The girl’s dizzy gaze swam before her to the bank. She saw the catalpa tree—a hundred miles off! She saw strange, steely shapes of playground apparatus on another continent, as it were. Dimly she beheld the forms of other girls, her companions, who had come with her, wading through the light, crisp feathers of water to her help.
Then she saw something else. She heard a shout. Down the playground slope to the innocent looking pool’s edge, like an arrow launched from nowhere, tore a brown figure, coming at the rate of a hundred yards to a dozen seconds.
It was a knightly figure, tall, slimly erect, with green and red stripes, together with many rich, quivering points of color flashing in an embroidered jumble upon its right sleeve, the highest color-point green that gleamed like an emerald eye against a blood-red background as the flying water hit it.
And where she wore the silver of rank upon her braceleted arm, tortured in a half-fainting effort to struggle onward with her dripping burden, it showed a kindred gleam of silver in the eagle drooping from a red, white, and blue ribbon on its left breast.
“Hang on, just a second! Hold up—I’ll take her!” It seemed to be the American Eagle, dangling from the tricolored ribbon, that screamed the encouragement.
Another second, and the arm that wore the Fire Maker’s bracelet, typical of the fire at the heart that waters could not quench, had yielded its unconscious burden—swamping cargo of green apples and all—to that stronger right arm with the dancing specks of color upon the sleeve.
“Do you know how long she’s been under water? One of the children just told me what was going on here!” panted the newcomer with the silver eagle on his breast as he laid poor little Rebecca, silent forever, as it seemed, face downward, upon the nearest patch of playground grass where the sunbeams mocked her wet, weed-like hair and the broken old shoes, as full of water, now, as she was herself.
“I don’t know how long she lay there—on the bottom of the pool.” Involuntarily Jessica pressed her left hand to her heart which was doing strange “stunts,” while with her right she helped the tired French child to the bank.
“And I don’t know whether there’s life in her still or not!” The lad in khaki had breathlessly flung his broad, olive-green hat upon the grass and was stretching Rebecca’s limp arms out on either side of her head, not a quiver of which gave token that the torch of her dumb existence was still alight in some covert corner of her dripping body. He looked up at the other four girls, Jessica’s companions, who, wet about the ankles, were hovering, pale-faced, near. “One or two of you had better run to the nearest pay-station and telephone for a doctor,” he gasped, “if there isn’t a doctor’s office near. We may not be able to bring her to! It may take the pulmotor—I could use that if we had it. Turn her face a little to one side, so that she can get the air!” This to his fellow-worker, Jessica, who obeyed, her breath hissing between her teeth in long, shivering, yearning gasps.
“Who’d ever have thought of any child drowning in that toy pool—two feet an’ a half of water at deepest?” groaned the lad as he knelt astride of the prostrate little figure, now looking haggard and horrified.