What Saved Mike
Let us be just to all. I therefore make haste to say that when Kit Woodford thus threw Mike Murphy into the Back River he did not doubt for an instant that he was a swimmer, for whoever heard of a lusty youth seventeen years old who could not take care of himself in water? Of course there are such, but they are so few that they are a negligible number.
Graff Miller was startled when he heard the splash, and turning his head saw the lad disappear, but his belief was the same as his companion’s, and turning on more power, he shot beyond sight before the lad could come to the surface.
Now I wish to say further that it is a fact within the knowledge of more than one that a person who did not know how to swim has, upon being precipitated into deep water, struck out like a master of the natatorial art. A father standing on the shore of a lake in northern England saw a boat upset when a hundred yards off and his little boy flung clear of the support. The lad had never even tried to swim, but as he was going down the parent shouted to him:
“If you don’t come right to land, I’ll whip you within an inch of your life!”
And the little fellow swam to where the frantic parent awaited him.
Moreover, I once witnessed the same strange occurrence. I was not six years old when I was waiting at the side of a deep pond, and watching my brother, four years older, construct a raft, with which he had promised to come over and take me a-sailing. He put a number of boards loosely together, and using a shingle for a paddle, worked out from shore and began making his way toward me, who was in high spirits over the promised treat.
In the very middle of the pond, where the water was fully twenty feet deep, the primitive raft began disintegrating. The boards slipped apart, so that those upon which my brother stood sank under his weight. Had he been older and more sensible, he would have known that this need not mean danger to him, for the smallest board was buoyant enough to hold his head above water, and he could have worked his way to land with such support. But the sight of the structure breaking apart threw him into a panic. He made a frenzied leap as far out as he could, came up instantly, blew the water from his mouth and swam so easily to where I was standing that I never dreamed he was in peril. I should have said that never before had he tried to swim.
The explanation of what seems unaccountable is simple. Now and then it happens that when a sudden demand is made upon a person to save his life by swimming he instinctively does the right thing. He adjusts his body correctly, and uses his legs and arms properly—his action being exactly like those of a bullfrog when he starts on a voyage to the other side of the spring where he makes his home.
This thing does not often occur, but, as I have said, it does now and then. Let me beg you never to make the experiment unless it is forced upon you, for I dread what the result would be.