"Why, Daddy! That's awfully brilliant of you! However did you guess?"
Her father pinched her ear.
"Occasionally, Elizabeth," he said, "you appear to labor under the misconception that I fail to take any note concerning the ordinary routine happenings of the day. But if you prefer, I will base my apprehension solely on analytical grounds. You leap ashore. You call for Hugh. You run towards him. You delay your reappearance. Immediately afterward you announce your engagement. I must maintain the sequence of causes prior to the effect presents an argument grounded on irrefutable logic."
"You win on logical as well as mere human grounds, Vernon," I said. "Bet, I congratulate you, minx though you are. If Nikka—"
And at that moment Nikka opened his eyes, and sat up in the bunk, bumping his head.
"Ouch!" he yelled. "Where am I? What—"
He rubbed his shoulder reminiscently.
"I'm sore all over, but I have a feeling it hurt worse a little while ago. How did I get here? And Hugh and Jack?"
So we recounted to him the full story of our rescue, which, in turn, necessitated chronicling our adventures of the past twenty-four hours for Betty and her father.
"I imagined, of course, that a mishap such as you describe had befallen you," remarked King when we had finished. "When Nikka shouted his warning, Watkins and I held a hasty conference on the roof and decided that your adjuration must have had sufficient urgency behind it to warrant our obedience, however reluctant we might be to abandon you. Upon Watkins' insistence, I preceded him down the rope. Prior to his own descent, he loosened the grapnel, with an eye to the possibility of twitching it down, so that when he was some eight or ten feet from the ground—my estimate, naturally, is hypothetical, as it was impossible to gain any clear view of his accident—the rope came free above, and he was precipitated into an opening in the rocks which we had not hitherto perceived.