The constable also was becoming master of his nerves. Harry, indeed, neither looked nor spoke like a very desperate person.
"Look here, officer," said he, "you're making a mistake. Do I look a burglar?"
"Come out and I'll tell you."
"Well, but look here: you're not going to run me in if I do?"
"I'm not so sure about that."
"You can't!" cried Harry, losing his temper. "What charge have you to bring against me?"
"Trespassing with intent! You may satisfy the sergeant, and if you do he won't detain you. But I've got to do my dooty, and if you won't come out I'll make you, but if you take my advice you'll come quietly."
"Oh, I'll come quietly," said Harry, "if I've got to come."
His tone was one of unaffected resignation. To be haled before the police was a new and most grotesque experience, at which he could have laughed outright but for the dread lest his superior officers might prove as crass as this callow constable. That he would have to go, however, appeared inevitable; and though the thought of calling Lowndes to vouch for his respectability did occur to him, it was instantly dismissed, and that of resistance never occurred to him at all. Harry was a very peaceable person, but he was also very excitable and impulsive, and what he now did was done without a moment's thought. He had opened the gate, which was wide and heavy, with the kind of latch which allows a gate to swing past the post on either side, and on the pavement stood a young police man with his lantern and something glittering in its light. It was a pair of handcuffs, and the sight of them was responsible for what followed. Instead of passing through the gate, as he seemed in the act of doing, Harry clapped both hands to the bar and rushed at the policeman with the gate in front of him. Every bar struck a different section of the man's body: his lantern fell with a clatter, his handcuffs with a tinkle, and he himself was hurled heavily into the road, along which Harry was scampering like a wild thing. At the corner he stopped to look back, because no footsteps were following and no whistle had been blown. The lantern had not gone out, for a jet of light spouted from the pavement half-way across the road, where it ran into a dark-blue heap. Otherwise the little road was quite deserted.
Some minutes later, when the whistles began to blow, the man they blew for just heard them from the heights of the hill; but he had had the presence of mind to walk up to the park gates, and through them at a pace almost leisurely; and long before ten o'clock he was sitting over little Woodman's fire in his room at the Hollies, Teddington, and wondering whether it was he or another who had been through the adventures of the evening.