Wade made for the river.

This was the moment all his manhood had been training and saving for. 
For this he had kept sound and brave from his youth up.

As he ran, he felt that the only chance of instant help was in that queer little bowl-shaped skiff of the “Ambuster.”

He had never been conscious that he had observed it; but the image had lain latent in his mind, biding its time.  It might be ten, twenty precious moments before another boat could be found.  This one was on the spot to do its duty at once.

“Somebody carried off,—­perhaps a woman,” Wade thought.  “Not—­No, she would not neglect my warning!  Whoever it is, we must save her from this dreadful death!”

He sprang on board the little steamboat.  She was swaying uneasily at her moorings, as the ice crowded along and hammered against her stem.  Wade stared from her deck down the river, with all his life at his eyes.

More than a mile away, below the hemlock-crested point, was the dark object Perry had seen, still stirring along the edges of the floating ice.  A broad avenue of leaden-green water wrinkled by the cold wind separated the field where this figure was moving from the shore.  Dark object and its footing of gray ice were drifting deliberately farther and farther away.

For one instant Wade thought that the terrible dread in his heart would paralyze him.  But in that one moment, while his blood stopped flowing and his nerves failed, Bill Tarbos overtook him and was there by his side.

“I brought your cap,” says Bill, “and our two coats.”

Wade put on his cap mechanically.  This little action calmed him.

“Bill,” said he, “I’m afraid it is a woman,—­a dear friend of mine,—­a very dear friend.”

Bill, a lover, understood the tone.

“We’ll take care of her between us,” he said.

The two turned at once to the little tub of a boat.

Oars?  Yes,—­slung under the thwarts,—­a pair of short sculls, worn and split, but with work in them still.  There they hung ready,—­and a rusty boat-hook, besides.

“Find the thole-pins, Bill, while I cut a plug for her bottom out of this broomstick,” Wade said.

This was done in a moment.  Bill threw in the coats.

“Now, together!”

They lifted the skiff to the gangway.  Wade jumped down on the ice and received her carefully.  They ran her along, as far as they could go, and launched her in the sludge.

“Take the sculls, Bill.  I’ll work the boat-hook in the bow.”

Nothing more was said.  They thrust out with their crazy little craft into the thick of the ice-flood.  Bill, amidships, dug with his sculls in among the huddled cakes.  It was clumsy pulling.  Now this oar and now that would be thrown out.  He could never get a full stroke.

Wade in the bow could do better.  He jammed the blocks aside with his boat-hook.  He dragged the skiff forward.  He steered through the little open ways of water.