Oswald said, "You shut up. If you don't want to hear the secret you'd better bunk. I'm going to administer the secret oath."
This is a very solemn oath, and only used about real things, and never for pretending ones, so Dicky said:
"Oh, all right; go ahead! I thought you were only rotting."
So they all took the secret oath. Noël made it up long before, when he had found the first thrush's nest we ever saw in the Blackheath garden:
"I will not tell, I will not reveal,
I will not touch, or try to steal;
And may I be called a beastly sneak,
If this great secret I ever repeat."
It is a little wrong about the poetry, but it is a very binding promise. They all repeated it, down to H. O.
"Now then," Dicky said, "what's up?"
Oswald, in proud silence, drew the pistol from his breast and held it out, and there was a murmur of awful amazement and respect from every one of the council. The pistol was not loaded, so we let even the girls have it to look at.
And then Dicky said, "Let's go hunting."
And we decided that we would. H. O. wanted to go down to the village and get penny horns at the shop for the huntsmen to wind, like in the song, but we thought it would be more modest not to wind horns or anything noisy, at any rate not until we had run down our prey. But his talking of the song made us decided that it was the fox we wanted to hunt. We had not been particular which animal we hunted before that.