But whoever, or whatever, he might be, the girl prayed that he would prove able to rescue Uncle Jabez. She felt that she could save herself, but she was having all she could do to bear up the unconscious miller.

"Hold on!" shouted the rescuer again.

Once more he plunged forward. He disappeared off the rock. Was he swimming again? The half-overturned boat hid him from Ruth's gaze.

Suddenly he shouted close at hand. Up he bobbed on the higher point of rock just beyond the boat.

"What's the matter, Missy?" he demanded. "Is the old man hurt?"

"He hit his head. See! he is unconscious," explained Ruth.

"I'll get him! Look out, now; I've got to push off this old boat, Missy.

She ain't no good, anyway."

Ruth saw that he was a big, black-haired, strong looking boy. His complexion was very dark and his eyes sparkling--like cut jet beads. He might have been seventeen or eighteen years old, but he was fully as tall, and apparently as strong, as an ordinary man.

His long hair curled and was tangled like a wild man's. His beard had begun to grow on his lip and chin. In his ears Ruth saw small gold rings and his wrists and forearms--which were bared--were covered with an intricate pattern of tattooing in red and blue ink.

Altogether, she had never seen so strange a boy in all her life--and certainly none so strong. He leaped into the broken boat, seized Ruth's oar that had not been lost in the overset, and bracing it against the rock, pushed the trembling boat free in a moment.

Ruth could not repress a scream. It looked as though he, too, must be thrown into the river, as the boat was caught by the current and jerked free.

But the wild boy laughed and leaped upon the higher part of the rock. As the miller's old boat drifted down stream, he sprang into the water again and reached the girl and her burden.

"Give him to me!" commanded the boy. "I can bear him up better than you, Missy. We'll get him ash.o.r.e--and you can't be any wetter than you are now."

"Oh, never mind me!" cried Ruth. "I am not afraid of a ducking. And I can swim."

"You don't want to try swimming in _this_ place, Missy," he returned.

"You follow right behind me--so."

He turned, carrying the heavy figure of the miller in his arms as though he weighed but a hundred pounds instead of nearer two, and set off toward the sh.o.r.e along the ledge of rock by which he had come.

Ruth saw, now, that beyond where the boat had been wrecked, the rock joined the sh.o.r.e, with only here and there a place where it was deep under water.

She saw, too, that the boat was now sinking. It had not sailed ten yards in the fierce current before its gunwales disappeared. It sank in a deeper channel below--flour and all! Ruth realized that Uncle Jabez would be sorely troubled over the loss of those bags of flour.

Ruth paddled to the sh.o.r.e behind the strong boy, but before they really reached terra firma, she knew that Uncle Jabez was struggling back to consciousness. The boy lowered the miller easily to the ground.

"He's coming 'round, Missy," he said. His smile was broad, and the little gold rings twinkled in his ears.

Ruth, wet and bedrabbled as she was, did not think of her own discomfort. She knelt beside Uncle Jabez and spoke to him. For some seconds he was so dazed that he did not seem to recognize her. Then he stammered:

"Ha--ha----I knowed we couldn't do it. No--no gal kin do a man's work.

Ha!"

This seemed rather hard on Ruth, after she had done her best, and it had not been her fault that the boat was wrecked, but she was too excited just then to trouble about the miller's grumbling.

"Oh, Uncle! you're not badly hurt, are you?"

"Ha--hum! I dunno," stuttered the miller, and sat up. He rubbed his forehead and brought his hand, with a little blood upon it, back to the level of his eyes. "I vum!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, with more interest than before. "I must ha' cracked my head some. Why was it I didn't drown?"

"This little missy, here," said the black-eyed youth, quickly. "_She_ saved you, Mister. She held your head above water till I come."

"Why--why----Niece Ruth! you did _that_?"

"Oh, it was nothing, Uncle Jabez! I am so glad you are not hurt worse.

This boy really saved you. He brought you ash.o.r.e."

"Who be ye, young man?" asked the miller. "I'm obleeged to ye--if what my niece says is true."

"Oh, I am named Roberto. You need not to thank--no!" exclaimed the stranger, suddenly getting up and looking all about.

"But it was very brave of him," declared Ruth, and she seized the boy's hand. "I--I am so glad you were near."

"Here's Tim and Joe Bascom coming," said Uncle Jabez, who was facing the store.

Instantly Roberto, as he called himself, jerked his hand from Ruth's grasp. He had seen the men coming, too, and without a word he turned and fled back into the woods.

"Why--why----" began Ruth, in utter surprise.

"What's the matter with that feller?" demanded Uncle Jabez, just as the storekeeper and Farmer Bascom arrived.

"I seen the feller, Jabe," said the latter, eagerly. "He's one o' them blamed Gypsies. I run him out o' my orchard only yisterday."

CHAPTER III

EVENING AT THE RED MILL

About this time Uncle Jabez began to wake up to the fact that his boat and the flour were gone.

"It's a dumbed shame, Jabez! an' I needed that flour like tunket," said Timothy Lakeby, the storekeeper.

"Huh!" grunted the miller. "'Tain't nothin' out o' your pocket, Tim."

"But my customers air wantin' it."

"You lemme hev your boat, an' a boy to bring it back, an' we'll go right hum an' load ye up some more flour," groaned the miller. "That dratted Ben will be back by thet time, I fancy. Ef he'd been ter the mill I wouldn't hev been dependent upon my niece ter help row that old boat."

"Too heavy for her--too heavy for her, Jabe," declared Joe Bascom.

"Huh! is thet so?" snapped the miller. He could grumble to Ruth himself, but he would not stand for any other person's criticism of her. "Lemme tell ye, she worked her pa.s.sage all right. An' I vum! I b'lieve thet 'twas me, myself, thet run the old tub on the rock."

"Aside from the flour, Jabez," said the storekeeper, "'tain't much of a loss. But you an' Ruthie might ha' both been drowned."