"And take care of your Aunt Alice; don't wear her out between you. If I come back and find her getting wrinkled, I shall carry her off away from you all!"
Faith laughed gaily.
"You really are a pirate," she said, "for you love carrying people away!"
"I mean it," he said, with a nod of his head.
It seemed quite dull when he went, for since his father's death he had come over very often to the Cottage.
Charlie was very sorry to lose him.
"I was getting to know him," he said; "he came over and brought me a fishing rod. He said crocks like me and him could be good fishermen if we were nothing else. And I mean to learn to be the best fisherman in the county."
Charlie always had a great idea of his own powers. He was still the Captain of his little company, and every spare afternoon would come to the tent in the orchard. One day he arrived with a new acquisition, a real telescope that he had found in an empty attic. It proved very useful in their games, and he soon found an opportunity to order Ben and Bolt up a tree to make observations of the country round.
"You must get up as high as you can, and if you see any of the enemy, however far off they may be, you must signal down to me without speaking where they are."
Hope and Faith were only too willing to climb any tree. They had sampled all the apple trees, but there was an oak tree at the bottom of the orchard which was much higher than any of the others, and they determined to climb up this. Hope carried the telescope. She was to spy through it, and Faith was to do the signalling by means of some toy flags. Charlie had taught them all to signal. There was not much about signalling that he did not know. Up the little girls went, higher and higher. They rather vied with each other as to who should get up the higher. Charity and Charlie were watching them from below, and egging them on.