“You can get out along one of these big branches, and drop out into the road.”
“No, no, come down, and let’s go by the gate.”
“And come upon my father waiting with a rope’s-end? Why, when he’s wild he lets out anyhow, and in the dark you’d get it as much as me. This way.”
Syd listened, and heard the boy creep actively along the bough and drop down on the other side of the fence.
“Catch,” he whispered. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
He threw over his bundle, and then swung himself up into the tree, got astride the big bough, and was working himself along, when a sound close at hand made him stop short to listen.
It was intensely dark where he sat beneath the thickly-leaved tree, and all was quite still. But he felt sure that he had heard some one approaching, and just as he had made up his mind to get further along, Pan’s voice reached him from the other side of the paling—
“Come on.”
Hoping that he might have been mistaken, Syd changed his position, so that he hung over the bough, and had just begun to edge along, when there was a quick rustling behind him, and the breaking down of shrubs, as if a man was forcing himself through, and the next minute he felt one of his legs seized.