The plotters’ admiration knew no bounds. The substitution of nouns for names was, in their eyes, the very acme of wit; and Henry was no longer an ordinary hero, but a veritable demi-god.
How learned this boy must be, and how ignorant they must seem to him! In fact, this so worked on the feelings of one boy (it is immaterial which one, gentle reader,—no, we defy you to guess which boy it was) that, in order to demonstrate he, at least, knew the difference between nouns and names, he laughed so hard, so monotonously, and so patiently, that long-headed Henry perceived the cause, and was, very rightly, disgusted.
“Well, boys,” said Henry, “I haven’t seen the prison-house yet, and if you will bundle me up in your disguises, we’ll set out for it, ‘The Wigwam of the Seven Sleepers,’ as George says Stephen calls it, and arrange everything as it should be and is to be.”
At this time they were in Mr. Lawrence’s garden. Will ran to the house and soon came back with a headgear which Charles compared to a Russian Jew’s turban, but Henry said it looked like a knight-errant’s sun-bonnet. Then Steve, not wishing to be outdone, said it was one of Father Time’s cast-off nightcaps. Then, having fitted it, whatever it may have been, to Henry’s head, and pinned it fast to his coat collar,—he had first changed coats with George, and turned his neck-tie wrong side out,—the plotters declared that he was admirably disguised, and they set forward in high spirits. However well Henry might plot, they were not adepts in the art of disguising; and this strange garb, far from concealing Henry’s features, served only to attract the attention of passers-by.
But they had not gone far when Henry pulled his Scotch cap out of his pocket and put it forcibly on his head. Then Charles mildly suggested that if a handkerchief were tied so as to pass over one eye, Henry might stroll through the streets of his native city without danger of being recognized.
“Well,” Henry said, reluctantly, “if you can tie it to give me the appearance of a wounded soldier, go ahead; but if it makes me look like an old woman sick with the neuralgia, I’ll—I’ll—no, you mus’n’t.”
A handkerchief had no sooner been tied over Henry’s eye so as to suit all concerned, than it occurred to Stephen that one amendment more was needful to make the disguise complete.
“Your ears are peculiar, Henry,” he said, “and very pretty. Now, Marmaduke always notices people’s ears,—at least, I guess he does,—so let me pull the flaps of the sun-bonnet clear over them.”
But good-natured Henry was only human,—or perhaps if his ears were so pretty, and somebody else had said they were, he did not wish to hide them,—and now he turned his one blazing eye full upon the boy, and said, almost fiercely: “Stephen, let me alone! I can barely manage to work my way along the road, as it is! Don’t you know, Steve,” he added mildly, “that it is hard enough for a fellow to get along in this world with all his five senses in full play?”
“It is too bad for Henry to go all the way there and back twice in one day,” Charles kindly observed. “Couldn’t we manage it for him to go only once, say in the afternoon, and then wait till Marmaduke and the rest come on?”