I had been listening to it just then, and said “Yes” and that I supposed it was the horrid noise the water made around on the other side. For quite a time we didn’t hear it, and then Jerry said:
“There it is again! The water must suck into those echoey hollows. It sounds almost like a person groaning.”
“Don’t!” I said.
All at once he turned toward me and said in a queer, quick voice:
“Do you suppose it could possibly be Greg?”
I can’t describe the way I felt when he said it, but if you’ve ever felt the same you know what I mean. It was a little as though something heavy dropped from my throat down to my toes, through me, leaving me all empty, with cold, tingly things rushing up again to my head. They were still rushing as we flew around the rock, and I kept saying:
“It can’t be Greg.... It can’t be....”
But it was.
He was lying doubled up, just below the high place where Jerry had told him to keep watch. We didn’t dare to touch him, because we didn’t know how badly he was hurt, and he couldn’t seem to tell us. But when I tried to put my arm under him, he pushed me a little and said, “No, no,” so I stopped. Then I saw that his right arm was twisted under him horridly and that his shoulder looked all wrong. I touched it very gently and asked him if it was that, and he said, “Yes; don’t!” We had to get him out somehow from that jaggedy place in the rocks where he was lying. So Jerry got him under the arm that wasn’t hurt, and I took his legs, and we hauled him to a flattish part of the rock.
I pulled off the football jersey and put it under him, and Jerry ran back to get my skirt, which I’d put in the kit-bag when we fixed our costumes. Just after Jerry had gone something dreadful happened. Quite suddenly Greg seemed to shrink smaller, and his face grew rather greenish and not at all like his, and his hand was perfectly cold when I snatched it. I suppose he’d fainted from our carrying him so stupidly, but I’d never seen anybody do it before and I didn’t know that was the way it looked. I’d never heard of people dying from hurting their arms, but I thought that perhaps he was hurt somewhere else that we didn’t know about. But by the time Jerry came back with the skirt Greg had opened his eyes and looked at me a little like himself. There is a book in our medicine cupboard at home called, “Hints on First Aid.” Jerry and I used to like to look at it, and Father said: