"Hi! I'm ready! Get a move on, for I'm starvin'."
There was no response at the opening.
"What's the matter with you?" he demanded, impatiently.
The echo of his own voice answered him. Slightly alarmed he called louder:
"Macpherson! What's happened to ye?"
Still no answer.
Distinctly nervous, Rufus shouted at the top of his lungs for Wallie and the bucket, breaking into a perspiration at the continued silence.
Was he sick? Fainted? Dead? Many things that could occur came to Reed as he halloed futilely.
When one o'clock came he was hoarse from yelling and sick with fear at his predicament. His imagination painted gruesome pictures as he sweated. He saw himself weak and emaciated, dying slowly of starvation, collapsing, finally to lie undiscovered for days, weeks maybe. The memory of a field mouse that had fallen into a pit haunted him, its futile, frantic struggles to scale the steep sides, and he remembered that when he had passed that way again he had looked and found it dead in the bottom. He wished now that he had rescued it.
His suffering would be worse than that of the field mouse, for he had the intelligence to know that it was useless to struggle, that there was no hope for him unless someone came to his assistance. And merciful heavens, how hungry he was at only an hour past his dinner time; what would his sensations be at an hour past his supper time or at one o'clock to-morrow? He made a sound like someone groaning in a rain barrel as he thought of the ham and cabbage boiling dry in the cabin.