how people can stand being Red Cross
nurses in France, for I'm sure I never could be one. Greg's shoulder
was quite awful,--what we could see, for it was almost dark now.
There was nothing at all we dared to do. We couldn't even bathe it,
for there was only sea-water, so I just sat and held Greg's other
hand and patted it. He didn't cry,--I think the hurting was too bad
for that,--but he moaned a little, and sometimes he said, "Hurts,
Chris."

I tried to tell him a story, the way I did when we all had the
measles and he was so much sicker than the rest of us, but he
couldn't listen. So we just sat there in the dark--it was perfectly
dark now and we couldn't see one another at all--and I began to
count the flashes of the Headland light--two long and two short, two
long and two short--till I thought I should scream. Suddenly Jerry
said:

"Are you hungry, Chris?"

I said that I wasn't, and asked him if he was. But he said:

"No, not very."

There were real waves on the Wecanicut side of the Monster now, and
the wind was still blowing from that direction harder than ever. Now
and then a drop of spray would flick my cheek, and I think the sound
of the wind around the rock was really more horrid than the noise
the water made. It seemed like midnight, but it was really quite
early in the evening, when Jerry saw the lights bobbing along the
shore of Wecanicut. They were lanterns, two of them, and they
stopped quite often, as if the people were looking for something.
For a minute I couldn't even move. Then I scrambled and slid after
Jerry to the place on the Monster that most nearly faced the
Wecanicut point. I don't think Greg really knew we'd left him; at
least he didn't make a sound.

The lanterns swung and bobbed nearer till they almost reached the
point, and we could hear faint shouts. Jerry and I braced our feet
against the slimy rocks and shrieked into the dark, and the wind
rushed down our throats and burned them. We could hear the people
quite clearly now.

"It's Father's voice," Jerry said. "Oh, Chris, the wind is dead
against us. _Now_ for it!"

I'd always thought Jerry could shout louder than any boy I ever
heard, but you can't imagine how high and thin both our voices
sounded out there on the Sea Monster. We heard Father's voice quite
distinctly:

"Chris-ti-ine ... Jer-r-r-y ... ti-in-e!"

We shouted till our chests felt scraped raw, the way you feel when
you've run too hard, and the wind tore our v