Harry and Grove and Skinny came plodding through the mud; they had come
down the same way I had come down. And oh, boy, you should have seen the
way they stared when they saw Pee-wee.
“You alive?” Harry said.
“I can prove it,” Pee-wee shouted.
Harry just stood looking at him and scowling and whistling to himself,
as if he couldn’t believe his senses.
“If you don’t believe I’m alive ask Roy,” the kid blurted out.
“Any injuries? Anything the matter?” Harry asked him, and began to feel
of him all over.
“Only I’m hungry,” the kid said.
Harry just whistled for about half a minute and then he said, “Well, I
suppose that a fall of two or three hundred feet is enough to give one
an appetite—if nothing else. How about you, Roy?”
I told them the best that I could about my adventures, and I asked him
what had happened to the light.
“I stumbled over the storage battery and spilled the chemicals,” he
said.
“Was it you calling _killed_?” I asked him.
“It was I calling _spitted_,” he said.
“Good night!” Grove blurted out.
“It shows how much you all know,” Pee-wee piped up. It was the same old
Pee-wee. “I wasn’t anywhere near those two rocks and I—I wouldn’t know
them if I met them in the street. I was sub-conscious in a tree—I mean
unconscious. When I slipped up there, I went kerflop off the
precipice—just like in the movies. There was a tree sticking out and I
caught it and I was kind of stunned. But anyway, I stuck there in the
branches, because I’m lucky. When I got all right again I managed to
crawl along a little ways and then I slipped down and landed behind a
rock or something, and below that it wasn’t so steep. I went down,
because I couldn’t get up and I wandered around down there, until I
heard somebody groaning. That was Roy.”
“Why didn’t you answer when I called?” Harry asked him.
“I guess I must have been unconscious then,” the kid said. “How could I
answer you if I was unconscious? I guess you were never unconscious.”
Harry said, “Well, if I’ve never been unconscious, at least I’m
stupefied. Pee-wee, I think you have nine lives like a cat. I’ll never
worry about you again. Go where thou wilt. You were born under a lucky
star. But tell me this, do either one of you nightly wanderers know who
it is who lies wedged between those two rocks somewhere down here?”
“He’s _surely_ dead,” little Skinny piped up; “isn’t he?”
Harry said, “Yes, Alf, I don’t believe we’ll have to disappoint you
again. He’s _very_ dead.”
“Let’s go and find him,” Pee-wee shouted.
“Do you think you’re able to move about, Roy?” Harry asked me.
“I started to find those two rocks and I’m going to find them,” I told
him.
“I’ll help you along,” Grove said.
We made torches and lighted them at the fire. The way you do that is, to
get a good stick and split it a little way and then split it crossways
to that and keep on splitting it this way and that until the split parts
are so thin that they just curl out and make a kind of a fuzzy topknot
on the end of the stick. If you do it right, the stick will burn, for
about half an hour. When we each had one, we started out to find the two
rocks we had seen from up on the cliff and the body that we had seen
between them.
“If it isn’t a scout then it must be a soldier,” Harry said, “because
I’m sure about the khaki uniform.”
Skinny kept right close to Harry; I guess he was kind of scared thinking
about what we were going to find. I couldn’t blame him, because it was
kind of spooky, seeing those torches moving in the dark.