“Two feet and a half of water—and green apples!” Jessica corrected him.
His hands were quickly finding the spaces between the rigid little limbs. Alternately he pressed with all the weight of his strong young shoulders upon them, then relaxed, setting up a bellows-like motion to expel the playground pool—as much of it as ’Becca had swallowed—from her air-passages and draw in fresh air.
“Could you get at my watch in my vest pocket and time this?”
Jessica obeyed.
“Two of the girls have gone to find a doctor,” she said, glancing at the disappearing forms of Sally and Betty. “Keep away; we mustn’t get too near”—this to the other two—“we mustn’t take the air from her.”
“You know something about first aid then; are you timing this work? It ought to be about a dozen strokes to a minute.” The bestriding lad directed his question to the first rescuer—the girl-rescuer—by the motion of an eyelid, the while his strong hands, tanned to the color of his khaki uniform, rose and fell rhythmically upon the framework of ’Becca’s dumb little heart, he trying so hard to breathe for her through those brown hands, to force artificial respiration.
The silver swooping eagle above his heaving heart shook and palpitated with his efforts.
A redness grew under his eyes, as under Jessica’s, where horror and anxiety laid their congesting fingers.
But the many rich points of color upon his khaki sleeve, yellow, green, red, white, each of them a little embroidered design in silk, mingled their merits with the sunbeams which wove of them a rich arabesque that flashed and played beneath the most noticeable of the badges, the emerald eye against a blood-red background which shone, green as hope, when he took the little victim of the bathing-pool from Jessica’s arms.
No peering eye, indeed, this merit badge, but the green cross of the first aid, awarded for proficiency in succor, hopeful still upon its red ground, enclosed in a green circle.