He was skipping and sobbing as if he were cracked. “Get a purchase!” he screeched. “We must have it out if we bust ourselves!” I had sprung and seized on it even as he spoke. To lift it was far beyond our strength; but straining and hauling our mightiest, we found we could shift it a little, right and left, like a colossal dead tooth in its socket. “O, if we only had Uncle Jenico’s wrench!” I panted, as we paused a moment in exhaustion. We were quite breathless and white. The sweat, for all the weather, was running down our faces. “Harry!” I groaned piteously, “if we can’t get it out now, after all this--this----” The look in his eyes stopped me. The despair was quite gone from them, and the old breezy fearlessness returned. “But we’re going to get it out,” he cried, “and without Uncle Jenico’s wrench, too.” His gay new confidence was revivifying, amazing. My heart, for all its terror, was beginning to expand in the radiance of it. “How?” I gasped. “Don’t keep me waiting, you--you old beast!” “I’ll show you,” he said; and with the word was down among the tackle, unknotting and pulling. I watched him breathless--helped him where I could. Between us, in a few minutes, we had disentangled many fathoms of unbroken rope, and still there was more to come. We wrought hurriedly, feverishly, with one eye always on the rising water. “Let it only wait,” said Harry through his teeth, “till we’ve got this clear, and then it may come as fast as it likes.” I worked on hard, not asking him why. Perhaps I had a lingering horror that his answer would disillusion me, show this shadow of hope a heart-breaking chimera. And still stealthily the tide crept up, and still we had not done. But at length the last kink was unravelled, and we rose with a shout. One end of the rope was still fastened tight to a ring-bolt in the spar at its seaward end. The other Harry shouldered, and with it turned to run up the bank. “Do you understand yet, gaby?” he demanded, grinning triumphant. “You are going to get a haul on the thing, to one side and further up?” “Yes, I am.” My spirits sank a little. “We shan’t be able to move it that way any more than we did before--anyhow, not to pull it out of its hold.” “Shan’t we? Wait and see.” “O, Harry! Don’t be such a fiend.” “Why, Dicky, you stoopid, look here. I examined the thing, which you didn’t, no more than Rampick himself, if it’s true he’s been here already. He thought it wedged tight, maybe, and safe from us. Well, I tell you it’s only caught by the tip of its nose--far enough in to baffle us lying as it does, _but easy enough to pull out floating_.” I stared at him a moment; then gave a wild hoot, and began to dance about as he had done before, and threw up my cap, and ended by hugging him. “You beauty, you beauty! You dear old positive genius and darling! We shall get away, after all, with nothing but a ducking. And Uncle Jenico----”