For at the heavy reek of animal bodies streaming out through a broad doorway; at the snorting stamp of great farmhorses, rolling the whites of their eyes in nocturnal curiosity, at the grunt of cows rattling their chains against the stall-head, baaing of sheep—from somewhere the squeal of a distressed little piggie—Una and others drew squeamishly back.
“Steady now! Keep the hush up! We don’t want to wake that old bear of a farmer. The stairs—the ladder—is at the far end, I guess, leading up to the hayloft.”
Pemrose was tiptoeing along the straw-littered aisle, on the trail of her own whisper, the flash light in her hand a cynosure for every blinking, brute-eye in the barn; tap, tap, patter, patter, came the staccato stamp of sheep’s feet, saluting it, from the pen behind the horses’ stall.
The Guardian brought up the rear.
“Careful now! Don’t make a sound. Keep the hush—”
But eighteen barn raiding girls, seeing the midnight adventure now in the light of a huge joke, crowding up a dark and narrow ladder are not likely to be too circumspect.
A false step, a rung missed—and one was back upon the shoulders of the others amid an hubbub of shrieks, poorly stifled.
Simultaneously a near-by bedroom window was flung up. A hoarse old voice was shouting:
“Heaven an’ earth! What’s all this hally-baloo? What’s all this uproar, I say? Now—now you stay right there till I come!”
“Up! Up! Up—girls!” cried Pemrose. “If he tries to mount the ladder to turn us out—we’ll push him down!”