“You got him!” Lawrence shouted, springing into action. “You got him! Hurray!”
Then a terrible thing happened. Overjoyed at their great good fortune, Lawrence for the moment lost his bearing. Of a sudden his skate struck ice that crunched ominously. He tripped to go plunging forward into the black waters of the racing river. He had fallen into an open pool.
“I’ll drown,” he thought, as, in an involuntary manner, he struck out with his hands in a swimming motion. All too late he saw ice ahead. Next instant he was beneath the river’s ice.
Johnny saw all this. With a gasp of terror he all but dropped the fox. Then, scarcely knowing what he did, he thrust the fox as if he were his mother’s fur scarf, into the moose-hide bag, drew the strings tight, then shot away toward the spot from which his cousin had vanished.
As Lawrence shot beneath the ice, life seemed near its end. Yet there had never been a time when life had seemed so real and so joyous as now. For a second panic gripped him. Holding his breath, he tried to think.
In an instant his mind was clear. He knew what he should do. There were two open pools farther on. How far? He did not know exactly. Could he hold his breath till then? He must hope. And he must try to move over closer to the shelving bank. If he reached the pool he might then touch bottom.
Desperately he struggled to draw himself over to the left. His head hummed. His lungs were bursting, his heart pounding.
“It—it’s the end,” he thought.
And then, up he popped. Just in time, as his feet touched, he gripped the edge of the ice and held there. Ten agonizing seconds he clung there, then a voice shouted, “Hold on, I’m coming.”
Ten seconds more and Johnny, who had leaped to the bank and raced along it, reached out to grip his mackinaw.