Meanwhile, Sunny Boy had wakened and found he was still thirsty. He remembered something Harriet had once told him when he was a very little boy and had teased for a drink when they were somewhere where she did not find it easy to get one for him.
“Take your mind off your troubles,” had been Harriet’s counsel. “Think about something else, and you’ll forget you are thirsty. Count the red roses on this wallpaper. I’ll help you.”
And Sunny Boy, with the help of his baby fingers, had gone to counting red wallpaper roses and forgotten his thirst, just as Harriet said.
“But I’m thirstier now,” said poor Sunny Boy to himself. “What’ll I count? Clouds?”
He began to count the gray-white clouds scudding swiftly across the sky. He counted six, ten, eleven.
“Big ones should count more,” he murmured sleepily.
His yellow head was beginning to nod again.
“Thirteen. What comes after thirteen?” he puzzled.
His eyes shut tight.
When he woke he did not know where he was at first. He lay quietly in the bottom of the boat, thinking, and then when he saw the oars, he remembered. He sat up.