“If I didn’t know it was him,” signalled the ungrammatical Dicky across the room, “I should never have believed it.”
“You may make as many faces as you like at young Brown,” glared Tempest at me, “but if I catch you making any more at me, your mother will need some extra pocket-handkerchiefs.”
“Jones,” observed Dr Plummer aloud, “a double poena for aggravated inattention.”
All right. I was getting pretty full up with engagements for one day, and began to think bed-time would be rather a relief.
It came at last. In the dormitory Ramsbottom successfully interfered with conversation by patrolling the chamber until the boys were asleep. No one doubted that he had been set to the task by the head master, and it augured rather badly for the resumption of the inquest next day.
However, even patrols go to sleep sometimes, and when I woke early next morning the usher had vanished to his own chamber. My first thought was not Hector, or the doctor, or my poenas, or the Dux, but the pond.
How, I wondered, was it getting on?
I routed up Dicky, and very quietly we dressed and slipped out. I knew that my early rising, if it were discovered, would probably be set down to my zeal for discharging impositions. But even they must wait now till we were sure about the pond.
For Dicky and I stood liable to as big a row as the assassin of Hector himself if anything went wrong with our experiment in engineering. Luckily very few fellows haunted this particularly muddy corner of the grounds, and now that Hector was above a daily bath, there was little chance of Plummer himself discovering the remarkably low tide on his premises—still less of his poking about among the stones in the bed of the pool.
To our great relief we found that our dam at the foot was holding out bravely, and that comparatively little water was trickling through the bank into the shrubbery. The flow at the upper end, however, was distressingly small, and though a whole night had passed we could still see the heap of stones under which the pistol was buried rising up from the shallow puddles around it, inviting investigation.