"Hullo!" he cried in a low tone. "This isn't all. Where are the others?"
Only eight boys had turned out in addition to those whose names have been mentioned, so that the whole party numbered a round dozen. Where were the twenty-six?
"Where are the others?" repeated the leader, as the stragglers, breathing hard with excitement, came up and formed round him in a group.
"They've funked!" growled a voice in the gloom. "I thought from the first some of them would."
"Beastly sneaks!" added another. "I collared hold of young Thomas and tried to make him come, but he wouldn't."
For a second time in the history of the project Brookfield hesitated. Here was an end to all his ideas of united action, and the whole responsibility for the rebellion would rest on the shoulders of himself and the few bolder spirits who stood before him. He could not draw back now—it would be too much of a climb-down; and it would never do for him, the football captain, to show the white feather.
"Come on! Don't waste time!" muttered Jarvis, but not in quite such a confident tone as that in which he usually spoke.
"Come on, then!" repeated the leader desperately. And turning on his heel he made for the adjacent wooden building styled on the prospectus the "gymnasium," but commonly known among the boys as the "shed."
Exactly what happened next perhaps Brookfield alone could afterwards clearly explain, and he was rather chary of repeating his experience. He opened the door and went cautiously forward in the darkness, feeling his way with outstretched hand to prevent his coming into violent collision with the parallel and horizontal bars. The windows, which in former times had been constantly broken with tennis balls in a game known as "shed cricket," were protected with wire latticing, and this served to obscure the struggling moonbeams which faintly illuminated the farther end of the building.
Exactly how or when he first caught sight of it, Brookfield could hardly have told, but as he neared the chest in which the fireworks were stored, he became conscious of the presence of something standing in what was usually an empty corner.