“Hi! It leads through into the barn. You can get through. Come along!” He fingered the boarded wall.
“What’s the other side?” said Corkran the cautious.
“Hay, you idiot.” They heard his boot-heels click on wood, and he had gone.
At some time or other sheep must have been folded in the cartshed, and an inventive farm-hand, sooner than take the hay round, had displaced a board in the barn-side to thrust fodder through. It was in no sense a lawful path, but twelve inches in the square is all that any boy needs.
“Look here!” said Beetle, as they waited for McTurk’s return. “The cattle are coming in out of the wet.”
A brown, hairy back showed some three feet below the half-floor, as one by one the cattle shouldered in for shelter among the carts below, filling the shed with their sweet breath.
“That blocks our way out, unless we get out by the roof, an’ that’s rather too much of a drop, unless we have to,” said Corkran. “They’re all bung in front of the window, too. What a day we’re havin’!”
“Corkran! Beetle!” McTurk’s whisper shook with delight. “You can see ’em; I’ve seen ’em. They’re in a blue funk in the barn, an’ the two clods are makin’ fun of ’em—horrid. Orrin’s tryin’ to bribe ’em an’ Parsons is nearly blubbin’. Come an’ look! I’m in the hayloft. Get through the hole. Don’t make a row, Beetle.”
Lithely they wriggled between the displaced boards into the hay and crawled to the edge of the loft. Three years’ skirmishing against a hard and unsympathetic peasantry had taught them the elements of strategy. For tactics they looked to Corkran; but even Beetle, notoriously absent-minded, held a lock of hay before his head as he crawled. There was no haste, no betraying giggle, no squeak of excitement. They had learned, by stripes, the unwisdom of these things. But the conference by a root-cutter on the barn floor was deep in its own affairs; De Vitré’s party promising, entreating, and cajoling, while the natives laughed like Inquisitors.
“Wait till Muster Vidley an’ Muster Toowey—yis, an’ the policemen come,” was their only answer. “’Tis about time to go to milkin’. What’ull us do?”