Chapter Twenty Two.
Peter Pegg says “Yuss.”
“Yuss,” said Peter Pegg, as he sat in the profound darkness, for it was some hours before the moon would rise, and he was solacing himself with a piece of the bread-crust, which was terribly dry and exceedingly hard—“yuss, this is precious nice tackle for a fellow’s teeth. Wants nibbling like a rat. Yuss, what I have telled the young governor sounds ’most as easy as cutting butter, only not quite. I can get the helephant up to the door here, and I don’t see much hardship in mounting him and riding off; only how am I to manage to get him here at the right time? Ah, well, I’m getting on. The governor’s better, and I have got a spear, and, so to speak, I have got a helephant, and a fine one, too. So I am not going to give up because some of the job is hard. This ’ere bit of bread is as hard as wood, but I am getting through with it, and that’s what I mean to do about our escape. Where you can’t take a fair bite at anything, why, you must nibble; and I must go on nibbling now to find some way of getting out of this here ramshackle place. If I can just contrive a hole so that I can climb on the roof whenever I like, and be able to cover it up again so that these beauties don’t know, I don’t feel a bit doubtful of being able to slide down to the eaves, and then hold tight and get my toes in here and my toes in there, and climbing back’ard till one gets to the ground. As to getting back again—oh, any one could do that. He will do it as well as I can as soon as he is better. Now then, ready? Yuss. Then here’s to begin.”
He rose softly, stepped quietly over the leaves, and deftly climbed up the door again, where he applied his eye to the ragged lookout.
“My, it is dark!” he said to himself. “There must be a regular river fog floating over the place. I can’t see a star.”
He stopped peering out and listening, but everything was so black that he could not even distinguish the tree opposite to him beneath which the sentry had taken his post.
“So still,” muttered the lad, “that I don’t believe he can be there. If he was, everything is so quiet that— Whoo—hoop! What’s that? Like somebody learning to play the key bugle without any wind. Here, I know: it’s one of them long-legged, long-necked birds with a big beak, that stands a little way out in the river and picks up the frogs. Yes, that’s it. Now it’s all right, so here goes.”
He crossed to the other side of the building so as to be farthest from the tree where he had last seen the sentry, and, as quietly as he could, he began to climb the back wall of the great stable; and, as he had anticipated, this did not prove difficult, the crossbars and uprights, interlaced with cane and palm-strip, furnishing plenty of foot and hand hold, so that, without making much rustling, he drew himself up and up till his head came in contact with one of the sloping bamboo rafters, to which battens of the same cane were lashed with thin rotan; and, as he expected, upon these battens lay a dense thatch of so-called attap—that is to say, large mats of palm-leaves were laid one over the other till a thick cover, which would throw off the most intense of the tropic rains, roofed the building in.
Standing with his toes well wedged into the side, the would-be fugitive raised one arm and began feeling about in the mats above him, and chuckled.