“I say, Hurst, don’t be such a ninny as to keep them about you!” exclaimed Berkeley, in a fright. “Suppose Pye should go in for a search this morning, and visit our pockets? You’d floor us at once!”
“The truth is, I don’t know where to put them,” ingenuously acknowledged Hurst. “If I hid them at home, they’d be found; if I dropped them in the street, some hullaballoo might arise from it.”
“Let’s carry them back to the old-iron shop, and get the fellow to buy them back at half-price!”
“Catch him doing that! Besides, the trick is sure to get wind in the town; he might be capable of coming forward and declaring that we bought the keys at his shop.”
“Let’s throw ‘em down old Pye’s well!”
“They’d come up again in the bucket, as ghosts do!”
“Couldn’t we make a railway parcel of them, and direct it to ‘Mr. Smith, London?’”
“‘Two pounds to pay; to be kept till called for,’” added Mark Galloway, improving upon the suggestion. “They’d put it in their fire-proof safe, and it would never come out again.”
“Throw them into the river,” said Stephen Bywater. “That’s the only safe place for them: they’d lie at the bottom for ever. We have time to do it now. Come along.”
Acting upon the impulse, as schoolboys usually do, they went galloping out of the cloisters, running against the head-master, who was entering, and nearly overturning his equilibrium. He gave them an angry word of caution; they touched their caps in reply, and somewhat slackened their speed, resuming the gallop when he was out of hearing.