“He’s drown-dr-rowning! Oh! he’s drowning. Jack Barry’s drowning in the river!”
“Who’s drowning? What’s the matter, Marcoo? Has anybody gone through the ice?” questioned Leon sharply of the one older boy upon the bank, who turned upon him over a heaving shoulder the pleasant, ruddy face, empurpled by shock, of Coombsie.
“Yes, the ice gave way out there.” Marcoo pointed to a wide hole thirty yards from the bank, where the dark, imprisoned water bubbled like a whirlpool. “Little Jack Barry has fallen through. Ice rotten there! Couldn’t reach him without a rope! Nix gone for it!” Coombsie flung the words from him like broken twigs. “Here he comes now!”
Bareheaded, breathless, the patrol leader of the Owls tore toward the bank, in his hand a coil of rope. Behind him ran two distracted women from a near-by house; the drowning boy’s mother and his grandmother—whose one unshattered idol he was—old Ma’am Baldwin.
She looked more like a ragged cornstalk than ever, that little old woman, thought Leon—in the way that trivial reflections have of being whirled to the surface upon the tempest of a moment like this—with all her odds and ends of shawls streaming on the icy breeze that skated mockingly to meet her. With her long wisps of gray hair outstreaming too!
And as she came she raised her right arm to her breast with that pathetic gesture familiar to Starrie Chase, as though to shield her half-broken old heart from the last blow that Fate might deal to it: as if she would defend the image it held of the drowning child, and therewith little Jack himself, from the robber Death.
Starrie’s brown eyes took one rapid snapshot of the old woman in her quaking anguish, and his mind passed two resolutions: that the Big Minute had come: and that there wasn’t water or ice enough in the tidal river to keep him from saving Ma’am Baldwin’s grandson.
“Tie this rope round me! Quick! Bowline knot! I’ll try an’ crawl out to him!” Nixon was shrieking in his ear.
“You can’t alone! The ice is too rotten. You’d break through—and we mightn’t be able to pull you out that way. Must make a chain! I’ll go first. Crawl after me, Nix, and hang on tight to my feet!”
Corporal Chase was already lying flat on his stomach, working himself out over the infirm ice where, here and there, within the white map of lines and circles traced by the skates of the small boys, were small holes through which the captive water heaved like Ma’am Baldwin’s breast, under a thin, glassy fretwork.