“Catch him!”
“Gettim! Crumbs! Gettim!”
The window actually did open. With a yell of joy William raised it and half-rolled, half-climbed over the sill into the room, followed by the Outlaws, uttering wild war whoops. After one stricken glance at them the rat disappeared down his hole....
But the Outlaws were thrilled by the house. They tramped about the wooden floors in the empty re-echoing rooms—they slid down the dirty balusters—they found a hole in a floor and delightedly tore up all the rotten boards around it—they explored the bedrooms and the cistern loft and the filthy, airless cellars—they met four rats and chased them with deafening shouts.
They were drunk with delight. Their hands and faces were covered with dust and their hair full of cobwebs. Then William and Ginger claimed the upstairs as their castle and Henry and Douglas charged from below and they all rolled downstairs in a mass of arms and legs and cobwebs. Finally they formed a procession and marched from room to room, stamping with all their might on the wooden floors and singing lustily in their strong and inharmonious voices. They had entirely forgotten their former avocation of gold digging.
“I say,” said William at last, hot and dirty and breathless and happy, “it’d be jus’ the place for a meeting place, wun’t it? Better than the ole barn.”
“Yes, but we’d have to be quieter,” said Ginger, “or else people’ll be hearin’ us an’ makin’ a fuss like what they always do.”
“All right!” said William sternly, “you’ve been makin’ more noise than anyone.”
“An’ let’s keep at the back,” said Henry, “or ole Miss Hatherly’ll be seein’ us out of her window an’ comin’ in interferin’.”
William knew Miss Hatherly, whose house overlooked the front of the empty house. He had good cause to know her. Robert was deeply enamoured of Marion, Miss Hatherly’s niece, and Miss Hatherly disapproved of Robert because he had no money and was still at college and rode a very noisy motor cycle and dropped cigarette ash on her carpets and never wiped his boots and frightened her canary. She disapproved of William still more and for reasons too numerous to state.