“Go ahead; you may need it some day.” But neither of us could remember anything that was at all useful now. I could plainly see the picture of some queerly-drawn hands doing a “Spanish Windlass,” but that wouldn’t have done poor Greg any good at all. Jerry did remember that you ought to cut people’s clothes and not try to take them off in the ordinary way, so he took out his knife and ripped up the sleeve of Greg’s jumper and the shoulder-seam of the white brocaded waistcoat. I don’t see how people can stand being Red Cross nurses in France, for I’m sure I never could be one. Greg’s shoulder was quite awful,—what we could see, for it was almost dark now. There was nothing at all we dared to do. We couldn’t even bathe it, for there was only sea-water, so I just sat and held Greg’s other hand and patted it. He didn’t cry,—I think the hurting was too bad for that,—but he moaned a little, and sometimes he said, “Hurts, Chris.”
I tried to tell him a story, the way I did when we all had the measles and he was so much sicker than the rest of us, but he couldn’t listen. So we just sat there in the dark—it was perfectly dark now and we couldn’t see one another at all—and I began to count the flashes of the Headland light—two long and two short, two long and two short—till I thought I should scream. Suddenly Jerry said:
“Are you hungry, Chris?”
I said that I wasn’t, and asked him if he was. But he said:
“No, not very.”
There were real waves on the Wecanicut side of the Monster now, and the wind was still blowing from that direction harder than ever. Now and then a drop of spray would flick my cheek, and I think the sound of the wind around the rock was really more horrid than the noise the water made. It seemed like midnight, but it was really quite early in the evening, when Jerry saw the lights bobbing along the shore of Wecanicut. They were lanterns, two of them, and they stopped quite often, as if the people were looking for something. For a minute I couldn’t even move. Then I scrambled and slid after Jerry to the place on the Monster that most nearly faced the Wecanicut point. I don’t think Greg really knew we’d left him; at least he didn’t make a sound.
The lanterns swung and bobbed nearer till they almost reached the point, and we could hear faint shouts. Jerry and I braced our feet against the slimy rocks and shrieked into the dark, and the wind rushed down our throats and burned them. We could hear the people quite clearly now.
“It’s Father’s voice,” Jerry said. “Oh, Chris, the wind is dead against us. Now for it!”
I’d always thought Jerry could shout louder than any boy I ever heard, but you can’t imagine how high and thin both our voices sounded out there on the Sea Monster. We heard Father’s voice quite distinctly:
“Chris-ti-ine ... Jer-r-r-y ... ti-in-e!”