“Make haste!” I said; “it must be getting late.”
“Ah,” said Mercer, “if I’d got a watch like old Eely’s, we could tell the time.”
“And as you haven’t, we must guess it,” I said. “Look!”
Mercer turned at my words, for he was looking back to see if Polly Hopley was visible at the cottage door, the news we had heard of her father being away robbing us of any desire to call.
There, about fifty yards away, with his back to us, was Magglin, rubbing something on his sleeve. Then he breathed upon it, and gave it another rub, before holding it up in the sunshine, and we could see that it was bright and yellow, possibly a brooch.
The next minute the poacher had leaped into the wood and passed among the trees.
“Oh, what a game!” said Mercer, as we walked away. “If Bob Hopley knows, he’ll lick old Magglin with a ramrod. There, come on.”
We reached the school in good time, only two or three of the boys being about, and spent the next half-hour turning over Mercer’s melancholy-looking specimens of the taxidermist’s art, one of the most wretched being a half finished rabbit, all skin and tow.
“Well, I would burn that,” I said. “It does look a brute.”
“Burn it? I should think not,” he cried indignantly. “It looks queer, because it isn’t finished. I’m going to make a natural history scene of that in a glass case. That’s to be a rabbit just caught by a weasel, and I shall have the weasel holding on by the back of its neck, and the rabbit squealing.”