help. This was the day we was going to try it. I looked at it again, though, and decided I’d better wait for her. She’d warned me lots of times not to try swimming alone till at least the end of the summer.
It was nearly half an hour before she came along. Sig Freed barked, and then I heard her sandals in the trail. She smiled at me. She had on a blue romper suit this time, and silver sandals, and her toenails were painted red. I noticed her legs was getting tanned.
“Hello, Miss Harrington,” I says. “Are we going to swim all the way across today?”
“Sure,” she says. “You can make it easy.”
She took her suit out of her handbag and went off in the bushes to change. When she came back I saw it wasn’t just her legs that was tanned; she was the same all over, and the diamonds on her bathing suit just glittered against this kind of golden color she was.
“You must have been sunbathing in the raw,” I says. “You’re sure a pretty color all over.”
She grinned at me and tousled my hair with her hand. “Look, kid. You’re seven years old, remember? Let’s keep it that way.”
We waded out in the water till it was up to her waist and looked straight across. It was about fifty yards. The trees looked cool and dim along the other side because it was all in the shadow now that the sun was going down.
“You’ve swum this far before,” she says, “in shallow water along the shore, and deep water’s not any different at all as long as you don’t get scared. So just take it slow and easy, and remember I’ll be right alongside you all the way. I’m a good swimmer; I used to be in a water ballet in Florida when I was only sixteen.”
We started out, and it was as easy as pie. I dog-paddled along and she was doing a slow crawl stroke, as she called it, right beside me. When she would roll her face up out of water on my side she’d grin at me, so I wasn’t scared at all. And I could see the bushes hanging over the water on the other side getting closer all the time.
We was almost there. We didn’t have more than a few feet to go and I was getting ready to reach up and grab one, when all of a sudden there was an awful racket cut loose behind us on the other bank and the water began to get chopped up all around us by something. It was going gug! gug! gug! gug! And every time there’d be a gug water would fly up in a little spout like you’d throwed a rock in it. It all happened without any warning at all, and by the time I’d even figured out that the noise I was hearing over there was guns shooting real fast Miss Harrington had let out a yell and grabbed me and just pulled me under.
I’d started to yell something myself, so my mouth was open, and it got full of water. I choked, and breathed in a little before I had sense enough not to, and got water in my nose and throat. I was scared, and I started to kick and struggle trying to get back to the top, but she held me down and I could feel her kicking along like she was still swimming. We must have turned, because we went right along and didn’t run into the bushes or the bank. I could still hear the things hitting up there, but down here under the water the sound was different. They went schluck! schluck! schluck! It was funny I even noticed it, because I was scared stiff by this time and beginning to go crazy and fight at Miss Harrington.
Just then I felt some brush, and our heads came out of the water. I took a breath, and started to choke. It seemed to me it was awful quiet, and it was a second or two before I realized what it was. The guns had stopped. I sputtered and fought for my breath, and started to look around. Overhanging limbs and leaves was all around us, there in the edge of the water. I couldn’t see out across the lake at all. We stood up and started to run up onto the bank. And just then the guns cut loose again. We