"If we could only make a fire," said the former, "I wouldn't mind so much staying right where we are till daylight; but I should hate to do so without one. Are you certain you haven't a single match?"
"Certain," replied Alaric; "but I thought you always carried them."
"So I do; but I used them all on that old lantern last night. I almost wish now I'd never invented that thing, and that they had caught us. They wouldn't have starved us, at any rate, and perhaps the prison isn't so very bad after all."
"I don't know about that," rejoined Alaric, stoutly. "To my mind a prison is the very worst thing, worse even than starving. After all, this doesn't seem to me so bad a fix as some from which I've already escaped. Going to China, for instance, or drifting alone at night in a small boat."
"What do you mean by going to China?" asked Bonny, wonderingly.
"Hark!" exclaimed the other, without answering this question. "Don't you hear something?"
"Nothing but the wind up aloft."
"Well, I do. I hear some sort of a moaning, and it sounds like a child."
"Maybe it's a bear or a wolf, or something of that kind," suggested Bonny, whose notions concerning wild animals were rather vague.
"Of course it may be," admitted Alaric; "but it sounds so human that we must go and find out, for if it is a child in distress we are bound to rescue it."