"DEAR TEDDY,
"I've got your letter, and I've dropped a line to Jenkins, directing him
to give you and any of your friends a real good hiding every time he
catches you on his ground.
"Your affectionate father,
"TRELOAR TRELAWNY."
Of course, the thing couldn't be allowed to stop there. We were all on
Trelawny's side, though his father wasn't. In fact, Pedlar and Methuen
and me were rather vexed with Trelawny's father; and we told Trelawny
so; and he said he was too. He said--
"We'll be revenged next term, as it is too late this. We must all think
of a heavy score against Jenkins"--he never called Cherry Ripe anything
but Jenkins for some reason--"and the best idea is the one we'll carry
out."
And everybody interested in the matter quite agreed; but Steggles did
not come into it, because Trelawny utterly barred Steggles from the
first.
*III*
Next term the great idea of how to crush Cherry Ripe came to me out of
the Bible. I let everybody speak first, and then, as nobody had said
anything like as good, I said--
"We will do what the enemy did in the New Testament, and sow tares in
his ground."
Everybody thought the idea fine but jolly difficult, and Chilvers
asked--
"What are tares?"
I said I wasn't exactly sure, and Methuen said it was a sort of grass,
and Trelawny said it was a parable. Anyhow, we didn't know where to buy
them. Finally we decided not to ask for tares, but some sort of seed
that would grow quickly, and get a deep hold of the ground, and ruin
anything else for yards round. Unfortunately we didn't know much about
wild things in general, and we asked Tomkins, who is our champion
botanist, and he said "Willow herb." But there were no seeds about at
that time of the year, it being February, and so Trelawny said--
"We will confide in Batson, who is well known to be the son of a
greengrocer and seedsman."
But it happened that Batson, who was the gardener's boy at Dunstan's,
was leaving to better himself. However, there was just time before he
went, and we let him into our secret score against Cherry Ripe, and gave
him two shillings with which to buy some seed of some vigorous growing
thing to sow in Cherry Ripe's nursery garden and choke his vegetables
when they came up. Batson said that he would do his best. He said it
might have to be grass seed or clover, but he promised it should be a
good choking thing.
Certainly it looked hopeful, because he soon brought a bag of seeds and
said they were a kind of clover that, if once sown, could not be got out
of the ground again without ploughing. Then came the question of the
time, and we decided that next Saturday was the day. There happened to
be a big game at football, but not a little one, so we were all free
excepting Methuen, who kept goal for the first.
All went well, and when the match began to get exciting owing to hands
being given against Bray in our 'twenty-five,' Trelawny and Pedlar and
Chilvers and I went into the wood unseen and got to the Cherry Ripe side
of it. Chaps had been in his field a good deal lately, hunting for a
very beautiful red fungus that was to be found in the hedges, on dead
sticks, and Cherry Ripe had been a good deal worried by them.
Then came the first surprise of that day. There was a huge board stuck
up in the field facing our wood with these remarkable words on it--
+-----------------------+
| |
| DANGER! |
| BEWARE OF THE BULL! |
| |
+-----------------------+
Our first step was to get back into the hedge. The field seemed to be
quite empty, but there are many hollows in it, and a bull might easily
have been sitting down quite near us. Or it might have been hidden in
the cluster of trees in the middle. One thing was clear. It was not at
the pond.