“The dream was gone now, and I edged myself down as near as I could to the hedge, keeping my eye on the master. Luckily for me at this moment one young rascal contrived to dig his spade into another’s heel, and got a blow in the face for his pains; and the master was down on the boy that hit him, and marched him off to the house for punishment. I seized the chance, and was at the hedge in a moment, carrying an armful of weeds to throw away in the ditch, so as not to attract the notice of the others. Sure enough there was my own dear old Nelly’s face peering up through a tiny opening which some rabbit had made in coming to feed on our cabbages.
“‘Johnny,’ she whispered, ‘give me a kiss.’
“I scrambled into the hedge and gave her half-a-dozen; but I couldn’t speak; I was far away in a dream again. Nelly, however, was wide awake and knew the value of her time.
“‘I’m staying with Uncle Jonas, in the white cottage next to the turnpike. It’s not a mile away. And look here, Johnny, Mag’s there too. He’s all safe; I’ve put a bit of wire on his door-fastening ever since you were taken up. Do you know, it was open when I took him away that day, but there he was all safe, and I’ve taken such care of him for your sake. We talk about you a great deal, Mag and I do. And, Johnny, you come down and see him. Uncle Jonas says you’re to run away. You’re innocent, you know, so it doesn’t matter. I’ve arranged it all, clothes and everything. We’ll go to America till it’s all blown over, and then——’
“‘Reynardson, down there, what are you doing?’ calls out the master, as he came back to look after his charges. And Nelly’s head slipped away in an instant, leaving, in the hurry, as I noticed, a wisp of her brown hair sticking on a thorn; which, by the way, I managed to secure later in the day, and put away in my trousers pocket for want of a safer place.
“I suppose it was from her Uncle Jonas that Nelly got this notion of America, and waiting there ‘till it’s all blown over.’ Anyhow, Uncle Jonas, like many of the neighbours of the new Reformatory, were on the side of us boys, and aided and abetted Nelly in her scheme for getting me away. He never thought, poor man, he was laying himself open to the law. And that good uncle would have got himself into a serious scrape if things had turned out as they ought to have done, for I contrived to slip away from the school the very next day, and was hidden in the white cottage all that night.
“I had got quite reckless; for, as Nelly said, when one is innocent, what does it matter? And she was so exactly her old self, and took such care of me—burying my school dress in the garden, and rigging me out in some old things of her uncle’s, and laughing at me in my big coat that I soon felt my pluck coming back again, though I cried a good deal at first, from fright as much as joy. And Mag, too, was exactly his old self, and was not a bit ashamed of me; it was some one else he ought to be ashamed of, as you shall soon hear.
“Our good time was soon over. It was the turnpike-keeper who did the mischief. He had seen me come down to the cottage, and he couldn’t resist the reward they offered early next morning to any one who caught me. He sent up a message to the school, and at nine o’clock the master and two policemen walked into the house. Nelly didn’t try to fight this time, but she spoke up and told them it was all her doing and neither mine nor Uncle Jonas’s. She told them that she had brought Mag to see me all the way from home, and that she was sure I wouldn’t run away any more if I might have Mag with me there.
“It was well for me that my wonderful Nelly kept her senses and could use her tongue, for my luck began to turn from that time forwards. The sergeant of police patted her on the head, and took Mag’s cage himself; and the other policeman put into his pocket the handcuffs he had begun to fasten on my wrists, saying they were ‘too big for such a kid;’ and even the master said that though I was in a bad scrape, he would speak for me to the magistrates.
“So we went back in procession to the school after I had kissed Nelly, and my clothes had been dug up in the garden, brushed, and put on me again; and when they locked me up in the whitewashed cell, where refractory boys were confined, the sergeant winked at the master, and put Mag’s cage in with me. When the labour-master unlocked the door to give me my dinner of bread and water, he brought something for Mag, and said a kind word to both of us.