He stepped toward the dressing-table; but the Terror was before him. He took the clothes-brush and set it firmly, bristles outward, against the bottom of the folded sheet of the apple-pie bed, where one or the other of Captain Baster’s feet was sure to find it. The Terror did not care which foot was successful.
Then inspiration failed them; the Terror took the cigarette-case from the dressing-table; they came quietly down the stairs and out of the inn.
As they turned up the street the Terror said with modest if somewhat vengeful triumph: “There! you see things do occur to us.” Then with his usual scrupulous fairness he added: “But it was Wiggins who set us going.”
“I’m an ally; and he called me Freckles,” said Wiggins vengefully; and once more he spurned the earth.
On their way home, half-way up the lane, where the trees arched most thickly overhead, they came to a patch of deepish mud which was too sheltered to have dried after the heavy rain of the day before.
“Mind the mud, Wiggins,” said Erebus, mindful of his carelessness in the matter.
Wiggins walked gingerly along the side of it and said: “It wouldn’t be a nice place to fall down in, would it?”
The Terror went on a few paces, stopped short, laughed a hard, sinister little laugh, and said: “Wiggins, you’re a treasure!”
“What is it? What is it now?” said Erebus quickly.
“A little job of my own. It wouldn’t do for you and Wiggins to have a hand in it, he’ll swear so,” said the Terror.