But _now_ a volley of cries, frenzied and appealing, rang out over the salt-marshes. Mingling with them--outshrilling them--came a call which made each scout jump as if an arrow had struck him. It was the weird hoot of an owl uttered by a human throat, shrill with desperation, the signal call of the Owl Patrol--but with a violent note of distress in it such as to their ears had never sharpened it before. "_Gee whiz!_ Something's wrong--something's up! I'll wager 'twas Nix Warren who hooted that time!" Starrie Chase dropped his coral-laden branches upon the frozen ground. "The Owls to the rescue!" he cried, and dashed toward the frozen river-bank. CHAPTER XIII THE BIG MINUTE When Scouts Chase and Estey reached that frosty bank a confused scene met their eyes. Before the tumble-down sheds some wildly terrified small boys were stumbling to and fro on the pale brink of the ice, floundering like river seals in their attempts to walk upon the skates which they were too distracted to remove, and shrieking at intervals:-- "He's drown-dr-rowning! Oh! he's _drowning_. Jack Barry's drowning in the river!" "Who's drowning? What's the matter, Marcoo? Has anybody gone through the ice?" questioned Leon sharply of the one older boy upon the bank, who turned upon him over a heaving shoulder the pleasant, ruddy face, empurpled by shock, of Coombsie. "Yes, the ice gave way out there." Marcoo pointed to a wide hole thirty yards from the bank, where the dark, imprisoned water bubbled like a whirlpool. "Little Jack Barry has fallen through. Ice rotten there! Couldn't reach him without a rope! Nix gone for it!" Coombsie flung the words from him like broken twigs. "Here he comes now!" Bareheaded, breathless, the patrol leader of the Owls tore toward the bank, in his hand a coil of rope. Behind him ran two distracted women from a near-by house; the drowning boy's mother and his grandmother--whose one unshattered idol he was--old Ma'am Baldwin. She looked more like a ragged cornstalk than ever, that little old woman, thought Leon--in the way that trivial reflections have of being whirled to the surface upon the tempest of a moment like this--with all her odds and ends of shawls streaming on the icy breeze that skated mockingly to meet her. With her long wisps of gray hair outstreaming too! And as she came she raised her right arm to her breast with that pathetic gesture familiar to Starrie Chase, as though to shield her half-broken old heart from the last blow that Fate might deal to it: as if she would defend the image it held of the drowning child, and therewith little Jack himself, from the robber Death. Starrie's brown eyes took one rapid snapshot of the old woman in her quaking anguish, and his mind passed two resolutions: that the Big Minute had come: and that there wasn't water or ice enough in the tidal river to keep him from saving Ma'am Baldwin's grandson.