“Here,” says he, “crawl in under, quick!”
He was holding up the side of the tarpaulin that covered the supplies, and I crawled under. He came right after me. The canvas hardly dropped in place before we heard the man coming back, and he had a lantern.
CHAPTER XV
When I saw the light of that lantern I began to think. Right off I realized I should have started up my thinker a long while ago. There we were—Catty and I—under a tarpaulin and entirely surrounded by canned tomatoes and baked beans and enemies. There wasn’t any reason for our being there that I could see, and there were a million reasons for our being some place else. I was sore. At that minute I could have taken Catty and whacked him across the nose with something heavy and painful.... The way it looked to me was this:—He had gotten us into this pickle just for the sake of getting us into a pickle. He hadn’t had any plan at all, but just that everlasting desire of his to have an adventure out of a story book.
That was it. He had played pirate, or whatever game he had in his head, and had gone along with it till he got out where his feet couldn’t touch bottom, and I went with him like a ninny. Now the adventure we were likely to have wasn’t one out of a story book at all. It had all the look of a real one with lots of grief in it.
Of course neither of us dared whisper, and we could hardly breathe under that thick canvas. We didn’t object to that especially. I would have been willing to have the canvas two feet thick. Then nobody could have seen through it or heard through it.
The man with the lantern came closer and walked all around the pile of supplies and then sat down on something and lighted his pipe. I could have reached out and scratched his back. If he hadn’t been deaf as a brickbat he would have heard my heart beat, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to hold it down inside me where it belonged. It acted like it wanted to settle in my throat, or maybe come popping right out of my mouth. There was a box corner that gouged me in the middle of the back and was about ready to poke a hole through my skin, and my left foot was asleep and prickling like the mischief, and I was hot and sweaty and lonesome. I don’t believe anybody was ever so uncomfortable. The worst of it was I couldn’t complain. When you’re feeling sore at everybody and everything, it helps a lot if you can roar about it.
Catty was right alongside of me, which was some comfort, though not so much as if I had dared jam a pin into him two or three times. I wished I could go to sleep, but didn’t ever try it on account of snoring.
Well, after I’d sat there all cramped up for two or three weeks, I heard another man come along and sit down by the first one and light his pipe.
“What was all the rumpus?” he says.