Help!  Help!  Help!

A cry as of a young person’s voice was heard faintly, coming from the direction of the river.  Something in the tone of it struck to his heart, and he sprang as if he had been stabbed.  He flung open his chamber window and leaped from it to the ground.  He ran straight to the bank of the river by the side of which the village of Alderbank was built, a little farther down the stream than the house in which he was living.

Everybody that travels in that region knows the beautiful falls which break the course of the river just above the village; narrow and swift, and surrounded by rocks of such picturesque forms that they are sought and admired by tourists.  The stream was now swollen, and rushed in a deep and rapid current over the ledges, through the rocky straits, plunging at last in tumult and foam, with loud, continuous roar, into the depths below the cliff from which it tumbled.

A short distance above the fall there projected from the water a rock which had, by parsimonious saving during a long course of years, hoarded a little soil, out of which a small tuft of bushes struggled to support a decent vegetable existence.  The high waters had nearly submerged it, but a few slender twigs were seen above their surface.

A skiff was lying close to this rock, between it and the brink of the fall, which was but a few rods farther down.  In the skiff was a youth of fourteen or fifteen years, holding by the slender twigs, the boat dragging at them all the time, and threatening to tear them away and go over the fall.  It was not likely that the boy would come to shore alive if it did.  There were stories, it is true, that the Indians used to shoot the fall in their canoes with safety; but everybody knew that at least three persons had been lost by going over it since the town was settled; and more than one dead body had been found floating far down the river, with bruises and fractured bones, as if it had taken the same fatal plunge.

There was no time to lose.  Clement ran a little way up the river-bank, flung off his shoes, and sprang from the bank as far as he could leap into the water.  The current swept him toward the fall, but he worked nearer and nearer the middle of the stream.  He was making for the rock, thinking he could plant his feet upon it and at the worst hold the boat until he could summon other help by shouting.  He had barely got his feet upon the rock, when the twigs by which the boy was holding gave way.  He seized the boat, but it dragged him from his uncertain footing, and with a desperate effort he clambered over its side and found himself its second doomed passenger.

There was but an instant for thought.

“Sit still,” he said, “and, just as we go over, put your arms round me under mine, and don’t let go for your life!”

He caught up the single oar, and with a few sharp paddle-strokes brought the skiff into the blackest centre of the current, where it was deepest, and would plunge them into the deepest pool.