She had untied the train.”
“H. G. Griffin,” remarked Poodle, “if you can’t find anything better to do at this crisis than to sing things like that, I think you’d better just jolly well get tied up again. There’s Jack Adeler and two sojers over across the clearing waiting for the General’s signal, and General Thorne is lying on top of the cabin, getting his trousers all nice and dirty with thatch, and saying ‘O cuss! O trunions!’ every time he slaps a mosquito. And here you beat it into this very nasty swamp to study nature.”
“Poodle, my son, you are a jackass,” were Hike’s first words to his rescuer.
“Hike, my child, you are a goat,” was Poodle’s retort; after which they solemnly shook hands again, stopped being boys for a while, and Poodle hastily led the way to the Lieutenant and his soldiers, where Hike was to wait and join the charge on the cabin.
Poodle hastened back to his nook on the thatch. He was hardly in place, beside the hole through the roof, when excitement began in the dingy room beneath.
CHAPTER XV
CHARGE!
“Those guards out of the way, all right? What’s that behind that pile of furniture?” Captain Welch was talking to P. J. Jolls, in the lonely cabin on the hill, while Poodle and General Thorne listened through a hole in the thatch.
“You’re pretty nervous for an Army officer, strikes me. That’s a shadow behind that furniture, and that’s all. Of course if you want me to take it away, it would give me pleas—” Mr. P. J. Jolls voice was filled with contempt.
“Well, you’ll get nervous if you don’t watch out. ’Fact, I think you will right now, Jolls, for it’s about time to tell you what I want before we go any farther. I want you to boost my seventy-five thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
“Whew!” commented the General, on the roof. “That might be almost called a bribe! So that’s why Welch wanted us to take Jolls’ aeroplanes!”