Now he understood what I would have him bear well in mind, and whispered:—
“One or the other of us must live to reach the village; but I pray earnestly, Dicky, that if either falls, it be me.”
This sort of a conversation was not calculated to make a timorous fellow overly bold, and I realized at once that an end must be put to it, else we might become so faint-hearted as to retreat even before the advance was begun.
Therefore, clasping him by the legs, I lifted him straight up until his head and shoulders were through the aperture; and then, pushing at his feet, I literally forced him out of the pen.
Instantly this was done I reproached myself for having been so hasty, fearing lest he, like the log, might fall, failing to find support on the sides of the hut, and thus an alarm be given.
Alec Perry was not a lad to be guilty of a blunder, even though his comrade did his best toward forcing him into one; and in some way, I know not how, he contrived to drop from the top of the timbers as lightly as a cat.
Listening intently, I began to clamber up the wall, gripping my fingers into the crevices between the logs until the blood came from under my nails, and when I was nearly at the top, the thought flashed upon me that we had left our skates behind.
They lay in one corner of the pen, and so great was our excitement, when the way of escape had been opened, that neither of us so much as thought of them.
Without skates we might as well remain where we were, for it would not be possible to walk across the lake in eight-and-forty hours.
I lowered myself down, losing the advantage I had gained at the expense of so much suffering, and thrust a pair of skates into each coat-pocket, after which the painful task of scrambling up the side of the pen was begun again.