Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors by Various
page 31 of 157 (19%)
terrible death.

Many wild suggestions were made for their rescue, but none that gave
the least hope of success. It was simply impossible to launch a boat.
The vast fields of ice, two or three feet in thickness, and from
twenty feet to a hundred yards in breadth, were crushing and grinding
down the river at the rate of four or five miles an hour, turning and
twisting about, sometimes jamming their edges together with so great
a force that one would lap over another, and sometimes drifting apart
and leaving wide open spaces between for a moment or two. One might as
well go upon such a river in an egg shell as in the stoutest row-boat
ever built.

The poor woman with her babe could be seen from the shore, standing
there alone on the rapidly narrowing strip of island. Her voice could
not reach the people on the bank, but when she held her poor little
baby toward them in mute appeal for help, the mothers there understood
her agony.

There was nothing to be done, however. Human sympathy was given
freely, but human help was out of the question. Everybody on the
river-shore was agreed in that opinion. Everybody, that is to say,
except Joe Lambert. He had been so long in the habit of finding ways
to help himself under difficulties, that he did not easily make up his
mind to think any case hopeless.

No sooner did Joe clearly understand how matters stood than he ran
away from the crowd, nobody paying any attention to what he did. Half
an hour later somebody cried out: "Look there! Who's that, and what's
he going to do?" pointing up the stream.
DigitalOcean Referral Badge