Billie had been in the tent, getting the potatoes on for dinner, and otherwise performing his duties as assistant camp cook.  He had heard Stanley’s voice calling to some one, but had not taken the trouble to look out until he failed to find a favorite pot on its accustomed hook.  Sticking his head out through the tent flap, he called down to the beach: 

“Say, Stan, where’s the granite pot with the long handle?” He listened for an answer but none came, and after a second call he started to investigate.  The sudden complete disappearance of Stanley mystified him.  Their boat lay in its accustomed place on the shore with the oars beside it, and there were the fish beside the cleaning board just as he had left them a moment ago.

“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” muttered Billie when there came a cry across the river—­Stanley calling for help.

Billie could just see him swimming with one long overhand stroke, and holding up something on his other shoulder, but following scout law, he stopped not to meditate, but pushed the boat off to the rescue.

There was no sign of life, at least to Billie’s fear-struck eyes, in the limp, dripping figure which Stanley laid so tenderly in the bottom of the boat.

“Quit shaking like that, Bill,” he ordered in husky sternness.  “You row to the island as fast as you can.”

On the way across he knelt beside her, applying first-aid methods, while Billie rowed blindly, trying to choke back the dry sobs that would rise in his throat, and the hot, boyish tears that blinded him every time he looked at Kit’s face, and thought of the Mother Bird.  It did not seem as if it could possibly be Kit, his dauntless, self-reliant pal, lying there so white and still.  When they reached the shore of the island, Stanley carried her in his arms to his own cot.

“Hadn’t I better go for help?” Billie asked.

“There isn’t time,” Stanley answered, shortly.  “Warm those blankets, get me the bottle of aromatic spirits of ammonia, and unlace her boots.”

All the time he was talking, he worked over Kit as swiftly and tenderly as any nurse, but it seemed hours to Billie before there came at last a half-sobbing sigh from her lips, as the agonized lungs caught their first breath of air, and she opened her eyes.

Neither Stanley nor Billie spoke as she stared from one to the other in slow surprise, taking in the interior of the tent, and Stanley’s dripping clothing, and then she said, the most comical thing at such a time: 

“Billie, did I lose the crabapples, or haven’t I gotten them yet?”

“So that’s what you were after,” Billie cried wrathfully, “poking up the river by yourself in that beastly little boat that turns over if you look at it, and you can swim about as well as a tree-toad.  If it hadn’t been for Stan here, you’d be absolutely drowned dead by now.”

The color stole back into Kit’s face.  Perhaps if he had sympathized with her, she might have broken down, but as it was, she looked up into Stanley’s eyes almost appealingly.