We were then lifted up by the poles attached to our novel sort of conveyance, two men carrying mine and two more lifting Ned’s “trap”—I know I felt very much like what a mouse does when caught in one, for I was caged with a vengeance—they trotted off with us, through a back door, and then along a wide, country road, I knew not whither!
Chapter Thirty One.
“One Piecee can do!”
We could not talk together, for the very good reason that our mouths were gagged, nor could we see each other now, poor consolation as that would have been; although possibly a friendly wink from Ned might have cheered me up a bit under the circumstances, the idea preying on my mind that it was owing to my fault in persuading him to enter into the treacherous ambuscade that we had been thus entrapped.
But whatever Anstruther’s reflections might have been I had no means of knowing, as our bearers trotted onwards with his bamboo palanquin abreast of mine, both of our craft making good headway; the artful, yellow-hatted old scoundrel who had so successfully planned our capture bringing up the rear of the procession and grunting away at a fine rate behind.
He was mounted on a diminutive pony, which he straddled in a clumsy fashion, his legs almost touching the ground; while a parasol he held aloft in one hand nearly poked my eyes out when he came up every now and then alongside my cage, to see that I was there all right and had not wriggled out of my bonds since his last inspection.
If I could not speak, like the monkeys in the Zoological Gardens, I thought the more; all sorts of curious fancies continually coming into my head as we were thus borne along.
For one thing, I was not in the least frightened about my fate; for, as the old chap had not killed us at the first start off, it occurred to me that he had merely taken us prisoners with the view of getting a heavy ransom for us by-and-by, being led to the belief that we might be important personages on account of his seeing us followed after we landed from the gunboat, by the cutter’s crew.