Part 30 (2/2)

”He's not going to poach, after all!” cried Erebus in a tone of acute disappointment.

”Look here: are you really quite sure you saw him poaching at all?

Long Ridge is a good way off,” said the Terror looking across to it.

”I did. I tell you he was half-way down old Glazebrook's meadow,” said Erebus firmly.

”It's very disappointing,” said the Terror, frowning at the disobliging fisherman; then he added with philosophic calm: ”Well, it can't be helped; we've got to go on watching him every evening till he does. If he's poached once, he'll poach again.”

”Look!” said Erebus, gripping his arm.

Sir James had stopped fis.h.i.+ng and was walking back to the boundary fence. He stood for a while beside the gap in it, hesitating, scanning the little valley down which the stream ran, with his keen hunter's eyes. It is to be feared that he had been too long used to the high-handed methods that prevail in the ends of the earth where big game dwell, to have a proper sense of the sanct.i.ty of his neighbor's fish. Moreover, Mr. Glazebrook was guilty of the practise of netting his water and sending the trout, alive in cans, to a London restaurant.

Sir James felt strongly that it was his duty as a sportsman to give them the chance of making a sportsmanlike end.

But Mr. Glazebrook was an uncommonly disagreeable man; and since Glazebrook farm marched with the western meadows of the Morgans, the Morgans and the Glazebrooks had been at loggerheads for at least fifty years. a.s.suredly the farmer would prosecute Sir James, if he caught him poaching.

Yet the valley and the meadows down the stream were empty of human beings; and as for the wood, there would be no one but his own keeper in the wood. Doubtless that keeper would, from the abstract point of view, regard poaching with abhorrence. But he would perceive that his master was doing a real kindness to the Glazebrook trout by giving them that chance of making a sportsman-like end. At any rate the keeper would hold his tongue.

Sir James climbed through the gap.

The Twins breathed a simultaneous sigh of relief; and Erebus said in a tone of triumph: ”Well, he's gone and done it now.”

”Yes, we've got him all right,” said the Terror in a tone of calm thankfulness.

Fortune favored the unscrupulous; and in the next forty minutes Sir James caught three good fish.

He had just landed the third when the keen eyes of Erebus espied a figure coming up the bank of the stream two meadows away.

”Look! There's old Glazebrook! He'll catch him! Won't it be fun?”

she cried, wriggling in her joy.

The Terror gazed thoughtfully at the approaching figure; then he said: ”Yes: it would be fun. There'd be no end of a row. But it wouldn't be any use to us. I'm going to warn him.”

With that he sent a clear cry of ”Cave!” ringing down the stream.

In ten seconds Sir James was back on his own land.

The Twins crawled through the bracken to a narrow path, went swiftly and noiselessly down it, and through a little gate on to the high road.

As he set foot on it the Terror said with cold vindictiveness: ”We'll teach him not to answer our letters.”

He climbed over a gate into a meadow on the other side of the road, took their bicycles one after the other from behind the hedge, and lifted them over the gate. They reached home in time for dinner.

During the meal Mrs. Dangerfield asked how they had been spending the time since tea; and the Terror said, quite truthfully, that they had been for a bicycle ride. She did not press him to be more particular in his account of their doings, though from Erebus' air of subdued excitement and expectancy she was aware that some important enterprise was in hand; she had no desire to put any strain on the Terror's uncommon power of polite evasion.

She was not at all surprised when, at nine o'clock, she went out into the garden and called to them that it was bedtime, to find that they were not within hearing. She told herself that she would be lucky if she got them to bed by ten. But she would have been surprised, indeed, had she seen them, half an hour earlier, slip out of the back door, in a condition of exemplary tidiness, dressed in their Sunday best.

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