“Oh, pray do not,” cried Robby, who notwithstanding the order he had received to be off, still kept near. “You will be tumbling down, I know you will.”
The other boys followed Norman, most of them keeping in a safer direction away from the waterfall.
Robby was running off to call some of the servants, who might he thought stop the young gentlemen better than he could, when at that instant he saw his grandfather pulling down the loch and close to the mouth of the stream formed by the waterfall. Just as he was beckoning to him to make haste that he might land and stop the boys, he heard a cry, and saw Norman slipping down the side of a smooth rock wet with the spray of the waterfall. In vain he shouted to him to hold on to any thing he could grasp. Norman shrieked out with terror, but the sound of the cascade prevented any one but his boyish companions from hearing his words. Horror-struck, they could do nothing to help him. Robby ran up along the stream, but was stopped by the roughness of the ground.
Norman though clinging to a few tufts of grass or small shrubs was unable to regain a footing. He slipped down lower and lower, till he fell with a plunge into the stream. The water was sufficiently deep to prevent him from being hurt by the fall, but the current was strong, and though his head was above the surface, he was unable to resist it, and carried off his legs was borne down the stream.
Robby had a handkerchief tied in a sailor’s knot round his neck, and as Norman passed close to the bank, he threw the end to him. Norman grasped it, and held on tightly while Robby kept a firm hold of the other end. But Robby was small, and the stream bore Norman onward. As long as he could, Robby scrambled along the bank, thus keeping Norman above water.
The other boys hurried down the rocks to assist him, but just before the foremost got up to where he was, Robby lost his balance, and falling into the water he and Norman were carried down the stream together.
Old Alec had seen the boys and heard their cries, and guessing that something was wrong, happily at that moment shoved his boat up the mouth of the stream as far as she could go. To throw his grapnel to the shore and to spring overboard was the work of an instant, directly he saw the two young boys floating down towards him. He had them safe in his arms before either of them had lost consciousness, and placing them in the boat he rowed as fast, as he could to the landing-place below the spot where the picnic party were still seated. They, alarmed by the cries of the other boys, one of whom shouted out in his terror that little Vallery was being drowned, started to their feet.
Alec’s loud voice which reached them, as he hailed in sailor fashion, “They are here all safe,” somewhat reassured them.
Captain Vallery and Mrs Maclean, were the first to get to the boat. They were followed by Fanny and her mamma.
Norman was quickly lifted out of the boat by his papa, who was not till then satisfied that he was really alive. He was at once carried up to the knoll, where a fire had just been lighted. The laird came up directly afterwards with little Robby in his arms, having gleaned from Alec and the other boys exactly what had happened.