‘I shouldn’t have minded THAT,’ Dicky said, ‘because I could easily have taken it all off again if they’d only said so. But the sillies went and propped up a milk-pan against the window. They never took the trouble to notice I had mended it. So the wretched thing pushed the window open all by itself directly they propped it up, and it tumbled through into the moat, and they are most awfully waxy. All the men are out in the fields and they haven’t any spare milk-pans. If I were a farmer, I must say I wouldn’t stick at an extra milk-pan or two. Accidents must happen sometimes. I call it mean.’
Dicky spoke in savage tones. But Oswald was not so unhappy, first because it wasn’t his fault, and next because he is a far-seeing boy.
‘Never mind,’ he said kindly. ‘Keep your tail up. We’ll get the beastly milk-pan out all right. Come on.’ He rushed hastily to the garden and gave a low, signifying whistle, which the others know well enough to mean something extra being up.
And when they were all gathered round him he spoke.
‘Fellow countrymen,’ he said, ‘we’re going to have a rousing good time.’
‘It’s nothing naughty, is it,’ Daisy asked, ‘like the last time you had that was rousingly good?’
Alice said ‘Shish’, and Oswald pretended not to hear.
‘A precious treasure,’ he said, ‘has inadvertently been laid low in the moat by one of us.’
‘The rotten thing tumbled in by itself,’ Dicky said.
Oswald waved his hand and said, ‘Anyhow, it’s there. It’s our duty to restore it to its sorrowing owners. I say, look here—we’re going to drag the moat.’