So saying, Corrie, in the revulsion of his suddenly relieved feelings, actually threw his arms round Poopy, and hugged her.

“O Corrie!” exclaimed the girl, submitting to the embrace with as much indifference as if she had been a lamp-post, “w’at troble you hab give me!  Why you run so? sure you know me voice.”

“Know it, my sweet lump of charcoal; I’d know it among a thousand, if ye’d only use it in its own pretty natural tones; but if you will go and screech like a bottle-imp, you know,” said Corrie, remonstratively, “how can you expect a stupid feller like me to recognize it?”

“There ain’t no sich things as bottle-imps, no more nor ghosts,” observed Bumpus; “but hold your noise, you chatterbox, and let’s hear wot the gal’s got to say.  Mayhap she knows summat about Alice?”

At this, Poopy manufactured an expression on her sable countenance which was meant to be intensely knowing and suggestive.

“Don’t I?  Yes, me do,” said she.

“Out with it, then, at once, you pot of shoe-blacking,” cried the impatient Corrie.

The girl immediately related all that she knew regarding the fugitives, stammering very much from sheer anxiety to get it all out as fast as she could, and delaying her communication very much in consequence, besides rendering her meaning rather obscure—­sometimes unintelligible.  Indeed, the worthy seaman could scarcely understand a word she said.  He sat staring at the whites of her eyes, which, with her teeth, were the only visible parts of her countenance at that moment, and swayed his body to and fro, as if endeavoring by a mechanical effort to arrive at a philosophical conception of something exceedingly abstruse.  But at the end of each period he turned to Corrie for a translation.

At length both man and boy became aware of the state of things, and Corrie started up crying: 

“Let’s go into the cave at once.”

“Hold on, boy,” cried Bumpus! “not quite so fast (as the monkey said to the barrel-organ w’en it took to playin’ Scotch reels).  We must have a council of war; d’ye see?  The black monster Keona may have gone right through the cave and comed out at t’other end of it, in w’ich case it’s all up with our chance o’ finding ’em to-night.  But if they’ve gone in to spend the night there, why we’ve nothing to do but watch at the mouth of it till mornin’ an’ nab ’em as they comes out.”

“Yes; but how are we to know whether they’re in the cave or not?” said Corrie, impatiently.

“Ah! that’s the puzzler,” replied Bumpus, in a meditative way; “but of course, we must look out for puzzlers ahead sometimes w’en we gets into a land storm, d’ye see; just as we looks out ahead for breakers in a storm at sea.  Suppose now that I creeps into the cave and listens for ’em.  They’d never hear me, ’cause I’d make no noise.”

“You might as well try to sail into it in a big ship without making noise, you Grampus.”