It was about a fortnight later when Aleck Donne went down the garden directly after breakfast with the full intent, after thinking it over a good deal, of charging old Onesimus Dunning, the gardener, with being leagued with the Eilygugg smugglers.
“If I told uncle,” he argued, “he would be sent away at once; but that would be doing the poor fellow a lot of harm and perhaps make him worse. Perhaps, too, it would make him nurse up a feeling of spite against us, and he would set the Eilygugg people against us as well. So I won’t do that, but I’m not going to have the nasty old imposter smiling at me and pretending to be so innocent. I just want him to understand that I’m not such a child as to be ignorant of his tricks. I’ll let him see that I know why he wanted me not to go along yonder by the west cliff.”
Aleck knew exactly where the man was likely to be, for he had been mowing the lawn, sweeping up the fragment result, and wheeling it away.
“He’ll be stacking it round the cucumber frame,” thought Aleck, “to keep in the heat. By the way, I wonder what became of the beautiful cuke that lay, at the back under the big leaves—we didn’t have it indoors! I’m sure he takes some of them away. Uncle never misses anything out of the garden, but I do.”
The lad went round to the kitchen garden, which sloped round towards the south, so beautifully sheltered that it was a perfect hot-bed of itself in the summer, and there, sure enough, was the heaped-up barrow of fresh green mowings, and one armful had been piled up to half hide a part of the rough wooden frame.
But no gardener was visible.
“Not here,” thought Aleck. “Well, perhaps I was wrong about that cuke.”
The next minute he had raised the clumsily-glazed sliding sash, with a hot puff of moist air smelling delicious as it reached his nostrils, while he propped up the glass, reached in, and began turning over the prickly leaves, laying bare the rather curly little specimens of the cool, pleasant fruit; but there was no sign of the big, well-grown vegetable.
“Was I mistaken?” mused the lad. “No, there was one, and there’s the remains of the stalk, showing where the cucumber has been cut. What a shame!” he muttered. “I’ll tell him of that too. Uncle would be angry if he knew.”
Aleck closed the frame again and began to look round.