He looked from one to the other of us and nodded his head
to himself. I suppose we did look very queer,--quite dirty, and
Jerry with the tin-foil-buckled belt still around him and no shirt;
and my bloomers dangling down like a Turkish person's because of the
elastics having burst when I fell down.
"It seems," said our man, "that I have arrived in the nick of time
to perform a daring rescue."
He said it in a funny make-believe way, as if he were doing one of
our plays, and then suddenly the twinklyness went out of his eyes
and he said:
"But take me to Gregory."
If we hadn't been so perfectly bursting with thankfulness and so
tired of shouting and the cold and the whole hideous place, we
should have wondered how on earth he knew Greg's name, because
neither of us had mentioned it. But we didn't think of it then, and
just snatched his hands and pulled him over the rocks, trying to
tell him a little how glad we were to see him.
When he saw Greg, his face grew quite different--very sorry, and not
twinkly at all and he went down on his knees (he couldn't have stood
up in the back of the cave) and he said:
"Poor old man!" And then, "I wonder who had the worst night of it?"
We said, "Greg, of course." But our man said, "I wonder." Then he
changed again, and instead of being all sorry and gentle, he got
quite commanding and very quick.
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