One thing more he saw in the fitful light. Close to the little, hobbly island was a dab of red and near it something of another color, foreign to its immediate surroundings. He thought it was the sleeve of a garment. Something that might be a hand was visible at the end of it. But the position was unnatural for an arm; there was something appalling in the way it lay. Then the jacket, reduced to a charred mass with a few unburned shreds, tumbled off the board into the water and all was darkness.
Emerson listened but there was no sound save the sizzling of the last burning remnant as it was swallowed in the black water.
CHAPTER XXII
ARABELLA
Clouds were now bespreading the sky, obscuring the myriad stars, and bringing with them a freshening breeze. The boy who thought they would not want him in the scouts stood upon the wall, his shirt blowing and flapping against his slender form. He was just a dash of white in the enveloping blackness.
Some day a sculptor will carve a statue of a scout. But it will not be the figure standing there that night in the darkness, his hair blowing, his spotless white shirt agitated by the heightening wind. It was ironical that this fine, heroic picture with its touch of wildness and impending recklessness, was in the darkness, and isolated where it could not be seen. For that was the way it was with Emerson; no one saw him, no one really knew him. And so the stirring picture was wasted....
Should he hurry to the nearest house for aid?
He gazed around but there was no light anywhere in that forsaken neighborhood. He looked below into the enclosure, then away again, and for a moment, several moments, seemed uncertain, fearful, bewildered. Then the monitor of the spelling books, knight of the lead pencils, Arabella, the teacher’s pet, fixed his eyes upon the projecting end of board for whatever doubtful safety it might afford him, and leaped straight for it into the black, watery hole.
A sudden, painful contact, a splash, a frantic grasping for something, anything; a warm, wet feeling on his throbbing forehead, a tingling in his finger-tips, a sinking, sinking——
Then oblivion.