The next morning Danny was very busy. He had been given the job of clipping the three ponies, and he was not able to go down to the wood. He was just about to set out, at one o’clock, when Miss Prince called him into her sitting-room.
“I want to speak to you, Danny,” she said. “I was down in the village just now, taking the boys to their carpentry class, and as I came back, alone, I met a man at the cross-roads. He came up to me and said, ‘Would you, please, give a message to Danny for me? Tell him that the Squire came through the wood, and, finding me in the old gamekeeper’s cottage, was furiously angry. He spoke—well, very roughly, and said that if I did not clear out at once he would hand me over to the police. So I’m clearing out.’ He looked awfully sad,” added Miss Prince, “and just as I was turning away he said, ‘Say good-bye to the kiddies for me. They performed a good turn, right enough, when they let me be friends with them.’
“He looked too sad for anything, and so thin and ragged. I gave him a shilling. At first he went very red, and then he took it, and said, ‘Thank you very much. I shall keep it as a souvenir of those who were kind to me.’ He looked at me as if he wanted to say something else, but he turned away without saying it, and walked down the road. It was the man the Cubs gave tea to on their birthday. What did he mean about the cottage?”
So Danny told Miss Prince how he had made the tramp a bed there. And then, in strict confidence, he told her the whole of the tramp’s sad story, because he felt so unhappy about it himself and felt he must talk of it to someone. The tears came into Miss Prince’s eyes.
“Cheer up, Danny,” she said. “I somehow feel we shall see him again, and that he will forgive his enemies, and that you will find the little girl.”
CHAPTER XIII
ELEPHANTS
The golden autumn turned to white winter. Christmas came, with frosty snow, and holly, and Santa Claus, and a party. The holidays ended, and Miss Prince came back.
Then came spring, with little green shoots on the hedges, and catkins, and the first celandines, and all the things that are so thrilling to find again after the long months without them. And the Cubs cut down lots of silver willow-palm to decorate the house on Palm Sunday. Then came May Day. The village children had a maypole. It was a very pretty sight when the little girls danced round it; but there was an awful tragedy when the twins collected all the coloured ribbons into two bunches and played “giant strides” on it, when no one was about! Of course all the ribbons broke, and the twins were not allowed to wear their Cub uniform for a fortnight.
And all this while what had happened to the mysterious tramp? No one knew. He had gone away that autumn morning, and no one had heard of him since.
It was one lovely warm evening in June that Nipper and Bobby Brown suddenly rushed up to where Miss Prince and the twins were weeding the garden, and cried: