Everyone had to laugh at this clever twist of the argument, and Billy Seton murmured:
'I'm hanged if this chap is any sort of a fool! Come, Arthur, give him a show! It'll be great fun, anyway. We're tired of hunting each other. Perhaps he'll give us a merry little run.'
'Well,' said Arthur, 'if you fellows are keen on it, I won't stand in your way. Seems to me a pretty poor sort of game. Still, it will do to choke him off with as well as another.'
CHAPTER V
THE CHOKING-OFF OF CHIPPY
'We'll make a man-hunt of it,' said Billy Seton. 'I suggest that somebody lends him a pair of tracking-irons, and we give him a quarter of an hour's start. When we come up to him we'll fire at him with tennis-balls, as usual. If we hit him three times, he's dead. If he hits one of us first, that man's dead, and out of the hunt.'
'Righto!' said Chippy. 'I've studied them rules. I'm ready.'
'And I'll lend the tracking-irons,' cried Dick Elliott.
Chippy put on the tracking-irons with immense pride and delight. He had wondered so much what these things were, and to fasten a pair on his feet, and to make tracks with them for a real patrol to pursue him—it was simply great.