“I beg your pardon, sir; most humbly I implore your forgiveness. I have but one excuse—this wondrous—Good night! I'm going to bed before I add to my new reputation as—a blessed idiot, no less!”
CHAPTER XIV. A MARVELLOUS VISION.
But the night was considerably older ere any one of that quartette lost himself in slumber, for all had been too thoroughly wrought up by the exciting events of the past day for sleep to claim an easy subject.
By common consent, however, that one particular subject was barred for the present, and then, sitting in a cosy group about the glowing fire there in the cavern, the recently formed friends talked and chatted, asking and answering questions almost past counting.
Little wonder that such should be the case, so far as Cooper Edgecombe was concerned, since he had been lost to the busy world and its many changes for a long decade.
Then, too, his own dreary existence held a strange charm for the air-voyagers, and the exile grew wonderfully cheerful and bright-eyed as he in part depicted his struggles to sustain life against such heavy odds, and still strove to keep alive that one hope,—that even yet he might be able to discover a clew to his loved and lost ones.
“Not alive; I have long since abandoned that faint hope. But if I might only find something to make sure, something that I could pray over, then bury where my heart could hover above—”
“You are still alive, good friend, yet you have spent long years out here in the wilderness,” gently suggested the professor.
Edgecombe flinched, as one might when a rude hand touches a still raw wound.