Chapter Eight.
Barney, the old gardener, had been round the garden that evening, and had paused thoughtfully close to the tree where he had had his adventure the night before; and as he went over the various phases of his little struggle and his fall, thinking out how he would have proceeded had he got hold of that boy again, he fancied he heard whispering.
The fancy became certainty, and creeping inch by inch closer to the palings, without making a rustle among the shrubs, he soon made himself certain of who was on the other side.
Barney’s face did not beam. It never had done so, but it brightened with a grin as he slowly and cautiously backed out of the shrubs on to the path, stepped across on to the grassy verge, and set off at a trot in true sailor fashion up the garden toward the house to give the alarm.
“Nay, I won’t,” he said, as he neared the door. “They two may have cut and run again before I get them two old orsifers round outside. Sure to have gone, for the skipper goes along like a horse, while the admiral’s more like a helephant on his pins. Scare any two boys away, let alone them. Lor’, if I had on’y brought that there bit o’ rope!”
But Barney had left it in his cottage; and as he reached the gate he stood to consider.
“Now if I goes down here from the gate, they’ll hear me, and be scared away. I know—t’otherwise.”
Chuckling to himself, he circumnavigated, as he would have called it, the park-like grounds of the Heronry, a task which necessitated the climbing of two high fences and the forcing a way through a dense quickset hedge.