“I’ll risk it.”
“Let him go, Juffrouw Pieterse. You understand—it’s company for me to have such a child with me. Then I’m not frightened so badly, if a murderer is in the closet. Nobody wants to be entirely alone. Isn’t that so?”
Juffrouw Laps gained her point: Walter was permitted to go with her.
It was principally their vanity that caused the Pieterses to consent so readily to Juffrouw Laps’s request and allow her to take Walter away to act as her castellan. Not one of them felt that it was a good thing for Walter to go with the Juffrouw; but they were all proud of his courage. The story would get noised abroad, and people would pass it on to their friends. Juffrouw Pieterse would see to it that the people knew it was “the same young gentlemen, you know, that went home with Dr. Holsma.”
Yes, and then people would say: “There’s something in those Pieterse children.”
Mothers like to hear such things.
With his package under his arm Walter marched away with Juffrouw Laps to do battle for that pious lady. That prehistoric weapon he left behind, on her assuring him that she had a well-filled store of weapons and ammunition enough to kill all the murderers that he would have occasion to contend with.
Chapter XXVII
Walter shuddered as he crossed Juffrouw Laps’s threshold. He reflected, and wondered how he could have entered upon this knightly expedition without considering certain details connected with it and inseparable from it.