“Arrested for being a rich and respectable old lady,� answered Hilary Pierce; “but I managed to escape that time. It was a fine sight to see the old lady clear a hedge and skedaddle across a meadow.�
Hood looked at him under bended brows and his mouth began to work.
“But what’s all this about the old lady having a pug or a pet or something?�
“Well, it was very nearly a pug,� said Pierce in a dispassionate manner. “I pointed out to everybody that it was, as it were, an approximate pug. I asked if it was just to punish me for a small mistake in spelling.�
“I begin to understand,� said Hood. “You were again smuggling swine down to your precious Blue Boar, and thought you could rush the frontier in very rapid cars.�
“Yes,� replied the smuggler placidly. “We were quite literally Road-Hogs. I thought at first of dressing the pigs up as millionaires and members of Parliament; but when you come to look close, there’s more difference than you would imagine to be possible. It was great fun when they forced me to take my pet out of the wrapping of shawls, and they found what a large pet it was.�
“And do I understand,� cut in the Colonel, “that it was something like that—with the other laws?�
“The other laws,� said Pierce, “are certainly arbitrary, but perhaps you do not altogether do them justice. You do not quite appreciate their motive. You do not fully allow for their origin. I may say, I trust with all modesty, that I was their origin. I not only had the pleasure of breaking those laws, but the pleasure of making them.�
“More of your tricks, you mean,� said the Colonel; “but why don’t the papers say so?�
“The authorities don’t want ’em to,� answered Pierce. “The authorities won’t advertise me, you bet. I’ve got far too much popular backing for that. When the real revolution happens, it won’t be mentioned in the newspapers.�