“Confound you for a donkey!” ejaculated the irascible old gentleman. “What Tom-fool rubbish you men do believe. Hullo! though, here’s a wad;” and he stooped and picked up a wadding evidently cut out of an old beaver hat. “That don’t look ghostly, at all events; does it, booby?”
Browsem only screwed up his phiz a little tighter.
“Why, tut, tut, tut! Come here, Dick!” shouted the old gentleman, excitedly. “We’ve been done, my lad; and they’ve cleared out the plantation while we were racing up and down here.”
I followed the old gentleman to one of the openings where we had stopped together the night before, when Todds, who was close behind, suddenly gave a grunt, and stooping down, picked up a half-empty horn powder-flask.
“That’s Ruddles’s, I’d swear,” growled Browsem.
“Of course,” said my uncle. “And now, look here, Dick,” he cried, pointing to the half-burnt gun-wads lying about near a large pollard oak. “There, shin up, and look down inside this tree.”
With very little difficulty, I wonderingly climbed up some fifteen feet, by means of the low branches, which came off clayey on my hands, as though some one had mounted by that same means lately, and then I found that I could look down right through the hollow trunk, which was lighted by a hole here and there.
“That’ll do; come down,” cried my uncle. “If I’d only thought of it last night, we could have boxed the rascal up—a vagabond! keeping us racing up and down the wood, while he sat snugly in his hole, blazing away directly we were a few yards off.”
I was certainly very close to Jenny that afternoon when my uncle, whom we thought to be napping in his study, rushed into the room.
“Hurrah, Dick! Tompkins has peached, and they sent fifty pheasants up in Ruddles’s cart this morning; but the old rascal’s locked up, and—hum! That sort of thing looks pretty,” he continued, for we were certainly taken somewhat by surprise. “But, you dog,” he roared, as Jenny darted from the room, “you did not catch the scoundrel.”