Boy Scouts of America -- Juvenile fiction; Camps -- Juvenile fiction
A slight adjustment of the long column revealed a less ghastly picture,
a picture the meaning of which scouts knew well enough. Bobbing
alongside the advancing face was a head which seemed to have no
connection with the nearby countenance. But the boys of Temple Camp
could see in their minds’ eyes what was not visible under the water.
_That bobbing head was being held above the surface_; the unseen body to
which it belonged rested upon the buoyant support of an outstretched
arm. Nothing held this unconscious form, it just rested easily upon the
arm and moved along. There was something uncanny about it; stark and
appalling, it seemed to be riding on a spring.
The scouts had read about this sort of thing, this use of a single
upholding human arm. But none of them had ever successfully practised
it. Now in the darkness of that wild night they saw the feat
demonstrated, saw an apparently lifeless form, a dead weight, given the
little balance of support to keep it up and guide it through the rough
water. And the swimmer seemed hardly embarrassed by this load.
What the gaping crowd did not know was that the arm which acted as a
girder was torn and bleeding and throbbing with grievous pain. What they
did not know was that the same quiet, unobtrusive will that had caused
Wilfred Cowell to stand still in the night and let another escape with
the Emblem of the Single Eye, was supporting him now amid storm and
darting agony. No search-light could show that. For how could any
search-light penetrate such a nature as his?
In a fine impulse, eloquent of admiration, several of the boys waded out
chest deep and relieved the swimmer of his burden. That was how it
happened that the hero reeled shoreward through the shallow water quite
alone. With his torn and bleeding arm hanging at his side, he stumbled,
caught himself, and went staggering up upon the grass, then fell heavily
to the ground in a dead swoon. And so again, just as when he collapsed
before his own home in Bridgeboro, he was only half-conscious of the
clamorous voices speaking his nickname as he sank into oblivion on the
soft, wet grass.
They spoke it in tones aghast as they crowded about him, “_It’s
Wandering Willie._” Some of them had not lingered at the other center of
interest long enough to learn that it was the young doctor of camp whom
Wilfred had saved. Nor to inquire the whys and wherefores of the young
man’s unknown excursion in the storm. He was not dead, nor like to die,
and the trend of excited interest and curiosity was toward that
swelling, clamorous throng that closed in around the prostrate boy whom
they had carried into the shelter of the pavilion.
One boy, unscoutlike in his rough determination, elbowed and wriggled
his way through the crowd, and braving the frown of Doctor Anderson (who
fortunately was visiting camp) kneeled over the dripping, outstretched
form.
“Is—he—he alive?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the doctor quietly; “open a space here, you boys; let’s have
some air.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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