“O, why did we come?” I moaned at last. “Why didn’t you come when I asked you?”
“What good would that have been,” he said miserably, “if we’d been caught and squashed?”
If he could not see the way to save, he could to make a man of me. He was the first to return to his sturdy self. It struck me like sacrilege to hear him suddenly emit a faint little laugh.
“O, don’t!” I said. “It’s too awful!”
“What is?” he answered. “Look here, Dick, we’re just fools, that’s all, There must be a way out somewhere—we’d forgotten what the badger showed us.”
In an instant, at his words, I had leapt to the ultimate pole of hope.
“O, Harry!” I said, “you good old fellow to think of it! Why, of course there must be; if only we could——”
“Wait a bit!” he interrupted me. “You’ll have to make up your mind to go on.”
“I’ll go anywhere,” I said, “to get safe out of this. O, don’t stop! Any moment may bring down some more of it.”
I was wriggling and sweating in a perfect agony over his hesitation.