“What is it? What’s the matter?” demanded Jack, running to the edge of the dock where the crowd of ’longshoremen and deck hands and sailors were clustered.
“It’s Mrs. Jukes’ little girl. She—she’s fallen overboard!” cried a man.
“She’s down there in the water,” explained another one. “She was clinging to a pile a minute ago. We’re trying to get a rope to her.”
“What! There’s a child down there and nobody’s gone after her?” cried Jack indignantly.
As he spoke he stripped off his coat and removed his boots almost with one operation. Then, shoving the men aside, he dived from the edge of the dock into the strip of dark, dirty water that lay between the ship and the wharf.
Clinging frantically to one of the piles supporting the dock was a little girl with a wealth of fair hair and a pretty, flower-like face. Too terrified even to scream, she was holding to the rough woodwork with all her little strength, but the expression of her face showed plainly that the struggle could not last much longer. In fact, as Jack, with a few strong, swift strokes, reached her side her grip relaxed altogether, and she slipped back into the oil-streaked water just in time for his strong arms to seize and hold her.
It was all over so quickly that hardly a moment seemed to have elapsed from the instant that the lad sprang from the stringpiece of the dock to the time when the cheering crowd above beheld him clinging to the rough surface of the pile with one hand, while with the other he supported the child, who had fainted and lay white-faced and weak in his grasp.
“Throw me a rope, some of you,” cried the boy, and in a jiffy a stout rope, with a loop in it, came shaking down to him.
He gently placed the loop under the child’s arm-pits, and when this was done, and it was not accomplished without difficulty, he signaled to the onlookers above to hoist up the unconscious little form. They hauled with a will, and in almost as brief a time as it takes to tell it Marjorie Jukes, daughter of the owner of the Titan Line of tank steamers, was on the dock once more with a doctor, hastily summoned from another vessel, attending to her.
Jack’s turn at the rope came then, and by dint of scrambling on his part and stout pulling from a dozen brawny arms above he, too, was presently once more in safety. Just as he reached the dock, dripping wet from his immersion, he heard the doctor asking how the child had come to go overboard.