going into that cold water?" Ruth gasped, suddenly stricken with fear for her friend's safety.
But that was exactly what Tom intended to do. There was no other way. He had seen, too, the exhaustion of the girl in the water and knew that if her hands slipped from the tree branch, she could never get a grip on the wire.
Without removing an article of clothing the boy leaped into the stream. It was over his head right here below the bank, and the chill of the water was tremendous. As Tom said afterward, he felt it "clear to the marrow of his bones!"