Page:Cornelia Meigs--The island of Appledore.djvu/147

Rh he was so excited that he hardly knew what he was about.”

Captain Saulsby moved and groaned a little. The sailor came over and stood looking down on him with good-natured and troubled  sympathy.

“I ought to have made some one come back for you,” he said, “but the orders we landed  with, were to hunt this fellow out, and we had  no time to think of any one else. The two officers that were ashore had got wind of him  already, so we had a time finding them, even,  before we got after the German. We finally traced him down to the point here, but when  we looked in at the window of the mill and  heard the old captain swearing and shouting  and saw only you two bending over him, we  didn’t think our friend could possibly be there. I knew you had been here since morning and the fellow had been seen at the crossroads in  the afternoon.”

“He must have come in when I was asleep,” said Billy. It seemed more and more that his nap had been an especially unfortunate  one.

“I had orders to go down and signal to the ship that we hadn’t found him,” the sailor