“Got any tubs for hire, sonny,” said Casteno cheerfully, walking up to the youngster and tapping him familiarly on the shoulder.
“What does your mother want to wash?” promptly returned the lad, and in a moment the three of us were on the best of terms.
Acting on an impulse of my own I took charge of the conversation, and pretended that we were soldiers who had got sick of barrack life, and had deserted from some important depot, and were anxious to get into hiding in the nearest town. Now in most lads there exists a very genuine sympathy with the hunted of all descriptions, and a loyalty, too, which no ordinary bribe or threat would cause them to break. As a consequence, he promised to take us off in one of the boats and to hide us under some cushions and sail sheets as he punted us down stream to “a capital nest I know,” he explained, “behind the kilns of the porcelain works.”
“But the town—what is its name?” I queried, with a grimace.
“Why, Worcester, of course,” the lad replied. “Didn’t you see it on the milestones?”
“We were in too great a hurry to look,” chimed in the Spaniard at once. “Why, we don’t even know what all those thousands of people are doing here in these grounds. We have simply bolted as hard as we could through the streets.”
“Then you didn’t even see the flying machine fall?” cried the lad, his eyes wide with excitement.
“Not a bit of it,” returned I, with more truth than the boy possibly could have expected.
“Then I’m sorry for you,” observed the lad slowly, “for it was the most lovely thing I ever saw in my life. Four men and one girl were dashed to pieces, and they’ve had to stop the race meeting—for this is Worcester Races on the Pitchcroft—whilst they look for the remains of the poor victims who are supposed to have come all the way from the Crystal Palace with Mr Santos-Dumont, who, luckily, made his escape in the parachute before the thing fell.”
Neither Casteno nor I, however, troubled to enlighten the lad as to the true facts. For one thing, it amused us slightly to discover for ourselves how strangely the news of our arrival had travelled, and in what a small degree the good citizens of Worcester were wont to mix the naked truth with their carefully-compounded stories of breathless adventure. For another, we were desperately anxious to get away from the neighbourhood of that racecourse. Any second the hue-and-cry might spread to the point at which we were. Indeed, it seemed little short of madness to loiter, and we sprang into the punt immediately we could get the lad to cast her off, and almost before he quite understood how quickly we had acted we had got ourselves concealed and the boy hard at work punting us down the stream.