Just then a dark object struck the ground at the feet of the boys, swinging around like a log of wood. Seeing what it was, Dick Halliard stooped down and drew it out of the current.
“What is it?” asked McGovern, in a whisper, seeing as he spoke that it was a human body. “Great Heavens! it is Tom Wagstaff!”
“So it is,” replied Dick, “and he is dead.”
“And so is Bobb Budd!”
CHAPTER XXX—A FRIEND INDEED
It was a shocking sight, and for a minute or two Dick Halliard and Jim McGovern did not speak.
Tom Wagstaff had been cut off in the beginning of his lawless career, and his dead body lay at the feet of his former companion in wrong-doing, with whom he had exchanged coarse jests but a short while before.
It was as McGovern declared, and as the reader has learned. When the Piketon Rangers heard the rush of the flood, each broke from the tent, thinking only of his own safety, which was just as well, since neither could offer the slightest aid to the others.
We have shown by what an exceedingly narrow chance McGovern eluded the torrent. But for the hand of Dick Halliard, extended a second time to save him from drowning, he would have shared the fate of Wagstaff. The particulars of the latter’s death were never fully established. He probably fled in the same general direction as McGovern, without leading or following in his footsteps, since his body was carried to the same shore upon which McGovern emerged. His struggles most likely were similar, but, singularly enough, he knew nothing about swimming, which, after all, could have been of no benefit to him, and he perished as did the thousands who went down in the Johnstown flood.
Terry Hurley overheard the exclamation of McGovern, the roar of the torrent having greatly subsided, and he called out to know the cause. Dick explained, and the sympathetic Irishman instantly quelled the disposition to joke that he had felt a short time before.