am about----Oh, goody! here comes Tom!"

She depended on Tom--she knew that he would do something if anybody could.
She gazed upon the wet, white face of the girl in the water and knew that
whatever Tom did must be done at once. Hazel Gray was loosing her hold.

"Oh! oh! oh!" screamed Helen, standing in the automobile with clasped
hands. "Don't let her drown, Tommy! Don't let her go down again--_don't_!"

Tom came, with grimly set lips, dragging about twenty feet of fence wire
behind him. Luckily it was smooth wire--not barbed. He quickly made a loop
in one end of it and wriggled the other end toward Ruth and the excited
men.

"Catch hold here!" he ordered. "Make a loop as I have, and don't let it
slip through your hands."

"Oh, Tom! you're never going into that cold water?" Ruth gasped, suddenly
stricken with fear for her friend's safety.

But that was exactly what Tom intended to do. There was no other way. He
had seen, too, the exhaustion of the girl in the water and knew that if
her hands slipped from the tree branch, she could never get a grip on the
wire.

Without removing an article of clothing the boy leaped into the stream.
It was over his head right here below the bank, and the chill of the water
was tremendous. As Tom said afterward, he felt it "clear to the marrow of
his bones!"