"At the Herr Lieutenant's orders!"
Whereupon the boy was summarily thrust before the gruff-voiced speaker to a shed behind the guardhouse—a shed whose planks were a-tremble at all their lower edges with glittering drops of North Sea fog. He was helped in with a kick, scientifically administered—the big key crashed in the lock—and one was free to sob one's bursting heart out, lying face downwards among the hard, clean, shining straw-trusses that covered the floor of beaten earth. Somehow the tears relieved, and merciful sleep came to the child, and presently he awakened under the oilskin coat that served for bed-covering, to the rustling of the straw under his head, and through one unglazed aperture that admitted light and air, shone a large, lucent moon—in her last quarter, with Saturn, blazing like a great blue diamond, at her pale and silvery side.
In the shed, which had been destined but luckily not used as a kennel for the Adjutant's Pomeranian boar-hound, the boy remained in durance vile for a period of several days. The drills and parades, the buglings and drummings that marked the ordinary course of garrison life, alone enlivened the cramped monotony. He was given coarse food and drink three times a day, and permitted to exercise for half-an-hour in charge of a corporal within the limits of the gravelled courtyard. Soldiers were drilling there on most of these occasions, big men in the brand-new green-grey uniform that seemed a kind of Service kit, and who regarded Bawne with looks of quite incomprehensible malignancy, and when their mouths were not closed by Prussian military discipline, made coarse or beastly jokes at his expense.
You are to suppose a pitifully unequal struggle on the part of the boy to maintain decency, cleanliness, and self-respect under these conditions, which would have ended in hopeless lethargy had the Saxham pup sprung from a feebler race. Two things helped him at this juncture. The Rosary he said in his straw lair at night, and certain stimulating reading contained in a sea-stained and grimy-paged Scout's Notebook, that nobody had seen him with, or having seen had thought it worth their while to take away. You can see him on the sixth morning of captivity squatting on his straw, poring over the Alphabet of the Morse Signalling Code, the Rules for First Aid, and so on, following the ten precepts of Scout Law.
"Rule No. 7. A Scout obeys orders of his patrol-leader or scout-master without question."
He nodded his head as he read the words and his heavy eyes brightened. He pushed back the dulled and rumpled hair from his forehead and straightened his hunched back.
"Rule No. 8. A Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties...."
The smile was bravely forced. He held up his head, filled his lungs with air, inflated his chest, pouted his lips, and began to whistle Rule Britannia. And at the second bar, somebody booted the door heavily and a thick voice bellowed:
"Halt den Mund!"
It was the voice of the soldier who was Bawne's jailor, and the whistle quavered and broke down. And as the boyish heart swelled to bursting and the irrepressible tears brimmed over, a musical motor-horn, some distance off, sounded clearly and sweetly: