HERVEY ALL OVER
I was so excited that I let one of the oars go sliding into the water.
“Where are you?” Hervey called. “Can’t you hang onto the boat?”
“It’s sinking,” a voice called.
“It won’t sink,” Hervey shouted. “It’ll swamp. Hang onto the stern of
it. Where are you anyway?”
While he was calling he was feeling for the oars and I had to tell him
that one slid into the water. I wouldn’t tell you what he said, but
anyway he was excited. We could hear screaming and splashing and cries
of “_Help, help!_”
“Hang onto the boat,” Hervey cried. Then he said to me, “Keep calling so
I’ll know where you are. Don’t try to move, you don’t know which way
you’re going. Just let her stand as long as we can’t row. She won’t go
far, only keep calling. All right, I’m with you,” he shouted. Then,
before I could say anything he had jumped into the water and was
swimming off. The mist just swallowed him up and in a few seconds I
couldn’t see him at all, only hear the sound as he swam and that voice
somewhere.
“Here I am,” I kept calling. And sometimes I gave the Silver Fox call
(that’s the call of my patrol) so he would know where I was. But
somewhere another voice kept giving the same calls and I knew it was an
echo and maybe he wouldn’t know what way to go when he started back.
Every time I called the echo called too, from somewhere far off.
Pretty soon I could hear voices and I heard Hervey say, “Let go your
arm, leave it to me.”
“I’m here,” I called. “Here—here—here—here I am. That other voice is an
echo—here I am—right here—right here——”
Pretty soon I could see him coming out of the mist. It seemed just as if
it broke open to let him through. He was holding some one up and I could
see a head sort of hanging back and looking up at the sky.
“All right?” I asked.
“Sure thing,” Hervey said. “Get hold of him, will you?”
“At the stern,” I said. I was glad to show him I knew that much anyway,
never to lift a person over the side of a small boat.
It was some job getting the rescued fellow aboard, and then I saw it was
our friend, the sharpy. His coat with the slanting pockets looked awful
funny all wet and clinging to him. He was all right, that was one good
thing, but his sharpy suit—_good night_! The worst that had happened to
him was a good scare.
“He was doing a new dance when I grabbed him,” Hervey said.
The fellow just lay in the bottom of the boat breathing hard, but I
could see he was all right. He reached up with his left hand and fixed
his funny little necktie, and then I knew he was all right. I guess he
would do that in his sleep.
“He’s going to sit out the next dance,” Hervey said.
“What happened?” I asked him.
Then he told me just how it was. The fellow was dragging the lake with a
seine. He had fastened one end of it on shore and was rowing with the
other end. When Hervey lifted the seine and grabbed it the fellow
happened to be standing in his boat and it pulled him over into the
water. He grabbed the boat along the side and, of course, that swamped
it.
I’ll say one thing, if the old tin box is ever found that will be the
way to find it—dragging with a seine. And that cake-eater would have
stood a pretty good chance of finding it too if he had been free to work
in the daytime. But he was trying to do it all alone in the night, that
was the trouble. Anyway it gave him a good scare and took all the nerve
out of him.
Hervey said to him, “Well, you had a wild night. If you had only told me
what you were going to do when we were talking over the ’phone I’d have
joined in with you. And we’d have found it. It serves you right for
staying away from dances. You have to come back with us to tell one of
the keepers that I’m not a liar and then I’ll hike as far as Catskill
with you if you’re going that way.”
“I’m staying at Brookside,” the sharpy said.
“Well, come over to Temple Camp anyway and see the fun,” Hervey said.
“It’ll do you good.”
I saw that Hervey was just in one of those happy-go-lucky, reckless
moods, and that now after all he didn’t care so much about
anything—unless there was an adventure in it.
So I said, “Mr. Wilkins, or whatever your name is, only I guess that
isn’t your name, when you had your first scare to-night, that was when
you heard the ’phone ring over at camp, you got this fellow in Dutch.
You got him called a liar because he said he ’phoned to camp and they
never heard of any message. We know all about what you did to-night and
nobody’s going to make any trouble for you, because anyway, one thing,
you’ve had trouble enough. There’s a man, he’s trustee——”
“All you have to do is tell him he’s a liar,” Hervey said. “Then I’ll
hike as far as Brookside with you.”
“You don’t have to tell him any such thing,” I said
“You stick to me and you’ll be O. K.,” Hervey told him. “Didn’t I just
save your life?”
The poor sharpy didn’t know what to make of it all. He was grateful to
Hervey, that’s sure. I guess he saw it wasn’t any use denying anything.
I guess he wasn’t scared any more, because Hervey seemed to be making
friends with him, sort of. I had to laugh because after all Hervey’s
fine plan to bring this fellow back like a prisoner, there he was sort
of pals with him. Christopher, but he’s a sketch.
The fellow said, “They’ll make a lot of trouble for me over there.”
“They make it for me too,” Hervey said; “don’t you care.”
“The place was open; I just walked in,” the sharpy said. “There was a
sign that said Visitors Welcome. You fellows invited me to drop over.”
“You sure dropped over,” I began laughing. “The water is unusually wet
to-night. You didn’t take anything over there. They’ll give you a good
calling down, that’s all.”
“I get one of those every day,” Hervey said.
“You mean every minute,” I told him.
Then I said, “All you have to do is come over with us, and anyway you
can’t help it, because I’m sculling the boat around now, and then all
you have to do is admit just what you did so as to prove this friend of
mine didn’t lie. You can do that much, can’t you? He saved your life.
You can put him right with the crowd over there, can’t you? That’s all
you have to do. It’s just a question of whether you’ve got a yellow
streak or not.”
“And we’ll have a lot of fun doing it too,” said Hervey.