CHAPTER XIII.

“NO, NO, IT IS NOT JUST.”

“I wonder what sort of grand things _he_ will do,” said Andrew with a sneer at Gaston, who, at the close of the banquet ran off to tell of his new honours to Ruth. “Not much fear of his carrying off the prize from any of us.”

“Not much,” laughed the schoolboys.

“It doesn’t seem to me,” remarked Phil after a pause, “that it’ll be an easy matter for any of us to get a chance of doing anything really swagger.”

“Just what I was thinking,” said Jack; “if only one had the chance of slashing off a few Turk’s heads it would be easy enough to get famous,” and as he lay on his back amongst the high grass, Jack made a ferocious onslaught with his stick at the tall blades waving above his head. “But you see where it is, however much those youngsters may break down the fences and rob the cherry orchards, we can’t go and slice off _their_ heads.”

“I should think not, indeed,” cried Faith; “why you know that you must not even strike them.”

“We shall see about that,” said Jack, very ominously, “when the time for action comes; but depend upon it, my fellow knights,” he added, with a knowing wink at Phil, “it was not customary to hold councils of war in the presence of gentle ladies.”

“Of course not,” said Andrew; “knights brought their trophies to their fair ladies to win their praises, but they didn’t tell them beforehand how they were going to get them.”

“They’d have been bigger duffers than I take them for if they did,” remarked Jack.

“Perhaps in those days,” remarked Andrew, “the ladies had more go in them than the meek and mild Fay has.”

“Now, I say, don’t _you_ jeer at Faith,” cried Phil, quickly.

“You’d better not,” cried Phoena, “or you’ll be disgraced and degraded, Andrew, as recreant to your vows.”

“Come on,” said Jack, springing to his feet, and thrusting his cap in true schoolboy fashion at the back of his head with the peak well over his left ear, “come on, fellow conspira---- knights I mean, I’ve an idea.”

“May I come, too?” asked Hubert, timidly.

“And I, too?” enquired Gaston, returning at that moment.

There was a whispered conference between the elders, then Andrew said audibly:

“As my valet, you know, he will be under my control, and we might find him useful.”

“Oh! yes, I’d be werry useful,” shouted Hubert, fervently. He was trembling with fear lest on the very threshold of his new career he should meet with a rebuff.

“Well, you understand,” said Jack, turning rather a grim countenance on the small suppliant, “that you’ll have to knock under to us; if you don’t you’ll get toko, mind that.”

“What’s toko?” asked Gaston, under his breath.

“Only a whacking,” said Hubert, as gaily as if it had been a plum bun. “I don’t mind that.”

“Then you’re the right sort of man, old chap,” cried Phil.

At this bit of praise Hubert swelled almost visibly with pride.

“And may Gaston come?” he asked.

“He’ll have to come as knight, you know,” said Jack to Phil.

“Yes, and Andrew would be sure to fight him and spoil sport that way,” whispered the latter in return.

“May Gaston come too?” asked Hubert again.

“No! Gaston mayn’t come too,” answered Andrew, mimicking Hubert’s tone; “we don’t want the company of a French frog on this occasion; do we, you fellows?” he added, addressing the other boys.

“No, he had better not come,” they agreed.

“So hop off, Master Frog, till further orders,” jeered Andrew.

“Never mind, Gaston, you’ll go with them next time,” comforted Faith. But Gaston, seeing all the boys disappear without him, and thus realising that, in spite of their promise, he was to be excluded from their games, was deaf to consolation.

He stood motionless, like a small monument of stony grief, his sorrowful eyes fixed on the opening in the thick bushes through which the others had vanished.

“Never mind, dear little Gaston,” said Phoena, kindly, running up to him and putting her hand on his arm, “you shall be my own knight, and we will do something grand between us.”

“You are good,” he said, slowly, but so mournfully that even Di’s heart was touched, “but it is not just; no, no, it is not just.”

Then he turned, and, with almost a majestic step, he walked out of the wood. A minute later he might have been seen executing a kind of war-dance on the top of the steep bank which separated the wood from the fields, and muttering in his mother tongue words to this effect:

“Ha! I am a French frog indeed! Yes, yes, a frog! Ah! it is well; they shall see, they shall see.”

Fay, meanwhile, and the other girls were speculating rather anxiously as to what might be the outcome of the boys’ conclave.

“I do hope they’re not going to do anything very dreadful,” said Fay, “but the boys are so foolhardy.”

“Yes,” said Phoena; “though I’m sorry for Gaston’s disappointment, I’m glad he didn’t go with them.”

“I wish they hadn’t taken Hubert,” said Faith.

“I don’t,” said Marygold, like a cunning little woman, “’cause I expect Hubert will tell us all about it when they come back, and the others wouldn’t.”

But Marygold was somewhat disappointed.

Hubert had been bound over to secrecy, and consequently his reticence as to the affairs of the meeting--at this early stage of the proceedings at any rate--was not to be shaken.

“Nuffin very important was to happen till to-morrow evening,” was all he could be coaxed into divulging.

“I’m going to start a kind of diary,” announced Phoena at breakfast next morning, “where I shall enter everything grand that anyone does in the day. It’ll make it easier to settle up at the end, you know.”

“Capital notion,” said several voices.

“I expect you’ll have a not half bad entry for to-night,” said Jack, mysteriously, upon which all the boys chuckled meaningly; and, to judge from their long absences during the day, and their very pre-occupied airs during meals and on all other public occasions, it was clear that something was brewing.

“I guess,” said Di, “that at last they’ve found a wasps’ nest, and are going to blow it up; that’s why they are in such a hurry for tea.”

For Hubert had just come to say that they had asked Mrs. Busson to have tea half an hour earlier than usual.

“For _particular_ reasons,” Hubert had explained.

Diana’s guess was wrong, however.

What was actually planned was never let out by the conspirators, nor indeed what actually took place, for Phoena was called upon to make no entry in her book that evening. Only mere fragments of information leaked out from Hubert. They were told in strict confidence to Marygold, and, being pieced together by her elders, furnished the following story, which was practically the true one.

By way of beginning their new career, the boys had determined to turn their attention to the trespassers, who vexed Busson’s soul so sorely and so persistently by straying from the footpaths through his grass fields, and making short cuts instead.

“We’ll give them such a lesson in trespassing,” the boys agreed, “that old Busson will bless us for ever after.”

With this laudable result in view, it would appear that they had arranged to lie in wait, “armed to the teef” as Hubert expressed it, _i.e._, provided with stout sticks, and concealed behind hay-stacks and hedges, in order to fall upon the first evil-doer who should stray from the right path. Their dream was to capture as many of these malefactors as possible, and to drag them to the farm bound in chains.

The chains were to be represented by some strong whipcord, upon the purchase of which the knights expended a considerable amount of their week’s pocket money. They made their plans with much care. They had learnt the “lay of the land” by heart, they had reconnoitred their positions again and again, and had rehearsed their manœuvres at least a dozen times during the day. Hubert had been well drilled in his part, with a good allowance of “toko,” which he had taken in excellent part as belonging of right to the fortunes of war; yet, despite all these preparations, when the moment for action came the result was a failure, and rather an ignominious one too.

They were to wait till well after dusk before beginning operations, twilight being the time when the trespassers were always abroad. Each of the boys was to occupy a separate position, and to be ready to spring upon the foe or foes the instant that there was a deviation from the lawful path, and by judicious out-flanking no culprit was to be suffered to escape. Hubert was concealed in a deep ditch which ran so close to the foot-path that he could not fail to note the passers-by, but he was specially charged not to blow his whistle unless the individual did actually transgress and forsake the beaten way.

“They must be caught red-handed,” the boys had decreed.

Loyally did Hubert fulfill his duty, though he literally hungered to see each passing pair of feet stray into forbidden paths. But none of the tired labourers who passed along the field showed any inclination to wander. Hubert had to let all go by with a heavy sigh and an increased longing for “really bad ones” to come soon.

At length, when it was growing very dusk, a short figure was seen to vault over the stile at the further end of the field, and without attempting to approach the foot-path, run boldly across the meadow.

Here, at last, was the longed-for malefactor.

Before even Hubert could whistle, Andrew, who was nearest to the stile, had darted out of his hiding-place and was attacking the foe.

But instead of meeting him face to face, as had been agreed should be done, according to the accepted canons of fair fighting, Andrew had allowed his victim to pass him, and had then followed him and struck him with his stick.

“I am just glad to be the very first of them all to be in the field,” he was saying to himself, but he didn’t say it twice.

In another second the figure, who was one of the odd men on his way to see to some yearling colts in the upper meadow, had rounded upon Andrew and seized him by the collar. Then he shook him so roughly that feeble cries for “he-elp” were nearly choked in his throat.

And if Phil and Jack had not come to the rescue and recognised Ned, with whom they had already chummed over the boat, that individual, so he solemnly assured them, would have well-nigh broken every bone in Andrew’s personal possession.

“And sarve him jolly well right, too, for hittin’ a chap over the head in the dark, and from behind, too,” Ned said.

“Well, you _have_ gone and made a fool of yourself, and of us too,” cried his cousins, in deep disgust, as Ned departed. “Why on earth couldn’t you observe our laws and behave like a man? Now, at any rate, hold your tongue and don’t blab a word of what has happened. We wouldn’t let the girls know for anything.”

“And so you mustn’t never say one word of it to anyone,” Hubert gravely told Marygold, who had forthwith taken the earliest opportunity to repeat “only a little bit of it” to Phoena, and a little more to Di, and pretty nearly the whole to Faith.

Happily for Hubert, _they_ kept their own counsel.