igently. He had twice
taken a load to shore, and was quite far again in the stream, when he
saw a strange sight. It was not Moses in the bulrushes, to be sure--but
a child in a wicker wagon, floating down the current amid a lot of
sticks and branches. The hoarse whistle of a steamboat near meant
danger; and to the eye of Connor the baby-craft seemed but a little
above the water, and to be slowly sinking.

Connor's shout rang back from the Kentucky hills as if it came from the
throat of an engine.

No one answered.

There were great logs between his skiff and the child--logs and child
were all moving together. Should he abandon Larry's precious boat?

Connor could not consider this. He plunged into the water and swam round
the logs. He never knew how he did it--he never knew how he cut his
hand--he never felt the pounding of the logs--he only knew that he
caught the wagon, kept those black eyes above the water, and pulled the
precious freight to shore. Then, while the water was streaming from him
in every direction, he sprang up the few steps to his mother's cabin,
and without a word placed the child, still in the wagon, inside the
door!

Running back as swiftly as his feet would carry him, Connor had the good
luck to find the deserted boat close to shore, jammed in a mass of
drift-wood, just in the turn of the Riffle.

Dragging it up and along the shore, he fastened it to a fisherman's
stake just by Twinrip. Then Connor felt he had discharged his
duty--Larry O'Flaherty's boat was safe--high and dry out of reach of
eddying logs.

Now, eager, dripping, and breathless--with eyes like stars, he flew home
again.

"Oh, mother," he said, "she's fast to the post and not a hole knocked
into her, and ain't her eyes black and soft as our mooley cow's and I
found her before the General Little ran her down--and I'm going to keep
her always--_I found her_--isn't it lucky we have a cow?"

What the boy said was rather mixed--you could not parse it, but you
could understand it.

The baby's big black eyes looked around, and she acknowledged a cup of
milk and her deliverer by a smile. It was a strange group. In the midst
of a puddle of water Mother Maggie was leaning over the new comer and
trying to untie the numerous knots in a shawl which had kept the child
in her wicker nest. Little Mike was staring open-eyed at the beads round
baby's neck, and at the coral horseshoe which hung from them. The pretty
little girl seemed qui