At that, there came a chorus of protests from the others, who had listened patiently enough hitherto:
“Not time for luncheon!” Roy exclaimed, indignantly. “Man, you’re crazy.”
“It’s well along in the night,” Saxe affirmed.
“Or, maybe, toward the morning of next day.” David spoke with the emphasis of entire conviction. “We’ve been here close to twenty-four hours, already.”
Billy Walker chuckled--a great volume of sound, which sent multiplying echoes afar over the placid water that shut them off from life.
“The exercise of reason convinces me that all of you are quite wrong,” the sage remarked, very genially. “There are certain well-known facts that compel me to believe you are wrong in your estimate of the time already elapsed since your incarceration by the flood. You are, perhaps, aware that in situations such as ours, the human mind errs outrageously in its calculations of time. Persons buried alive for a few hours invariably deem the time many days. One lives through great suffering; he believes that the time of his agony has been correspondingly great, though it may have been a matter of seconds, rather than of hours. This involuntary exaggeration seems a universal rule. We can’t reasonably believe that we are constituted differently from other men. With the judgment clarified by reason, based on knowledge of allied facts, I am compelled to believe--in direct contradiction to my own feelings, as well as yours--that the time elapsed since the lake broke in on us hasn’t been more than--” Billy paused to reflect, running over the sequence of events, as the basis of computation.
“Well, how long is it--measured by logic, and not by emotion?” Saxe demanded, somewhat sulkily.
“And, after all,” Billy remarked musingly, “time is only one of the categories of human thought, as Kant pointed out. To me, it seems eons since I was in the great out-of-doors--free, free to live. I judge by reasoning that we have been shut up here for nearly an hour--not quite.”
Before Roy could voice the protest on his lips, a cry came from Saxe:
The others held silent, marveling what this might mean. To their ears came the gentle lapping of the waves against the walls of the prison-house, the faint sighs of their own breathing--nothing else. After a long time, Saxe spoke again; and his voice was lifeless, where before it had been vibrant with feeling.