As she neared the struggling boy, she called out cheerfully:
“All right, Timothy. Keep up a minute. I’m almost there.”
He tried to smile, and beat the water feebly in a last effort to save himself. But when she was almost at arm’s-length distance, he sank again. Billie dived under, caught him by his stiff red hair and pulled him to the surface.
Loungers on a beach are not apt to notice what is really going on among the bathers. A man has been drowned in sight of a hundred spectators and no one knew that anything had happened. So it was with the group of people lying on the sand. They had not even looked seaward for ten minutes, and were as oblivious to the fact that a struggle for life was taking place in the water, as if they had been sitting in an inland meadow.
Once again, Genevieve called weakly: “Help, help!” but her voice was lost in the sound of the surf as it broke on the shore. Then, at last, seeing she could not attract anybody’s attention, she jumped into the water and began swimming slowly out toward Timothy and Billie. But she was frightened, and fright in deep water takes the form of a creeping, all-pervading exhaustion. Once she turned and tried to go back to the raft, but the strong current carried her along faster than she could swim. It was all she could do now to keep her own head above water, and she forgot Billie and Timothy and everything in the world but her determination to stay on top.
In the meantime, Billie, with Timothy in tow, was also in the grip of the current.
“Take your own time, Billie,” she heard her own voice saying, and she half smiled when she remembered how often she had heard her father use those very words in the early days of her swimming. “I can’t keep this up forever,” her thoughts continued, as her arm began to feel numb and the pressure became almost unbearable.
It had not come into her head that she could let Timothy go and save herself. Her father had had his own peculiar ideas in bringing up his little daughter, and it was a very courageous heart that now thumped and thumped in her athletic young frame. One hand still gripped Timothy’s hair while with the other she paddled gently and let herself drift along. Hours seemed to pass. It was really only a few minutes. Billie closed her eyes.
“I’m so tired, Papa,” she whispered. “Don’t think I’m a coward if I——”
Bump! Straight they drifted into something large and soft and yielding.