Oswald is a boy of firm and unswerving character, and he had never wavered from his first idea. He felt quite certain that the books were right, and that the best way to restore fallen fortunes was to rescue an old gentleman in distress. Then he brings you up as his own son: but if you preferred to go on being your own father’s son I expect the old gentleman would make it up to you some other way. In the books the least thing does it—you put up the railway carriage window—or you pick up his purse when he drops it—or you say a hymn when he suddenly asks you to, and then your fortune is made.
The others, as I said, were very slack about it, and did not seem to care much about trying the rescue. They said there wasn’t any deadly peril, and we should have to make one before we could rescue the old gentleman from it, but Oswald didn’t see that that mattered. However, he thought he would try some of the easier ways first, by himself.
So he waited about the station, pulling up railway carriage windows for old gentlemen who looked likely—but nothing happened, and at last the porters said he was a nuisance. So that was no go. No one ever asked him to say a hymn, though he had learned a nice short one, beginning ‘New every morning’—and when an old gentleman did drop a two-shilling piece just by Ellis’s the hairdresser’s, and Oswald picked it up, and was just thinking what he should say when he returned it, the old gentleman caught him by the collar and called him a young thief. It would have been very unpleasant for Oswald if he hadn’t happened to be a very brave boy, and knew the policeman on that beat very well indeed. So the policeman backed him up, and the old gentleman said he was sorry, and offered Oswald sixpence. Oswald refused it with polite disdain, and nothing more happened at all.
When Oswald had tried by himself and it had not come off, he said to the others, ‘We’re wasting our time, not trying to rescue the old gentleman in deadly peril. Come—buck up! Do let’s do something!’
It was dinner-time, and Pincher was going round getting the bits off the plates. There were plenty because it was cold-mutton day. And Alice said—
‘It’s only fair to try Oswald’s way—he has tried all the things the others thought of. Why couldn’t we rescue Lord Tottenham?’
Lord Tottenham is the old gentleman who walks over the Heath every day in a paper collar at three o’clock—and when he gets halfway, if there is no one about, he changes his collar and throws the dirty one into the furze-bushes.
Dicky said, ‘Lord Tottenham’s all right—but where’s the deadly peril?’
And we couldn’t think of any. There are no highwaymen on Blackheath now, I am sorry to say. And though Oswald said half of us could be highwaymen and the other half rescue party, Dora kept on saying it would be wrong to be a highwayman—and so we had to give that up.
Then Alice said, ‘What about Pincher?’