“No, of course not,” I returned hastily. “I just meant that things are deceptive at night. And even if it is a tramp,” I went on desperately, “wouldn’t it be better to wait till morning? At least it would be safer.”
She was not listening to me. She had now advanced firmly halfway across the little front yard toward the hedge. “Why on earth couldn’t Hamish have stayed out of sight?” I thought, “and what had moved my aunt to look out of the window in the middle of the night anyway!”
Aunt Cal reached the hedge and peered over it. “Come out of there,” she ordered loudly, “or I shall have you arrested for trespassing.”
There was no answer. She advanced along the hedge, she was approaching the clump of bushes where we had last seen Hamish. I held my breath. If only I could do something to prevent the revelation that was impending! I wished Eve were there, she might have had an inspiration.
Aunt Cal had reached the bushes. She had picked up a stick and now began poking at them fiercely. “Come out of there!” she repeated. “Or I shall call the police!”
All of a sudden my eyes, which had been vainly trying to pierce the shadows, were attracted upward. In the house beyond the hedge a light had winked on. It was in the little upper window facing our way. Aunt Cal saw it too for she paused momentarily in her poking.
And while our attention was thus distracted, a figure hurtled from between the bushes and the hedge and plunged headlong through the latter and on across Captain Trout’s back yard, a rubber coat flapping about its ankles as it ran. “There! What’d I tell you!” Aunt Cal exclaimed. “The miserable loafer!”
We watched the figure disappear into the darkness. “Tomorrow,” said my aunt, “I shall make a complaint. Come, you must go back to bed at once, you’ll catch your death on this wet grass.”
“Yes, Aunt Cal,” I said meekly, and followed her back into the house. And without further ado I presently found myself back in my own room again with the door, by special admonition of Aunt Cal, locked on the inside.
But the light in Captain Trout’s upstairs window still winked across the grass and now and then, I could see it blink as if a figure stepped between it and the window. Perhaps the cook had had another chill, I thought with an inward chuckle, and had demanded still more blankets! Well anyway Hamish had got safely away. Then, suddenly as it had come, the light winked out.