“Where did it go?” he asked. “I was looking right at it, an’ now it’s gone. Maybe I’d better turn my boat around.”
But he could not turn the boat around. Indeed, it seemed that that rowboat intended to do exactly as it pleased. And it wanted to go right on, sailing out to sea.
“Maybe we’ll come to China,” thought Sunny Boy, not knowing very clearly where China was. “Only I would rather have another some one with me. I wish Ralph had come.”
The sun began to burn him and he wished for some shade.
“The ocean’s awfully sunny,” sighed poor Sunny Boy. “I feel queer inside.”
He was hungry, but he didn’t know it. The queer feeling grew worse and worse.
“My mother wouldn’t like me to be sick,” he said aloud. “I wish I had a drink of water.”
He was really very thirsty, having had no water since breakfast. It was now two or three o’clock in the afternoon, though there was nothing to tell Sunny Boy the time. He had never gone without a meal in his life, and whenever he had wanted a drink of water it had always been easy to get. Sunny Boy, if he had only known it, was experiencing some of the worst troubles of shipwrecked sailors.
“I’m lonesome—but I won’t cry,” he said stoutly.
His voice sounded so little on the wide stretch of blue water that he knew, deep down in his heart, no one could hear him. But he stood up in the boat—luckily it was a flat-bottomed rowboat or it might have tipped and spilled him out and that would have been a serious matter—and shouted as loud as he could. He shouted until he was tired, and then, realizing that he was a very little boy alone on a very big ocean, brave little Sunny Boy did give up and cried. And some grown men, in his place, would have cried, too.