The doctor stood looking down at the water for a few moments, and then turned to me.
“How high above the surface of the water were we, do you think, when we came here?”
“I should say about twenty-five feet?”
“Why, we ain’t four foot above it now; and—look there! it’s a rising fast. I say, Joe Carstairs, if I’d known we were going to be drowned I wouldn’t have come.”
“Are you sure it is rising?” said the doctor, bending down to examine the level—an example I followed—to see crack and crevice gradually fill and point after point covered by the seething water, which crept up slowly and insidiously higher and higher even as we watched.
“Yes,” said the doctor, rising to his feet and gazing calmly round, as if to see whether there was any loophole left for escape; “yes, the water is rising fast; there can be no doubt of that.”
Just then Gyp, who had been fierce and angry, snapping and barking furiously at the savages each time they charged, suddenly threw up his head and uttered a dismal howl.
“Here, you hold your noise,” cried Jack Penny. “You don’t hear us holler, do you? Lie down!”
The dog howled softly and crouched at his master’s feet, while Jack began to take off his clothes in a very slow and leisurely way. First he pulled off his boots, then his stockings, which he tucked methodically, along with his garters, inside his boots. This done he took off his jacket, folded it carefully, and his shirt followed, to be smoothed and folded and laid upon the jacket.
And now, for the first time I thoroughly realised how excessively thin poor Jack Penny was, and the reason why he so often had a pain in his back.