“There’s one comfort,” she said, wading along knee-deep in a torrent. “These spring rains give nobody cold.”
An hour later she spoke again, but that was at the end of that journey.
“I don’t believe this is the right valley after all,” she said. “I don’t see any cave.” We stopped to take our bearings, as you may say, and as we stood there, looking up, I could have sworn that I saw a man with a gun peering down at us from a ledge far above. But the next moment he was gone, and neither Tish nor Aggie had seen him at all.
We found the cave soon after and climbed to it on our hands and knees, pulling Modestine up by his bridle. A more outrageous quartet it would have been impossible to find, or a more outraged one. Aggie let down her dress, which she had pinned round her waist, releasing about a quart of water from its folds, and stood looking about her with a sneer. “I don’t think much of your cave,” she said. “It’s little and it’s dirty.”
“It’s dry!” said Tish tartly.
“Why stop at all?” Aggie asked sarcastically. “Why not just have kept on? We couldn’t get any wetter.”
“Yes,” I added, “between flowering hedgerows! And of course these spring rains give nobody cold!”
Tish did not say a word. She took off her shoes and her skirt, got her sleeping-bag off Modestine’s back, and—went to bed with the worst attack of neuralgia she had ever had.
That was on Wednesday, late in the afternoon.
It rained for two days!