"On my back now for a few rods. It'll change the work, and rest me. I can see the boat, but I can't see Barry. The wind is blowing harder."
All that time, however, Barry had been doing precisely what his friend had done, only that he had watched more anxiously the increasing ripple on the water.
"She isn't so very far," he had said to himself at first. "I do wish Sime had come with me. He can't reach that shore, swim his best. It'll be an awful thing to tell."
A couple of minutes later he was muttering: "That was a harder puff. How she does drift! Seems to me I don't get an inch nearer. If it blows much worse, I'll have to follow her to the upper end of the lake."
That was nearly six miles away, and the thought of it made the warm water he was swimming in seem several degrees colder. Barry's lips closed hard, and his teeth set against each other, and he measured his every stroke to make it tell.
Then his turn came to try a "back swim and a rest," and he too said: "I can see the shore and the city, but I can't get a glimpse of Sime. There! isn't that his head?—that black thing? Guess it is; it's moving. Yes, it's him!"
It was indeed the back of Sime's head, but the boy under it was saying to himself: "The shore's as far away as it ever was: I'd no idea we had paddled out such a distance. Reach it? I will reach it. Never swam so far in my life, but I must reach it."
Still, it was getting to be weary work, and before him lay what seemed an interminable reach of glittering ripples. He was breathing hard, his arms and legs were moving with less force than at first, and his progress through the water was slower and slower.
"Can I do it? It's got to be done. I'll tread water a moment for a change. I can't see Barry. Hurrah! it's the shallows!"
As he dropped his feet they came down upon smooth sand, for all that end of the lake was a very gentle slope from the beach. The water was up to his neck, but the bottom was there, and Sime's heart bounded with a great throb of relief.