“I’ll t’ink some dere—dere she’ll go down,—’Becca!” answered, at last, the pluckily wading, little French child, who clung to her right hand, pointing to a rainbow-shaft from the fountain leveled downward, too, like an exploring finger.
And there the rainbow and Jessica found her—at the burnished point to which she in her dumb play had waded forth through two feet and a half of water to catch that rainbow—lying all dressed in the old grey frock and broken footwear beneath the island sunburst of the fountain.
Here the girl, looking down, saw a dark spot, a hair-fringed mound upon the pool’s bottom, barely covered by a glassy inch or two of ripples—head submerged!
With a choking cry she stooped and dragged it up, lifted it. She was strong and athletic for her seventeen years, but her whole girlish framework rocked and shuddered, almost collapsed, as she did so, bowed by an unexpected gust of weight.
The dumb child was eight years old, stout and chunky; now, unconscious, clogged by the leaden weight of water in her little clothing, swamped by green fruit, she would have made a taxing burden for a man.
“Father—Father in Heaven, give me strength—help me—strength to carry her out of the pool! Strength, Father—strength!”
Half-aloud, irrepressibly, the cry that ever comes first in dire need rocked between the young girl’s parted, gasping lips—she rocking with it, to the roots, like a sapling in flood.
The childish mound of weight and water sank again until it touched the glassy ripples, seeming as if it dragged her very flesh with it, while the French child, submerged to her wallowing armpits, moaned beside her.
Then the round, strained arm that flashed with the silver of the Fire Maker’s bracelet, aided by its fellow, managed, somehow, to gather up that leaden weight again, to hold it above the thin sheet of water, to start with it, staggering toward the earthen bank.
“Is she drowned—dead? How long did she lie there? How far can I carry her?” The questions spun like a water-worked wheel in Jessica’s brain, grinding out each staggering step. “Oh! isn’t it horrible? And we were going to dress her up! The frock I made her! Green apples! Cramp!... Oh, I’m letting her down! It’s too much. I—c-can’t!”