"They're keeping jolly quiet," whispered one of Cummles's lieutenants to his leader.
"Y-e-s," agreed Cummles, inwardly a bit chagrined to think that the Crees were taking their medicine so quietly. Then suspicion smote him. "I say," he murmured, "we'll just open the door and see what's happened. Seems to me that gas might have laid them all out, or something. Be funny if—"
Moving silently forward, the Cripples approached the door, and stood there in perfect silence—a silence matched only by that on the other side of the door.
"Well!" said Cummles, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, and whipping open the door. The disagreeable smell from the bottles came to their noses, and one or two drew back.
It was just at that moment that one of the fellows at the rear sang out, in a loud, yet guarded voice: "Look out, you chaps—here's old Salmon."
A dark figure was certainly approaching from the direction of the school buildings, and it looked as if the Cripples were cornered. But necessity drove them; and, led by Cummles himself, they all bolted into the classroom and closed the door.
It would have caused them a trifle of concern had they known that the figure was merely that of Jack Symonds; and that the supposed Cripple who had given the alarm was none other than Faraday himself. Billy had, as a matter of fact, joined the band in the shadows, and the rest had been easy. In the darkness he had escaped recognition; and the trick played by the Crees worked with smooth certainty.
Now, indeed, the tables were turned with a vengeance. The Crees, forewarned, had merely passed through the room and had made their exit by a window, which they were careful to close and shutter up behind them.
During the time of their supposed tortures, they had been quietly awaiting events elsewhere; and now the Cripples were securely captured. Billy Faraday sprang forward and turned the key that Cummles had carelessly left in the door; and he laughed quietly in the darkness.
"We've got them by their giddy wool, what?" he chuckled. "Ever see anything so neat?"