“That will do, sir, thank you,” the small man answered, laughing and pocketing the paper. “Good-bye, sir. Good-bye, young gentlemen. I’m glad you’ve got here at last. You’ve been a longish time about it, though, haven’t you? Good-bye.”
With that he turned his horse and rode off down the hill, while Percy and I, in a state of the blankest bewilderment, looked alternately at each other and at Jack, who, standing with his arm across his horse’s neck, was regarding us with a broad and cheerful grin.
“Jack!” exclaimed Percy, at last. “What’s the meaning of all this? What has that man to do with us? How—why—what—what is the meaning of it?”
At this Jack once more broke into a laugh, and stepping forward, clapped one hand upon Percy’s shoulder and the other on mine, and said:
“Percy, old fellow, and you, Tom,—I suppose I may call you ‘Tom’?—forgive me for laughing; but there is such a joke against you two. I’ve been expecting you any day for the past month. That man has been attending upon your footsteps ever since the morning you landed in New Orleans. I have letters from home for both of you up at the house where I am staying. I know all about your poaching scrape, and your trip across the ocean and up the Mississippi, and your walk across Nebraska, and the train-wreckers’ episode, and how the station-agents along the line used to joke you as you went by, and——”
“But how, Jack? How?” we both cried, rendered desperate by this enumeration, which only increased the bewilderment of our already sufficiently puzzled brains.
“Come over here by the stream,” replied Jack. “There is a nice bunch of trees. We can sit down in the shade, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
But to make matters intelligible I must deprive Jack of the honor of telling the story himself, and must add to it a few details with which he was unacquainted. To do so I must go back to the night when Percy and I escaped—as we thought—the terrors of the law by running away from Moseley’s.
It was not until the morning following our “escape” that our absence was discovered,—Percy’s sheet waving in the wind was the first intimation that something was amiss,—but as soon as the discovery was made there ensued some pretty lively bustle in the little community.
Bates and the keepers were rescued from the “den,” Mr. Goodall was notified, and as soon as he arrived and my parents returned home a meeting of the elders was held at the vicarage; Sir Anthony being of the number. The old Baronet was half amused and half indignant that we should have supposed him to be so harsh and undiscriminating as to prosecute two thoughtless boys for an offence which they did not know was an offence. But, “It is just like boys, though,” said he. “They never do stop to think.”