here, now you can see away across to the other shore, Jack.
Isn't it a bully sheet of water, though?"

"What dandy times we can have next winter iceboating, skating, playing
hockey, and everything like that," suggested Jack, delightedly, as his
eyes feasted on the immense body of fresh water, with its surface just
rippled in the soft summer breeze.

"We'll soon come to where the boys said they meant to go in swimming
this morning," added Toby. "It's a perfect day, too, even if the sun
does feel hot. Just such a day as this when I got that nasty little
cramp in the cold water of the lake, and might have had a serious time
only for Big Bob Jeffries taking me on his back and carrying me like a
baby to the shore."

"Listen!" exclaimed Jack just then, "what's all that yell going on ahead
of us? The boys must be cutting up capers; and yet it strikes me there's
a note of fear in their shouts. Turn on the juice, Toby, and eat up the
road! Something terrible may be happening, you know. Things keep
following each other these days like sheep going over a fence after
their leader!"

Toby made the flivver fairly bound along, such was his eagerness to
arrive at the scene of all the excitement. Twenty seconds later he gave
a loud cry.

"Look, Jack, there's some one floundering out there, and throwing up his
arms. It's our Joel Jackman, I do believe! and great Caesar! he's got a
cramp and is drowning!"

CHAPTER XIII

WHEN THE CRAMP SEIZED JOEL

What the excited Toby had just said in thrilling tones was undoubtedly
the truth. There was no "fooling" about the frantic actions of the boy
who was struggling so desperately out in the lake. He was threshing the
water furiously, now vanishing partly underneath, only to come up again
in a whirl of bubbles.

When a cramp seizes any one, no matter if he should happen to be a
champion in the art of swimming, he is always in mortal peril of his
life, especially should he be at some distance from the shore, and in
deep water. It almost paralyzes every muscle, and the strongest becomes
like a very babe in its spasmodic clutch.

Joel Jackman was long-legged and thin, but had always been reckoned one
of those wiry sort of chaps, built on the order of a greyhound. He could
run like the wind, and jump higher than any fellow in all Chester,
barring none. But when that awful cramp seized him in the cold water of
Lake Constance, lie found himself unable to make any progress toward
shor