“Fine!” he chuckled, when the sagging string touched the mill roof.
I had told him that I would have no part in his proposed invasion of the enemy’s territory. I had declared that it was entirely too risky for my blood. But what I had said had been largely a matter of talk. I’m no coward. I was ready, as his loyal chum, to stand by him.
As a matter of fact, in my courageous decision, I was even more impatient than he was for night to come. I’m that way by nature. Sometimes it takes me quite a while to make up my mind, but once I have decided to do a certain thing I like to go ahead and do it. I don’t like to wait around. [[130]]
And having completed our plans, I was impatient, as I say, for nightfall. For it was our intended scheme to climb a rope in the darkness to the mill’s flat roof, gaining secret access at that unguarded quarter to the enemy’s territory. The spy, of course, would be expecting us to come up the stairs—would probably have several hidden traps in readiness for us there. He never would think of the roof. That was the fun of it.
The kite properly raised, we had now to wait for the wind to go down, which it undoubtedly would do at sunset. And when Tom called us to supper, which he and Peg had prepared, we tied the kite string to a bush, hoping that in the time we were eating that the kite would “die,” leaving its string on the mill roof. It was by the aid of this string, of course, that we expected to secretly raise our rope, pulling it up the east wall of the mill, over the top, then down the west wall, tying it to a tree.
Supper over, Tom and I called on the soap man, at Scoop’s directions, not only to settle up with our employer and pay him the money due him, but to hold him in spirited conversation, in the mill, until our leader had returned from town with the necessary rope.
“If you hear me at work,” Scoop had instructed, [[131]]“sing a song or dance a jig. Do anything,” he had added, with a grin, “that will make a lot of noise, I’ll give two owl hoots when I’m through.”
So we told the soap man funny stories, thereby keeping him in the mill until dusk. Shortly after eight o’clock a near-by owl went, “Hoo-o! Hoo-o!” At least the soap man thought it was an owl. We didn’t tell him anything different. And in keeping with our leader’s instructions, we yawned, telling the mill’s tenant that it was time for us to go home.
“Everything’s ready,” Scoop told us, when we had joined him near the inventor’s workshop.
“Rope up?” I inquired.