“It’s a blessed thing,” said Will, “to get ashore with a whole leg, isn’t it?”
His light manner was but the froth on the surface of his deeper emotions. He was trembling from the long strain and stern self-repression.
Reube drew a deep, slow breath.
“Verily,” said he, with a grave face, “that was pretty nearly as bad as the cave while it lasted!”
“O, surely not,” objected Will. “We had the free air and sun, and a chance to fight for our lives. But it makes me mad to think what fools we were in the first place.”
“How so?” asked Reube.
“Why,” answered Will, “if we’d come, this way on the first arrival of those beastly leviathans we would not have had half so far to swim, and our pursuers would have had nearly twice as far to go. It would have all been as simple and easy as falling off a log, and our hearts wouldn’t be going like trip hammers now, the way they are.”
“That’s so,” agreed Reube, in a tone of disgust. “But now I’m wondering what other scrapes we can manage to get into between here and home. I never realized till now the truth of the proverb—generally I despise proverbs—which says ‘It never rains but it pours!’ It seems to me I have been at steady high pressure the last few days, and lived more and felt more than in all the rest of my life put together.”
“My idea is that fate’ll let us alone for a while now,” remarked Will, with the air of a philosopher. “The law of probabilities is all against any further excitement on this trip.”
“So be it!” said Reube. “But let’s get to the Dido—and our clothes!”