But just as Martin was on the verge of despair he caught sight of a familiar figure, and in a flash he saw a possible chance of safety.
On one of the grass plots a buxom woman was bending over a large washtub that stood on a three-legged stool. A clothes-line, propped on poles, was extended from a nail in the house-wall to one of the palings, and from it hung a blue shirt, a pair of stockings, a spotted neck-cloth, and other articles, pegged up to dry in the sun.
“Sally Boulter!” Martin exclaimed, rushing through the little gate.
He had recognised her as the wife of his friend Boulter the waterman, to whom she sometimes brought his dinner to the stairs.
“Please let us come into your house,” he went on breathlessly. “There’s a man after us.”
“Well, to be sure!” she cried, keeping her hands in the tub. “In with you, young master.”
The boys ran past her into the open doorway of the little house. At the same moment the pursuer, red-faced with running, came out of the alley into the yard. Apparently he had seen the boys before they disappeared, for he pounded along straight to Mrs. Boulter’s gate.
When he reached it he found it closed, and on the other side of it a strapping young woman, her stout, muscular arms bared to the shoulder, and in her hands a blanket which she had just wrung dry. Her lips were pressed close together, and her friends would have said that she was in a difficult mood.
Brought up by the gate, the man asked, rather gaspingly:
“Have you seen a baker’s boy and a blackamoor?”