“Pretty pair, ’pon my word!” said Uncle Richard, as Tom came blinking into the light just as the clock was striking ten. “Then you couldn’t keep awake?”
“No, uncle. I suppose I must have been very tired to-night.”
“The Vicar’s plums last night; my pears to-night. Humph! It’s time that young fruit pirate was caught.”
Chapter Twenty Seven.
Tom thought the matter over for days as he worked at the speculum now approaching completion. He had met Pete Warboys twice, but the fellow looked innocency itself, staring hard and vacantly at him, who longed to charge him with the theft, but felt that he could not without better evidence.
Then a bright thought came as he was polishing away opposite his uncle, and using the finest emery.
“I know,” he said to himself, and he waited impatiently to be at liberty, which was not until after tea.
“Going for a walk, Master Tom?” said David, whom he encountered in the lane.