"I don't know. It's a good boat, though. Pity to see it knocked into kindling wood."
"That's right."
The pilot of the big freight steamer, which was approaching her dock after a voyage down Lake Michigan, also saw the drifting boat now, and, doubtless thinking some one was in it, he pulled the whistle wire sharply. A hoarse blast from the steamer's siren came across the water. The signal was one of alarm.
At the sound of it a boy, who had been sitting on a box at the edge of the wharf, idly swinging his bare feet to and fro, looked up. He was a lad about fifteen years old, with brown eyes and a pleasant face. Though clean, his clothes—what few he had on—were very much patched.
"Something's the matter," said the lad. "Something in the path of the steamer, I guess," for he had been around the lake front so constantly that he was a regular water-rat, and he knew what every whistle signal meant.
As the boy glanced out to where the steamer was he saw the rowboat, almost in the path of the big vessel, for the pilot of the freighter had shifted his wheel to avoid a collision, though changing his course meant that he could not make as good a landing as he had expected.
"Why, that rowboat's going to be smashed!" the boy exclaimed, repeating the general opinion of the crowd. "The steamer can't get up to the bulkhead without grinding it to pieces. There! He's reversing!"
As he spoke there came across the narrow expanse of water the sound of bells from the engine-room—bells that indicated, to the practiced ear of the lad, the signal for the engineer to back the freight steamer.
"That boat's worth saving," the boy murmured as he jumped off the box and went closer to the end of the pier. "I'm going to do it, too. Maybe I'll get a reward."
He lost no time in useless thinking, but, throwing off his coat with one motion and divesting himself of his trousers by another, he poised himself for an instant on the stringpiece of the pier, clad in his undergarments.