Reggy slept as peacefully as a new-born babe. Tucked into his canvas sleeping-bag and with a woollen toque pulled well down over his ears, he was oblivious to the storm, and in the faint glimmer of our candle-lantern looked like an Eskimo at rest.
Peg after peg jerked out of the ground, and our tent commenced to rock to and fro in a drunken frenzy. Would the guard never come to tighten the guys? They seemed to have forgotten us. Warmly ensconced in my blankets and half asleep in spite of the noise, I lay and from time to time idly wondered how much longer the tent would stand.
Sometimes I dozed and dreamed of getting up to fix it, and saw myself crawling about in wet pyjamas in the wind and rain. The thought awoke me; the tent was flapping still. Reggy, as the junior, was in duty bound to right it; but if the storm couldn't wake him, what could mere man do? I dozed again and awoke just in time to see the canvas give one last wild gyration. Then it crashed down upon us.
"Hi! What the d——l are you doing now?"
It was the sleep-saturated voice of Reggy in angry, smothered tones beneath the wreck. For answer to his question, a gust of wind lifted the canvas from his face, and a spurt of rain, with the force of a garden hose, struck him.
"O Lord!" he howled. "The bally tent's blown down!" Reggy's perspicacity, while sluggish, was accurate.
"Get up, you lazy blighter, and lend a hand!" I shouted between blasts of wind and rain which soaked me through and through.
"Ugh! You wouldn't ask a chap to get up in a storm like this," he cried appealingly.
I didn't. I merely took the lower end of his sleeping-bag and emptied it, as one would a sack of potatoes, onto the floor. Reggy emerged like a rumpled blue-bird.
"Rotten trick, I call that," he grumbled, as he scrambled to his feet.