They didn’t challenge him at once. They jumped on their bicycles and began riding around the wet sand, whooping. Mr. Charlie Hand rebuked them; but they replied they hadn’t come down with him, that it was a free country and they would do as they pleased. Mr. Hand, powerless to do anything about it, walked up the beach with Miss Downey, and at that point Edwin was so ill-advised as to start for the water. This brought action. They wheeled around, cut him off, and got off their bicycles. “Oh, no, you don’t.”
“What do you mean, ‘No, I don’t’?”
“You see her, don’t you? The schooner?”
“Well?”
“Well? You going to dive off her or not?”
He looked at the schooner, gulped, grimly maintained his brave front. “Why, sure — if that’s all that’s bothering you.”
He gained a brief respite when the black foreman of stevedores chased them away. But it was very brief. In a half hour, just when he had eluded them by jerking the handle bar of one bicycle and joined Phyllis in the water, there came a loud put-put-put, and the schooner’s kicker boat hove into view, the captain at the tiller, the mate in the bow, and the Negro stevedores squatting comfortably on her sides, headed for the town. The unloading was over. The schooner was deserted.
“Come on!”
The reckoning had come, and he knew it. He left the water with a fine show of contempt, and headed for the wharf. Behind him, incredulous, the other children strung out in a little procession, the girls whispering, “Is he really going to do it?” This was so flattering that he felt a wild lunge of hope: perhaps, by some chance, he could shut his eyes and get off headfirst. But his legs felt stiff and queer, and he felt a hysterical impulse to kick at the two bicycles which wheeled relentlessly along, one on one side of him, one on the other.
“And off the bowsprit, see? Because it’s high. You remember that, don’t you? You like it high.”
He walked down the wharf, boarded the ugly hulk. The fertilizer scratched his feet and proved to have an unexpected stench. He made his way past rusty gear to the bow, stepped up and out on the bowsprit. But the angle at which it was tilted made climbing difficult, and he had to pull himself along by the cables. The little group on shore waded down beside the wharf, the better to see. He got his fingers around the last cable, the one that held the end of the timber, and then for the first time he looked down. His stomach contracted violently. The water seemed cruelly remote, as though it were part of another world. He knew that by no conceivable effort of will could he dive off, even jump off. Quickly he sat down, lest he fall, and straddled the timber with his legs. At once he slid backward, to fetch up with a sickening squoosh against the next cable.
He held on, flogged desperate wits. And then he hit on a plan. Up the beach were Mr. Hand and Miss Downey, sitting in the sand. If he started a jawing match, that might cause such a ruckus that Mr. Hand would have to step in and order him down. Roger gave him an opening: “Well? What’s the matter? Why don’t you dive?”
“I dive when I feel like it.”
“You can’t dive — that’s why.”
“Aw! Suppose you come out and make me dive! I dare you to do it! Le’s see you do it!”
Roger hesitated. The bowsprit looked as high to him as it did to Edwin. But Wally nodded coldly, and he started out, Wally just behind him. He passed the first cable, then the second. He grasped the third, the one that braced Edwin, who — placed disadvantageously with his back to the enemy — cast an anxious glance toward Charlie Hand. Roger saw it.
“Yah! Hoping Charlie Hand will make you come down! Look at momma’s boy, scared to jump off!”
“Yah! Yah! Yah! Le’s see you make me dive!”
Edwin yelled it at the top of his lungs, and still the enamored Mr. Hand didn’t move. Roger, clinging to the cable, eased himself down, preparatory to shoving the poltroon in front of him into the water. Then, not being barefooted as Edwin was, he slipped. He toppled off the bowsprit. But he hung there; for his hand had slid down the cable as he fell, and now held him fast, jammed against the collar. He screamed. Wally screamed. All the children screamed.
“Drop! Drop! It won’t hurt you!”
“I can’t drop! My hand’s caught!”
Edwin knew it was caught, for there was that horrible sound in Roger’s voice, and there was Mr. Hand sprinting down the beach, and there was the hand wriggling against him. Wally yelled at him in a frenzy: “Pull up! Pull up! Move! Can’t you give the guy a chance?” But pull up he could not. He was wedged there, could reach nothing to pull up by, could only tremble and feel sick.
Wally reached for Roger’s hand, and then he slipped. But as he fell he clutched and for one instant caught Roger’s foot. The added weight pulled the tortured hand clear, and the two of them plunged into the water. Involuntarily Edwin looked, and then felt the bowsprit turning under him. He hung upside down above the water, clasping the bowsprit with his legs, and then he too plunged down, down, down through miles of sunlight.
Next thing he knew, there was green before his eyes, then dark green, then green-black, and his shoulder was numb from some terrible blow. Then the green appeared again; he was coming up. When he broke water, Wally was beside him, yelling. All the bitterness of the last few days rose up within him. He hit Wally as hard as he could in the mouth. Unexpectedly, he could get no force in the blow, there in the water. He seized Wally and pushed him under. Then he treated him to a compound duck, a feat learned in Annapolis. That is to say, he pulled up his feet, placed them on Wally’s shoulders, and drove down — hard. He looked around for Roger. Roger was nowhere to be seen. He turned toward shore.
It was the look of horror on Mr. Charlie Hand’s face that woke him up to what had really happened — what Wally had been yelling before he was ducked. Roger was drowning. That blow on the shoulder — he got that when he fell on Roger, and Roger was knocked out — and was drowning!
He turned, tried to remember what you did when people were drowning. He saw something red, grabbed it. It was Roger’s hair. His other hand touched something; he grabbed that too. It was the collar of Wally’s work suit. Wally came up, coughing with a dreadful whooping sound, then went under again. Terror seized Edwin. As a result of that duck, now Wally was drowning too. He shifted his grip on Roger, so he had him by the shirt. He held on desperately to Wally. Then he flattened out on his back and began driving with his legs for shore. Water slipped over his face, and he began to gasp. Still he held on. The water that slipped over his face wasn’t white now — it was green; he was going under at least six inches with every kick. Then something jerked his shoulder. It was Charlie Hand. “All right, Edwin — I’ve got them!”
The events of the next few hours were very confused in Edwin’s mind. There was his own collapse on the beach, the farm hands working furiously over himself, Wally, and Roger; the mad dash to the hospital in Mr. Charlie Hand’s car; the nurses, the doctors, the fire department inhalator, the shrill telephoning between mothers. It wasn’t until the three of them were lodged wanly in a special room, and a nurse came in, around six o’clock with the afternoon paper, that life again began to assume a semblance of order. For there was his picture, squarely on page one, and there was an account of the episode, circumstantial and complete: