“Oh, I wish he wouldn’t be so blooming polite!” Jerry said sharply, as we were laying Greg back again, and I felt something wet and warm splash down on my wrist. But I didn’t tell Jerry I’d felt it.
CHAPTER X
If I wrote volumes and volumes I couldn’t begin to tell how long that night seemed. It was longer than years and years in prison; it was as long as a century. I think Jerry slept a little, and perhaps I did, too, for when I peered out at the cave entrance again there were two or three bluish, wet stars in the piece of sky I could see, and the rain-sound had stopped. Jerry was huddled up at my feet with his dear old head propped uncomfortably against me. He was snoring a little, and somehow it was the nicest sound I’d ever heard. Greg’s hand was still in mine, and it was not very hot.
Dawn always disappoints me a little. You think it’s going to be perfectly gorgeous, and then it’s usually nothing but one cold, pinkish streak, and the shadows all going the wrong way. But when I saw a faint wet grayness beginning to creep along the horizon beyond the Headland, I thought it was the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen in my life. The gray spread till the whole sky was the color of zinc, with the sea a little darker, and then one spikey yellow strip began to show on the sky-line. I could see Greg at last, with the jersey under his head, and the white brocade waistcoat all dark and stained at the shoulder, and his poor dear face ghastly white. And Jerry asleep, with the ruffle still pinned to his wet shirt and a big hole torn in the knee of his knickerbockers. And I saw the slimy pools that the tide had left beside us—it was on the ebb again—and the pieces of the root-beer bottle that Jerry had broken off, and the horrible, high, black head of the Sea Monster above us.
There was no boat of any sort to be seen, near or far away, but I woke Jerry so that we could both keep watch in case one came. Just as Jerry crawled out of the cave and stretched himself stiffly, Greg took his hand away from mine and blinked out at the sky, and said in almost his own voice:
“Have we been here all the time?”
“Yes, all the time, ducky,” I said, and then I cried, “Don’t try to move, Gregs!” for I saw him trying to squirm over.
He lay back and said “Why?” but then in an instant he knew why. I couldn’t do anything but cuddle my cheek down against his, and he sobbed:
“Make me stop crying, Chris.”