Would he make it? He felt a tug at the other end of the line. In despair, he felt the rope sliding through his powerless fingers.
There came another, far heavier, splash beside him.
Jerry James had come to his chum’s rescue.
He had jumped in!
Blowing noisily through his nose, Jerry stroked over to Sandy’s side. There were two more thuds in the water.
Life preservers.
“Here,” Jerry gasped, getting his hands under Cookie’s limp shoulders. “Let’s get one of these doughnuts over his head.”
Together, the two chums slipped the preserver over Cookie’s head. They yanked up his arms and draped them over the ring, to make sure that he would not slip through it. Then, they pushed him over to the side of the gently rolling freighter, winding the rope about his waist.
“Okay,” Sandy called, lifting a hand weakly from the water. “Haul away!”
The men at the rails pulled and Cookie slowly left the water. As they lifted him, the pressure of the rope around his waist acted like a kind of artificial respiration. Water streamed from his open mouth as he made his ascent. At last, he was safely on deck, and then the two friends were pulled from the lake.