We knew that if the cave was going to be flooded we must get Greg out of it before the water came much higher, but it was still raining pitch-forks outside, and we didn’t know whether to risk waiting a bit longer or not.

“Perhaps there’s sea-weed and we can feel high watermark,” I said.  “Try, Jerry.”

We felt all the way around the sides of the cave toward the bottom, but as far as we could tell there was no sea-weed at all.

“That doesn’t help us much,” Jerry said, “because we don’t know whether the tide is really full now and has covered it, or whether it just doesn’t grow here.”

We curled our feet under us and waited.  We could hear the water sloshing around very close to us.  Once when I put out my hand it went right into a cold pool.  It was then that Jerry had a most wonderful idea.  I heard his knife snap open again and asked him what it was this time.

“If I take the crystal off my watch,” he said, “I can feel where the hands are.”

I heard the little clicking pop that the front of a watch makes when you pry it off, and I knew he was feeling the hands very gently.

“The little one’s in line with the winder stem thing,” he said, “and the big one—­Chris, it’s about twenty minutes of twelve.  The water can’t come any higher.  We must have had the worst of it.”

It was queer that I cried then, because I hadn’t felt at all like crying when we thought that the cave would be flooded.

Greg had been quiet for so long that it frightened me suddenly, and I groped after him to be sure that he was all right.  I found his hand, and I couldn’t believe that it was really hot when ours were so cold.  His forehead was hot, too, and dry, in spite of his hair being damp still from the rain.  He curled his hand into mine and said very clearly: 

“Will you please bring me a drink of water?”

It was perfectly awful, because he said it so politely and very carefully, as if he were trying not to bother somebody.  And there was no drink to give him.  I thought of the people in stories who lie on deserts and battle-fields burning in agonies of fever, but I couldn’t remember reading about anybody dying of fever on a rock in the middle of the sea.  I dipped my handkerchief in the pool just beside me and laid it, all dripping, on Greg’s forehead.  I didn’t know whether it was a proper First Aid thing to do, but he seemed to like it and was still again, holding my hand.  Presently he said: 

“Mother, why isn’t there a drink?”

“This is awful, Chris,” Jerry said.

Then I thought of the rain-pools.  There were lots, of course, in the hollows of the Monster, but we had nothing to scoop up the water with.  Greg’s forehead was just as hot as ever, and he thrashed about and hurt his shoulder and cried miserably.