Van Bibber and some of his friends in their steam yacht lying at anchor off the New York Yacht Club’s wharf saw the boy mounting the ladder and shouted to the other boys to stop him. The other boys would have liked to do what the gentlemen suggested, but it was too late. But Tommy ran half-way up the ladder, begging his rival to come down. Mooney swore at him to go back, and Tommy hung there half-way up and fearful to do more lest he should rattle the ex-leader of the gang. The gentlemen on the yacht told two of the crew to jump into the rowboat and pick the young fool up, and the sailors ran to cast off the skiff. Then they saw Mooney outlined against the dark background of the tenements, as motionless as a marble statue on a high pedestal. He raised his arms slowly over his head until the finger tips met and interlaced, then he bent his knees and his body swung forward. There was a brief, breathless silence as he dived out and down, and then a yell from the yacht and a gasping cry from the boys, as they saw him throw out his hands wildly to save himself, and saw that he had misjudged the distance and would strike the posts. Some of the youngest boys turned sick and sank whimpering to their knees, and six of the older ones dived like one man into the water to pull him out. He had struck the posts with his arm, had turned, striking them again, and then sank without a cry into the river. The sailors in the rowboat had just started toward the spot and the club men were cursing them for their slowness. The six boys in the water were shut off from Mooney by the posts, and slipped back after they had tried vainly to climb over them. “He’s killed. He’ll be drowned. Ah, he’s sunk for good,” the boys wailed and cried in chorus. Young Tommy from his post half-way up the ladder, saw that before the boat could reach his rival, or the boys could get around the piles to him, he would be drowned, and so he ran up the rest of the ladder, poised for just a second, and then took the second and last jump that was ever taken from Corey’s slip. He cleared the posts by an inch or two, turned in the water before he had gone half-way into it, and dived to where he saw the white body settling towards the bottom. The sailors in the rowboat reached him in time to pull him out and carry him to the yacht with the bruised and unconscious body of his rival in his arms. Then the gentlemen sent Mooney over to the hospital, and wanted to make up a purse for Tommy, but he said it was “all right” and “hadn’t done nothin’ anyhow.” It took several weeks for Mooney’s leg and arm to knit, and he limped for months afterward. The gentlemen on the yacht wanted to compromise by giving Tommy a medal, but he said he’d had enough trouble over the last medal, and asked why they did not give it to Mooney, for he had taken the jump in cold blood; “an’ I,” said Tommy, “just did it because I was in a hurry to get down.”