“What I’ve been asking you—pains and agonies and frightful sufferings and despairs, and that sort of thing; and there you were, pop down into the darkness, pop under the kopje, pop out into the sunshine, and pop—no, I mean, all over.”
“Well, what would you have had me do? Stop underneath for a month?”
“No, of course not; but, hang it all! if it hadn’t been that you got that cut on your forehead and a few scratches and chips, it was no worse than taking a dive.”
“Not much,” said Lennox, looking amused.
“Well, I really call it disgusting—a miserable imposition upon your friends.”
“Why, Bob, you are talking in riddles, old fellow, or else my head’s so weak still that I can’t quite follow you.”
“Then I’ll try and make my meaning clear to your miserably weak comprehension, sir,” cried Dickenson, with mock ferocity. “Here were you just taking a bit of a dive, and there were we, your friends, from the captain down to the latest-joined private, suffering—oh! I can’t tell you what we suffered. I don’t mean to say that Roby was breaking his heart because he thought there was an end of you; but poor old Sergeant James nearly went mad with despair, and the whole party was ready to plunge in after you so as to get drowned too.”
“Did they take it like that, Bob?”
“Take it like that? Why, of course they did.”
Lennox was silent for a few moments before he said softly, “And did poor old Bob Dickenson feel something like that?”