Mike

These things are Life’s Little Difficulties.  One can never tell precisely how one will act in a sudden emergency.  The right thing for Mike to have done at this crisis was to have ignored the voice, carried on up the water-pipe, and through the study window, and gone to bed.  It was extremely unlikely that anybody could have recognised him at night against the dark background of the house.  The position then would have been that somebody in Mr. Outwood’s house had been seen breaking in after lights-out; but it would have been very difficult for the authorities to have narrowed the search down any further than that.  There were thirty-four boys in Outwood’s, of whom about fourteen were much the same size and build as Mike.

The suddenness, however, of the call caused Mike to lose his head.  He made the strategic error of sliding rapidly down the pipe, and running.

There were two gates to Mr. Outwood’s front garden.  The carriage drive ran in a semicircle, of which the house was the centre.  It was from the right-hand gate, nearest to Mr. Downing’s house, that the voice had come, and, as Mike came to the ground, he saw a stout figure galloping towards him from that direction.  He bolted like a rabbit for the other gate.  As he did so, his pursuer again gave tongue.

“Oo-oo-oo yer!” was the exact remark.

Whereby Mike recognised him as the school sergeant.

“Oo-oo-oo yer!” was that militant gentleman’s habitual way of beginning a conversation.

With this knowledge, Mike felt easier in his mind.  Sergeant Collard was a man of many fine qualities, (notably a talent for what he was wont to call “spott’n,” a mysterious gift which he exercised on the rifle range), but he could not run.  There had been a time in his hot youth when he had sprinted like an untamed mustang in pursuit of volatile Pathans in Indian hill wars, but Time, increasing his girth, had taken from him the taste for such exercise.  When he moved now it was at a stately walk.  The fact that he ran to-night showed how the excitement of the chase had entered into his blood.

“Oo-oo-oo yer!” he shouted again, as Mike, passing through the gate, turned into the road that led to the school.  Mike’s attentive ear noted that the bright speech was a shade more puffily delivered this time.  He began to feel that this was not such bad fun after all.  He would have liked to be in bed, but, if that was out of the question, this was certainly the next best thing.

He ran on, taking things easily, with the sergeant panting in his wake, till he reached the entrance to the school grounds.  He dashed in and took cover behind a tree.

Presently the sergeant turned the corner, going badly and evidently cured of a good deal of the fever of the chase.  Mike heard him toil on for a few yards and then stop.  A sound of panting was borne to him.

Then the sound of footsteps returning, this time at a walk.  They passed the gate and went on down the road.

The pursuer had given the thing up.

Mike waited for several minutes behind his tree.  His programme now was simple.  He would give Sergeant Collard about half an hour, in case the latter took it into his head to “guard home” by waiting at the gate.  Then he would trot softly back, shoot up the water-pipe once more, and so to bed.  It had just struck a quarter to something—­twelve, he supposed—­on the school clock.  He would wait till a quarter past.

Meanwhile, there was nothing to be gained from lurking behind a tree.  He left his cover, and started to stroll in the direction of the pavilion.  Having arrived there, he sat on the steps, looking out on to the cricket field.

His thoughts were miles away, at Wrykyn, when he was recalled to Sedleigh by the sound of somebody running.  Focussing his gaze, he saw a dim figure moving rapidly across the cricket field straight for him.

His first impression, that he had been seen and followed, disappeared as the runner, instead of making for the pavilion, turned aside, and stopped at the door of the bicycle shed.  Like Mike, he was evidently possessed of a key, for Mike heard it grate in the lock.  At this point he left the pavilion and hailed his fellow rambler by night in a cautious undertone.

The other appeared startled.

“Who the dickens is that?” he asked.  “Is that you, Jackson?”

Mike recognised Adair’s voice.  The last person he would have expected to meet at midnight obviously on the point of going for a bicycle ride.

“What are you doing out here, Jackson?”

“What are you, if it comes to that?”

Adair was lighting his lamp.

“I’m going for the doctor.  One of the chaps in our house is bad.”

“Oh!”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Just been for a stroll.”

“Hadn’t you better be getting back?”

“Plenty of time.”

“I suppose you think you’re doing something tremendously brave and dashing?”

“Hadn’t you better be going to the doctor?”

“If you want to know what I think——­”

“I don’t.  So long.”