Still no reply. And now, beginning to feel alarmed, Scarlett lowered himself down, and forced his way through the tangle of little shrubby boughs growing round him, to the dead trunk, and found himself within a breastwork of rotten bark as high as he could reach, and which crumbled away as he tried to get up, one great green mossy patch breaking down and covering him with damp, fungus-smelling touchwood.
“Fred! Where are you? Don’t be stupid, and play with a fellow. Do you hear?”
Still there was no reply, and Scarlett gave an angry stamp on the soft ground.
“He’s hiding away. I won’t trouble about him,” muttered the boy. Then aloud—“Very well, lad. I shan’t come after you. I’m going back to the lake side.”
Scarlett began to struggle back, making a great deal of rustling and crackling of dead wood; but he had not the slightest intention of leaving his companion behind, in case anything might have happened to him. So he clambered back through the brush of oak shoots on to the sound limb, and walked slowly back to the folk to try and walk along the dead portion of the tree; but before he had progressed six feet, he began to find that it was giving way, so he descended, and then slowly creeping in and out among the dead branches, sometimes crawling under and sometimes over, he began to make his way to the spot where Fred had disappeared.
It proved, however, a far more difficult task than he had imagined, for pieces of the jagged oak boughs caught in his jerkin; then he found that in stretching over one leg he had stepped into a perfect tangle of bramble, whose hooked thorns laid tight hold of his breeches, and scratched him outrageously as he tried to draw his limb back. Finding that to go forward was the easier, he pushed on, and took three more steps, vowing vengeance against his companion the while.
“It’s horribly stupid of me,” he muttered. “I don’t see why I should take all this trouble to help a fellow who is only playing tricks, and will laugh when I find him. Oh, how sharp!”
Still there was the latent thought that Fred might have hurt himself, and Scarlett pressed on; but, all the same, seeing in imagination Fred’s laughing face and mocking eyes. In fact, so sure, after all, did he feel that his companion was watching him from somewhere close by, that he kept thrusting the rough growth aside, and looking in all directions.
“I’ll give him such a topper for this,” he muttered; and then as he struggled on another foot, he suddenly stopped short, looked straight ahead, and exclaimed loudly, “There, I can see you. Don’t be stupid, you old ostrich, hiding there. Now then, come out.”
Scarlett’s ruse was a failure. “He knows it isn’t true,” muttered the lad. “Serve me right for telling lies. It was only my fun, Fred,” he cried hastily, to make honest confession of his fib. “But don’t go on like that. Come out now, and let’s get back. It makes me so hot.”