A SCOUTING ADVENTURE.
General Smith, having now partially recovered, was mustering his
forces and arranging his plans of campaign. He had spoken no hasty
word when he boasted that he knew the secret haunt of the robbers.
For, some time before, during a brief but glorious career as a pirate,
he had been brought into connection with Nipper Donnan, the strongest
butcher's boy of the town, and the ringleader in all mischief,
together with Joe Craig, Nosie Cuthbertson, and Billy M'Robert, his
ready followers.
Hugh John had once been a member of the Comanche Cowboys, as Nipper
Donnan's band was styled; but a disagreement about the objects of
attack had hastened a rupture, and the affair of the castle was but
the last act in a hostility long latent. In fact the war was always
simmering, and was ready to boil over on the slightest provocation.
For when Hugh John found that his father's orchards, his father's
covers and hencoops were to be the chief prey (being safer than the
farmers' yards, where there were big dogs always loose, and the town
streets, where "bobbies" mostly congregated), he struck. He reflected
that one day all these things would belong to himself. He would share
with Prissy and Sir Toady Lion, of course; but still mainly they would
belong to him. Why then plunder them now? The argument was utilitarian
but sufficient.
Though he did not mention the fact to Prissy or Sir Toady Lion, Hugh
John was perfectly well acquainted with the leaders in the fray at the
castle. He knew also that there were motives for the enmity of the
Comanche Cowboys other and deeper than the town rights to the
possession of the Castle of Windy Standard.
It was night when Hugh John cautiously pushed up the sash of his
window and looked out. A few stars were high up aloft wandering
through the grey-blue fields of the summer night, as it were
listlessly and with their hands in their pockets. A corn-crake cried
in the meadow down below, steadily, remorselessly, like the aching of
a tooth. A white owl passed the window with an almost noiseless whiff
of fluffy feathers. Hugh John sniffed the cool pungent night smell of
the dew on the near wet leaves and the distant mown grass. It always
went to his head a little, and was the only thing which made him
regret that he was to be a soldier. Whenever he smelt it, he wanted to
be an explorer of far-off lands, or an honest poacher--even a
gamekeeper might do, in case the other vocations proved unattainable.
Hugh John got out of the window slowly, leaving Sir Toady Lion asleep
and the door into Prissy's room wide open. He dropped easily and
lightly upon the roof of the wash-house, and, steadying himself upon
the tiles, he slid down till he heard Caesar, the black Newfoundland,
stir in his kennel. Then he called him softly, so that he might not
bark. He could not take him with him to-night, for though Caesar was
little more than a puppy his step was like that of a cow, and when
released he went blundering end on through the woods like a festive
avalanche. Hugh John's father, for reasons of his own, persisted in
calling him "The Potwalloping Elephant."
So, having assured himself that Caesar would not bark, the boy dropped
to the ground, taking the roof of the dog-kennel on the way. Caesar
stirred, rolled himself round, and came out breathing hard, and
thump-thumping Hugh John's legs with his thick tail, with distinctly
audible blows.
Then when he understood that he was not to be taken, he sat down at
the extremity of his chain and regarded his master wistfully through
the gloom with his head upon one side; and as Hugh John took his way
down the avenue, Caesar moaned a little, intoning his sense of injury
and disappointment as the parson does a litany.
At the first turn of the road Hugh John had just time to dart aside
into the green, acrid-scented, leathery-leaved shrubbery, where he lay
crouched with his hands on his knees and his head thrust forward,
while Tom the keeper went slowly by with his arm about Jane
Housemaid's waist.
[Illustration: "WAIT TILL THE NEXT TIME YOU WON'T LEND ME THE FERRET,
TOM CANNON! O-HO, JANE HOUSEMAID, WILL YOU TELL MY FATHER THE NEXT
TIME I TAKE YOUR DUST SCOOP?"]
"Aha!" chuckled Hugh John; "wait till the next time you won't lend me
the ferret, Tom Cannon! O-ho, Jane Housemaid, will you tell my father
the next time I take your dust scoop out to the sand-hole to help dig
trenches? I think not!"
And Hugh John hugged himself in his pleasure at having a new weapon
so admirably double-barrelled. He looked upon the follies of love, as
manifested in the servants' hall and upon the outskirts of the
village, as so much excellent material by which a wise man would not
fail to profit. Janet Sheepshanks was very severe on such
delinquencies, and his father--well, Hugh John felt that Tom Cannon
would not wish to appear before his master in such a connection. He
had a vague remembrance of a certain look he had once seen on his
father's face when Allan Chestney, the head-keeper, came out from Mr.
Picton Smith's workroom with these words ringing in his ear, "Now,
sir, you will do as I tell you, or I will give you a character--_but_,
such a character as you will carry through the world with you, and
which will be buried with you when you die."
Allan was now married to Jemima, who had once been cook at the house
of Windy Standard. Hugh John went over to their cottage often to eat
her delicious cakes; and when Allan came in from the woods, his wife
ordered him to take off his dirty boots before he entered her clean
kitchen. Then Allan Chestney would re-enter and play submissively and
furtively with Patty Pans, their two-year-old child, shifting his
chair obediently whenever Cook Jemima told him. But all the same, Hugh
John felt dimly that these things would not have happened, save for
the look on his father's face when Allan Chestney went in to see him
that day in the grim pine-boarded workroom.
So, much lightened in his mind by his discovery, Hugh John took his
way down the avenue. At the foot of it, and before he came to the
locked white gate and the cottage of Betty, he turned aside through a
copse, over a little green patch of sward on which his feet slid
smooth as velvet. A hare sat on the edge of this, with her fore-feet
in the air. She was for the moment so astonished at Hugh John's
appearance that it was an appreciable period of time before she
turned, and with a quick, sidelong rush disappeared into the wood. He
could hear the soughing rush of the river below him, which took
different keys according to the thickness of the tree copses which
were folded about it; now singing gaily through the thin birches and
rowans; anon humming more hoarsely through the alders; again rustling
and whispering mysteriously through the grey shivery poplars; and,
last of all, coming up, dull and sullen, through the heavy oak woods,
whose broad leaves cover all noises underneath them as a blanket
muffles speech.
Hugh John skirted the river till he came to the stepping-stones, which
he crossed with easy confidence. He knew them--high, low, Jack, and
game, like the roofs of his father's outhouses. He could just as
easily have gone across blindfold.
Then he made his way over the wide, yellowish-grey spaces of the
castle island, avoiding the copses of willow and dwarf birch, and the
sandy-bottomed "bunkers," which ever and anon gleamed up before him
like big tawny eyes out of the dusky grey-green of the short grass.
After a little the walls of the old castle rose grimly before him, and
he could hear the starlings scolding one another sleepily high up in
the crevices. A black-cap piped wistfully among the sedges of the
watermarsh. Hugh John had often heard that the ruin was haunted, and
certainly he always held his breath as he passed it. But now he was on
duty, and, if need had been, he would that night have descended to the
deepest dungeon, and faced a full Banquo-board of blood-boltered
ghosts.