“Well, I’ll be darned,” muttered Billie when there came a cry across the river—Frank calling for help.
Billie could just see him swimming with one long overhand stroke, and holding up something on his other shoulder. Not stopping to figure it out, Billie pushed the boat off to the rescue.
There was no sign of life, at least to Billie’s fear-struck eyes, in the limp, dripping figure which Frank laid so tenderly in the bottom of the boat.
“Quit shaking like that, Bill,” he ordered in husky sternness. “You row to the island as fast as you can.”
On the way across he knelt beside her, applying first-aid methods, while Billie rowed blindly, trying to choke back the dry sobs that would rise in his throat. It did not seem as if it could possibly be Kit lying there so white and still. When they reached the shore of the island, Frank carried her in his arms to his own cot.
“Hadn’t I better go for help?” Billie asked.
“There isn’t time,” Frank answered shortly. “Warm those blankets, get me the bottle of spirits of ammonia, and unlace her shoes.”
All the time he was talking, he worked over Kit as swiftly and tenderly as any nurse, but it seemed hours to Billie before there came at last a half-sobbing sigh from her lips, as the agonized lungs caught their first breath of air, and she opened her eyes.
Neither Frank nor Billie spoke as she stared from one to the other in slow surprise, taking in the interior of the cabin, and Frank’s dripping clothing. Then she said, crazily, “Billie, did I lose the crabapples, or haven’t I gotten them yet?”
“So that’s what you were after,” Billie cried, “poking up the river by yourself in that beastly little boat that turns over if you look at it, and you can swim about as well as a cat. If it hadn’t been for Frank here, you’d be absolutely drowned dead by now.”