rmark," 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