So this wonderful boy could cook, also! The Crown Prince had never met any one with so many varied attainments. He gazed through the eyeholes, which were rather too far apart, in rapt admiration.
“As you haven’t got a belt,” Bobby said generously, “I’ll give you the rifle. Ever hold a gun?”
“Oh, yes,” said the Crown Prince. He did not explain that he had been taught to shoot on the rifle-range of his own regiment, and had won quite a number of medals. He possessed, indeed, quite a number of small but very perfect guns.
With the last gasp of the candle, the children prepared to depart. The senior pirate had already forgotten the two men he had trailed through the passage, and was eager to get outdoors.
“Ready!” he said. “Now, remember, old sport, we are pirates. No quarter, except to women and children. Shoot every man.”
“Even if he is unarmed?” inquired the Crown Prince, who had also studied strategy and tactics, and felt that an unarmed man should be taken prisoner.
“Sure. We don’t really shoot them, silly. Now. Get in step.
“‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.’”
They marched up the steps and out through the opening at the top. If there were any who watched, outside the encircling growth of evergreens, they were not on the lookout for two small boys and a dog. And, as became pirates, the children made a stealthy exit.
Then began, for the Crown Prince, such a day of joy as he had never known before. Even the Land of Delight faded before this new bliss of stalking from tree to tree, of killing unsuspecting citizens who sat on rugs on the ground and ate sausages and little cakes. Here and there, where a party had moved on, they salvaged a bit of food—the heel of a loaf, one of the small country apples. Shades of the Court Physicians, under whose direction the Crown Prince was daily fed a carefully balanced ration!