spluttering and choking.

"Help, help!" he cried.

Then under he went again.

But the Round Fat Rosy Woman had seen him.

"Quick, Hiram!" she shouted to her husband in a voice that sounded
like a man's, "there's a boy fallen overboard!"

"Where?" asked the man at the tiller, still keeping the pipe in his
mouth.

She pointed into the brown water.

"Right there--there's where he went down."

Perhaps the Man With the Red Shirt and the Pipe was so used to having
his children fall into the coal, or the Canal, or something, that he
didn't think it was a serious matter, for he came to the side of the
"Mary Ellen" very slowly, just as Marmaduke was coming up for the
third time.

And that is a very important time, for, they say, if you go down after
that you won't come up 'til you're dead. Whether it was true or not,
Marmaduke didn't know, for he had never been drowned before, and no
one who had, had ever come back to tell him about it. Anyway, he
wasn't thinking much, only throwing his arms around in the water,
trying vainly to keep afloat.