[CHAPTER X]
GROWING FREEMEN
The Rev. Charles was greatly uplifted as he tramped through the sand to keep his appointment with the boys. He had succeeded beyond his hopes, and a most congenial field of work and study lay open to his hand.
"Catch them young," had been hammered into his heart and brain by his five years' work in East London. With heart and brain he had fought against the stolid indifference and active evil-mindedness of the grown-ups, till heart and brain grew sick at times. His greatest hopes had settled on the children, and here were two, of a different caste indeed, but as ignorant of the essentials as any he had met with--and they were given into his hand for the moulding. By God's help he would make men of them, high-born or baseborn. The side-issue was nothing to him, but it would add zest to the work.
When he got, as he believed, into the neighbourhood of his previous day's adventure, he examined the ridge of sand-hills with care. But they were all so much alike that he could not be sure. He had hoped to find the boys on the look-out for him, but he saw no signs of them.
He struggled up the yielding side of the nearest hill and looked round. If he could find their hole he would probably find them inside it or not far away.
It was close on midday, baking hot, and the sand-hills seemed as deserted as Sahara. The sea lay fast asleep behind its banks, which reached to the horizon. When he looked back across the flats to Carne, he rubbed his eyes at sight of its stout walls bending and bowing and jigging spasmodically in an uncouth dance. The very wire-grass drooped listlessly. The only sound was the cheerful creak of a cricket.
The width, length, and height of it, the gracious spaciousness of it all filled him with fresh delight. It was all so very different from the heart-crushing straitness of the slums and alleys in which his last years had been spent. He stood drinking it all in, and then, seeing no signs of the boys, he turned his back to the shore and strode inland.
But within a few steps he caught sight of recent traces of them in fresh-turned yellow sand which the sun had not had time to whiten. He whistled shrilly, if perchance the sound might penetrate to their hold.
And then, to his astonishment, the ground in front of him cracked and heaved, and first one and then another dark sanded head and laughing face came out, and the boys sprang up from the shallow holes in which they had buried themselves and stood before him.