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Florence was a girl of strength and courage. Not without reward had she spent hours in the gymnasium. Swinging from ring to ring in mid-air, twisting through ladder and trapeze, torturing the medicine-ball, she had developed muscular strength far beyond her years.
There was need of grip and grit now, as she clung, with the mysterious pursuers above her, and with water, perhaps fathoms of it, beneath her, to the side of that abandoned scow.
Footsteps approached. Grumbles and curses sounded in her ears. Trembling, she held her breath. Her fingers, she knew, were in the shadows. Flattened as her body was against the dark side of the scow, she hoped she might not be seen if anyone looked for her there.
To her great relief they did not look but went grumbling away toward some fish shanties a block away.
“Do they live there?” she asked herself. “I wonder.”
Moments passed. Her courage and her grip weakened.
“What’s the use?” she murmured at last. “I can swim. Swimming is better than this, even in a city dump scow.”
Relaxing her hold, she dropped with a low splash into some ten inches of black, muddy water.
“So far, so good,” she philosophized. “But now?”