“Say!” cried Clarence. “Look here, will you? Who are you?”
The swimmer on hearing the sound of the boy’s voice suspended his swimming, turned his head, and seeing standing in what he had supposed to be an empty boat, a young cherub arrayed in a scanty suit of blue, released his hold and disappeared under the water as though he had been seized with cramp.
The boat freed of his hand tilted very suddenly in the other direction, with the result that the erect cherub lost his balance so suddenly that he was thrown headlong into the waters on the other side.
Simultaneously with Clarence’s artless and unpremeditated dive, the strange swimmer came to the surface. He had thought, as our young adventurer subsequently learned, that the figure in the boat was a ghost. But ghosts do not tumble off boats into the water; neither do ghosts, when they come to the surface, blow and sputter and cough and strike out vigorously with an overhand stroke, which things the supposed ghost was now plainly doing. The stranger, therefore, taking heart of grace, laid the hand of proprietorship upon the boat once more. Clarence from the other side went through the same operation.
“What did you spill me for?” he gasped.
“I didn’t know anyone was in the boat,” returned the stranger with a slightly foreign accent. “When you stood up and spoke, I was plumb scared.”
“I really think I’m rather harmless,” remarked the boy, blithely. “Never yet, save in the way of kindness, did I lay hand on anybody—well hardly anybody. Where are we anyhow?”
“We’re on the Mississippi River,” returned the other guardedly.
“Oh, thank you ever so much. I really thought we were breasting the billows of the Atlantic.”
Meanwhile, they had drawn within a few feet of the shore, on which Clarence now cast his eyes. On a sloping beach in a grove surrounded by cottonwoods blazed a ruddy fire. Standing about it but with their eyes and attention fixed upon the two swimmers was a group consisting of a man a little beyond middle age, a woman, apparently his wife, a younger woman, a boy a trifle older and larger than Clarence, a girl of twelve, and five or six little children. In the camp-fire’s light Clarence perceived that they were, taking them all in all, swarthy, black-haired, clad like civilized people, and yet in that indescribable wild way of which gypsies possess the secret.