“Will you please bring me a drink of water?”
It was perfectly awful, because he said it so politely and very carefully, as if he were trying not to bother somebody. And there was no drink to give him. I thought of the people in stories who lie on deserts and battle-fields burning in agonies of fever, but I couldn’t remember reading about anybody dying of fever on a rock in the middle of the sea. I dipped my handkerchief in the pool just beside me and laid it, all dripping, on Greg’s forehead. I didn’t know whether it was a proper First Aid thing to do, but he seemed to like it and was still again, holding my hand. Presently he said:
“Mother, why isn’t there a drink?”
“This is awful, Chris,” Jerry said.
Then I thought of the rain-pools. There were lots, of course, in the hollows of the Monster, but we had nothing to scoop up the water with. Greg’s forehead was just as hot as ever, and he thrashed about and hurt his shoulder and cried miserably.
I don’t know how Jerry could have thought of so many things; for it was he who thought of very carefully breaking the bottom off the root-beer bottle and using it for a cup. Of course the bottom might have cracked all to pieces, but it was quite heavy and Jerry was very careful. It came off wonderfully well, though rather jaggy. Jerry tried to grind the cutty edges off by rubbing them against the rock, but it didn’t work. Then we remembered being very thirsty once on a long picnic-walk ages ago, and Father wrapping his handkerchief around the top of the tin can the soup had come in and giving us a drink at a pump. So we knew that we could do that with the broken bottle. Jerry dodged out into the rain through the tide-pools and came back after a while with some water.
“I couldn’t get much,” he said, “because the place I found was very shallow, but I can go again.”
I remembered reading in books that you mustn’t give much water to fever-stricken people in any case. We lifted Greg’s head up,—that is, Jerry did, while I held the root-beer bottle glass, and said:
“Here’s the drink, Gregs, dear.”
It was very hard to tell what I was doing, and some of the water trickled over the handkerchief and down the front of Greg’s jumper. But he drank the rest, and said: “Thank you very much” in the same careful voice.