the tiny little
cabin and had laid Greg on it in the bottom of the boat. He gave him
some stuff out of a little flasky bottle, too, and Greg sputtered
over it and said "Ugh!" but afterward he said:

"It's nice and hot inside when I thought it had gone."

And we couldn't talk, either, when our man was hoisting the
orange-painted sail and hauling up the anchor and running back and
forth to pull ropes and things. But when he was settled at the
tiller and all of us were cosy with sweaters and coats, Jerry asked
him again.

"Why, you see," the Bottle Man said, "something had hit me very hard
and for a long time all that I was able to do was to totter along on
the two sticks."

"But what hit you?" I asked.

He dropped his voice, because Greg was actually asleep.

"An inconsiderate shell," he said.

For a minute, because I was so used to thinking of him on the lonely
island, I imagined a big conch-shell being hurled at him from
somewhere. Then Jerry and I both gasped:

"You mean you were in the war?"

"Exactly," said our man.

"And the bearded man was a doctor?" Jerry asked.

"That he was!" the Bottle Man said.

We both asked him questions at once, but he was dreadfully vague,
and kept looking at Greg and the sail and the shore, but we managed
to piece together that he'd been wounded twice and left for dead in
No-Man's-Land (after doing all sorts of heroic things, we know) and
finally sent home to America from a French hospital. We found out,
too, that his aunt was the "good soul" he talked about in his
letters, and that she half-owned the island and had a beautiful big
old house on it where she made him come while he convalesced. It was
very hard to find out all these things, because he _would_ be so
mysterious and kept saying "Ah!" and "That's another story!" He also
wanted to hear all of our adventures, but we wouldn't tell him those
until we'd heard some of his.

Jerry asked him suddenly about the scar where the sea-thing bit him,
or stabbed him, or whatever it did, and our man twinkled and pulled
up his sleeve. And there, just above his right elbow where the tan
stopped, was a little white three-cornered scar, sure enough. Jerry
looked and said "Oh!" and our man said "Ah-ha!"

And at the end of all the stories we realized that we didn't know,
even now, how he happened to be sailing along just in time to rescue
us.

"_I_ sailed all the way from Bluar Boor," he said, "on purpose to
see you. To tell th