§ 2
Considerable delay in delivering the assault on the house was caused by the foreman’s insistence that he alone should ascend the ladder to capture Bealby. He was one of those regular-featured men with large heads who seem to have inflexible backbones, he was large and fair and full with a sweetish chest voice and in all his movements authoritative and deliberate. Whenever he made to ascend he discovered that people were straying into his building, and he had to stop and direct his men how to order them off. Inside his large head he was trying to arrange everybody to cut off Bealby’s line of retreat without risking that anybody but himself should capture the fugitive. It was none too easy and it knitted his brows. Meanwhile Bealby was able to reconnoitre the adjacent properties and to conceive plans for a possible line of escape. He also got a few tiles handy against when the rush up the ladder came. At the same time two of the younger workmen were investigating the possibility of getting at him from inside the house. There was still no staircase, but there were ways of clambering. They had heard about the reward and they knew that they must do this before the foreman realized their purpose, and this a little retarded them. In their pockets they had a number of stones, ammunition in reserve, if it came again to throwing.
Bealby was no longer fatigued nor depressed; anxiety for the future was lost in the excitement of the present, and his heart told him that, come what might, getting on to the roof was an extraordinarily good dodge.
And if only he could bring off a certain jump he had in mind, there were other dodges—....
In the village street an informal assembly of leading citizens, a little recovered now from their first nervousness about flying tiles, discussed the problem of Bealby. There was Mumby, the draper and vegetarian, with the bass voice and the big black beard. He advocated the fire engine. He was one of the volunteer fire brigade and never so happy as when he was wearing his helmet. He had come out of his shop at the shouting. Schocks the butcher, and his boy were also in the street. Schocks’s yard, with its heap of manure and fodder, bounded the new house on the left. Rymell the vet emerged from the billiard room of the White Hart, and with his head a little on one side was watching Bealby and replying attentively to the baker, who was asking him a number of questions that struck him as irrelevant. All the White Hart people were in the street.
“I suppose, Mr. Rymell,” said the baker, “there’s a mort of dangerous things in a man’s belly round about ’is Stummick?”
“Tiles,” said Mr. Rymell. “Loose bricks. It wouldn’t do if he started dropping those.”
“I was saying, Mr. Rymell,” said the baker, after a pause for digestion, “is a man likely to be injured badly by a Blaw in his stummick?”
Mr. Rymell stared at him for a moment with unresponsive eyes. “More likely to get you in the head,” he said, and then, “Here! What’s that fool of a carpenter going to do?”
The tramp was hovering on the outskirts of the group of besiegers, vindictive but dispirited. He had been brought to from his fit and given a shilling by the old gentleman, but he was dreadfully wet between his shirt—he wore a shirt, under three waistcoats and a coat—and his skin, because the old gentleman’s method of revival had been to syringe him suddenly with cold water. It had made him weep with astonishment and misery. Now he saw no advantage in claiming Bealby publicly. His part, he felt, was rather a waiting one. What he had to say to Bealby could be best said without the assistance of a third person. And he wanted to understand more of this talk about a reward. If there was a reward out for Bealby—
“That’s not a bad dodge!” said Rymell, changing his opinion of the foreman suddenly as that individual began his ascent of the ladder with a bricklayer’s hod carried shield-wise above his head. He went up with difficulty and slowly because of the extreme care he took to keep his head protected. But no tiles came. Bealby had discovered a more dangerous attack developing inside the house and was already in retreat down the other side of the building.
He did a leap that might have hurt him badly, taking off from the corner of the house and jumping a good twelve feet on to a big heap of straw in the butcher’s yard. He came down on all fours and felt a little jarred for an instant, and then he was up again and had scrambled up by a heap of manure to the top of the butcher’s wall. He was over that and into Maccullum’s yard next door before anyone in the front of the new house had realized that he was in flight. Then one of the two workmen who had been coming up inside the house saw him from the oblong opening that was some day to be the upstairs bedroom window, and gave tongue.
It was thirty seconds later, and after Bealby had vanished from the butcher’s wall that the foreman, still clinging to his hod, appeared over the ridge of the roof. At the workman’s shout the policeman, who with the preventive disposition of his profession, had hitherto been stopping anyone from coming into the unfinished house, turned about and ran out into its brick and plaster and timber-littered backyard, whereupon the crowd in the street realizing that the quarry had gone away and no longer restrained, came pouring partly through the house and partly round through the butcher’s gate into his yard.
Bealby had had a check.
He had relied upon the tarred felt roof of the mushroom shed of Maccullum the tailor and breeches-maker to get him to the wall that gave upon Mr. Benshaw’s strawberry fields and he had not seen from his roof above the ramshackle glazed outhouse which Maccullum called his workroom and in which four industrious tailors were working in an easy dishabille. The roof of the shed was the merest tarred touchwood, it had perished as felt long ago, it collapsed under Bealby, he went down into a confusion of mushrooms and mushroom-bed, he blundered out trailing mushrooms and spawn and rich matter, he had a nine-foot wall to negotiate and only escaped by a hair’s-breadth from the clutch of a little red-slippered man who came dashing out from the workroom. But by a happy use of the top of the dustbin he did just get away over the wall in time, and the red-slippered tailor, who was not good at walls, was left struggling to imitate an ascent that had looked easy enough until he came to try it.
For a moment the little tailor struggled alone and then both Maccullum’s little domain and the butcher’s yard next door and the little patch of space behind the new house, were violently injected with a crowd of active people, all confusedly on the Bealby trail. Someone, he never knew who, gave the little tailor a leg-up and then his red slippers twinkled over the wall and he was leading the hunt into the market gardens of Mr. Benshaw. A collarless colleague in list slippers and conspicuous braces followed. The policeman, after he had completed the wreck of Mr. Maccullum’s mushroom shed, came next, and then Mr. Maccullum, with no sense of times and seasons, anxious to have a discussion at once upon the question of this damage. Mr. Maccullum was out of breath and he never got further with this projected conversation than “Here!” This he repeated several times as opportunity seemed to offer. The remaining tailors got to the top of the wall more sedately with the help of the Maccullum kitchen steps and dropped; Mr. Schocks followed, breathing hard, and then a fresh jet of humanity came squirting into the gardens through a gap in the fence at the back of the building site. This was led by the young workman who had first seen Bealby go away. Hard behind him came Rymell, the vet, the grocer’s assistant, the doctor’s page-boy and, less briskly, the baker. Then the tramp. Then Mumby and Schocks’s boy. Then a number of other people. The seeking of Bealby had assumed the dimensions of a Hue and Cry.
The foreman with the large head and the upright back was still on the new roof; he was greatly distressed at the turn things had taken and shouted his claims to a major share in the capture of Bealby, mixed with his opinions of Bealby and a good deal of mere swearing, to a sunny but unsympathetic sky....