"That kid," said Gorrick to Spencer, "wants his head smacked, badly."
"That's just what I say," agreed Spencer, with the eagerness of a great mind which has found another that thinks alike with itself.
Spencer was the first of the trio ready to enter the water. His movements were wary and deliberate. There was nothing of the professional diver about Spencer. First he stood on the edge and rubbed his arms, regarding the green water beneath with suspicion and dislike. Then, crouching down, he inserted three toes of his left foot, drew them back sharply, and said "Oo!" Then he stood up again. His next move was to slap his chest and dance a few steps, after which he put his right foot into the water, again remarked "Oo!" and resumed Position I.
"Thought you said it was warm," he shouted to Gorrick.
"So it is; hot as anything. Come on in."
And Spencer came on in. Not because he wanted to—for, by rights, there were some twelve more movements to be gone through before he should finally creep in at the shallow end—but because a cold hand, placed suddenly on the small of his back, urged him forward. Down he went, with the water fizzing and bubbling all over and all round him. He swallowed a good deal of it, but there was still plenty left; and what there was was colder than one would have believed possible.
He came to the surface after what seemed to him a quarter of an hour, and struck out for the side. When he got out, Phipps and Thomas had just got in. Gorrick was standing at the end of the cocoanut matting which formed a pathway to the spring-board. Gorrick was blue, but determined.
"I say! Did I go in all right then?" inquired Gorrick.
"How the dickens do I know?" said Spencer, stung to fresh wrath by the inanity of the question.
"Spencer did," said Thomas, appearing in the water below them and holding on to the rail.