The motor made a couple of ridiculous-sounding discouraged sneezes and coughs, and stopped. Then almost before the sound of the crash had stopped splitting my ear-drums, I was over near the boat, looking down into it and shining my flashlight into it. There lying in the bottom was a great big quart-sized whiskey bottle, and my imagination told me that maybe John Till had been in the boat and that he had gotten drunk and had fallen out and was out there in the lake somewhere already drowned. My heart sank as I thought of what a hurt heart Little Tom Till would have when he found it out.
The waves of the lake were washing against the dock post and lapping at the shore and the boat, and I knew it was a terribly tense minute. And then Poetry, who was beside me, grabbed my arm like he had just heard something terribly important, and said, “Listen ... SH! ... Listen!”
I listened, and didn’t hear anything at first, and then all of a sudden I did, and it was a scared voice calling from somewhere saying, “HELP ... HELP ... HELP...!”
10
I CERTAINLY didn’t dream that things were going to turn out the way they did when that mad boat came racing toward us and whammed itself into our dock and up onto the shore and turned part way over on its side, and when I heard a voice calling from somewhere, “HELP ... HELP ... HELP!” The first thing I thought of was that somebody, I didn’t know who, was out there somewhere drowning and had to have help right away quick. Santa’s house was several hundred yards up the shore and any yelling I or any of us could have done for Big Jim and Circus to come and help us, couldn’t have been heard by them, and by the time any of us could have run up there and waked them up, it would maybe be too late to save whoever’s life needed to be saved.
Quick as anything, I said to Poetry, “We’ve got to do something or maybe somebody will drown out there!”
But say, I didn’t have to tell Poetry to step on the gas to get going. He was the fastest acting barrel-shaped boy you ever saw. In less time than it takes me to write it for you, Poetry had quick picked up two oars that were lying there and tossed them into a row boat that was on the opposite side of the dock, and a jiffy later was unwinding the anchor rope from around the dock post. Then he yelled to me, “Hurry up and get in quick, and get the oars into the oarlocks, and let’s row out quick and save him.”
Even while we were making a lot of noise, it seemed I could still hear that voice out there calling, “HELP ... HELP ... H-E-L-P!...”
We got the boat’s prow headed into the waves, which is what you have to do when you row on a lake—keep the prow headed toward the oncoming waves, or you’ll maybe get your boat filled with water.