ing on the bank we saw a yellow torrent
twenty feet or more wide and four or five feet deep rushing tumultuously
down the rocky channel.

Tom, however, who had come out on the bank a little way below, shouted
to us, above the roar, to come that way, and we rejoined him at a bend
where the opposite bank was high. He was in the act of crossing
cautiously on a snow bridge. During the winter a great snowdrift, seven
or eight feet deep, had lodged in the brook; and the recent freshet had
merely cut a channel beneath it, leaving a frozen arch that spanned the
torrent.

"Don't do it!" Addison shouted to him. "It will fall with you!"

But, extending one foot slowly ahead of the other, Tom safely crossed to
the other side.

"Come on!" he shouted. "It will hold."

Addison, however, held back. The bridge looked dangerous; if it broke
down, whoever was on it would be thrown into the water and carried
downstream in the icy torrent.

"Oh, it's strong enough!" Tom exclaimed. "That will hold all right." And
to show how firm it was, he came part way back across the frozen arch
and stood still.

It was an unlucky action. The whole bridge suddenly collapsed under him,
and down went Tom with it into the rushing water, which whirled him
along toward a jam of ice and drift stuff twenty or thirty yards below.
By flinging his arms across one of those great cakes of hard-frozen snow
he managed to keep his head up; and he shouted lustily for us to help
him. He bumped against the jam and hung there, fighting with both arms
to keep from being carried under it.

Addison, who had the axe, ran down the bank and with a few strokes cut a
moosewood sapling, which we thrust out to Tom. He caught hold of it, and
then, by pulling hard, we hauled him to the bank and helped him out.

Oh, but wasn't he a wet boy, and didn't his teeth chatter! In fact, all
three of us were wet, for, in our excitement, Addison and I had gone in
knee-deep, and the water had splashed over us. In that bitter cold wind
we felt it keenly. Tom was nearly torpid; he seemed unable to speak, and
we could hardly make him take a step. His face and hands were blue.

"What shall we do with him?" Addison whispered to me in alarm. "It's
five miles home. I'm afraid he'll freeze."

We then thought of the old Squire's logging camp on Papoose Pond, the
outlet of which entered Wild Brook about half a mile above where we had
tried to cross it. We knew that there was a cooking stove in