Noon
`` Bath for you , breakfast for both of us -- then we must buckle down to work . _ Come ! _ '' Noon found them far advanced in the preliminaries of their hard adventuring . Working together in a strong and frank companionship -- the past temporarily forgotten and the future still put far away -- half a day 's labor advanced them a long distance on the road to safety . Even these few hours sufficed to prove that , unless some strange , untoward accident befell , they stood a more than equal chance of winning out . Realizing to begin with , that a home on the forty-eighth story of the tower was entirely impractical , since it would mean that most of their time would have to be used in laborious climbing , they quickly changed their dwelling .