you decide to be sensible, somewhere up the valley
is the cave Charlie Sands hid in when he ran away. I think I can find
it."

It was thundering louder now, and Aggie was giving a squeal with every
peal. We were too far gone for pride. I helped her out of her
sleeping-bag and we started after Tish and the donkey. The rain poured
down on us. At every step torrents from Thunder Cloud and the Camel's
Back soaked us. The wind howled up the ravine and the lightning played
round the treetops.

We traveled for three hours in that downpour.

III

Only once did Tish speak, and then we could hardly hear her above the
rush of water and the roar of the wind.

"There's one comfort," she said, wading along knee-deep in a torrent.
"These spring rains give nobody cold."

An hour later she spoke again, but that was at the end of that journey.

"I don't believe this is the right valley after all," she said. "I don't
see any cave." We stopped to take our bearings, as you may say, and as
we stood there, looking up, I could have sworn that I saw a man with a
gun peering down at us from a ledge far above. But the next moment he
was gone, and neither Tish nor Aggie had seen him at all.

We found the cave soon after and climbed to it on our hands and knees,
pulling Modestine up by his bridle. A more outrageous quartet it would
have been impossible to find, or a more outraged one. Aggie let down her
dress, which she had pinned round her waist, releasing about a quart of
water from its folds, and stood looking about her with a sneer. "I
don't think much of your cave," she said. "It's little and it's dirty."

"It's dry!" said Tish tartly.

"Why stop at all?" Aggie asked sarcastically. "Why not just have kept
on? We couldn't get any wetter."

"Yes," I added, "between flowering hedgerows! And of course these spring
rains give nobody cold!"

Tish did not say a word. She took off her shoes and her skirt, got her
sleeping-bag off Modestine's back, and--went to bed with the worst
attack of neuralgia she had ever had.

That was on Wednesday, late in the afternoon.

It rained for two days!

We built a fire out of the wood that was in the cave, and dried out our
clothes, and heated stones to put against Tish's right eye, and brought
in wet branches to dry against the time when we should need them. Aggie
sneezed incessantly in the smoke, and Tish groaned in her corner. I was
about crazy. On Thursday, when the edge of the neuralgia was