Those within the shop had been too much interested in their own proceedings to be conscious of a dog-cart, which came tearing through the darkening shadows at such a pace that startled pedestrians might be excused for thinking that it was a case of a horse running away with its driver. But such would have been convinced of their error when, in passing Mrs. Huffham's, on hearing Mr. Stephen bellowing with what seemed to be the full force of a pair of powerful lungs, the vehicle was brought to a standstill as suddenly as a regiment of soldiers halt at the word of command. The driver spoke to the horse, -

"Steady! stand still, old girl!" The speaker alighted. Approaching Mrs. Huffham's, he stood at the glass-windowed door, observing the proceedings within; and when Mr. Stephen, in his blind rage, struck the lamp from its place and plunged the scene in darkness, the unnoticed looker-on turned the handle of the door and entered the shop, shouting, in tones which made themselves audible above the din, -

"Bravo! that's the best plucked boy I've seen!" And standing on the threshold, he repeated his assertion, "Bravo! that's the best plucked boy I've seen." He drew a box of matches from his pocket, and striking one, he held the flickering flame above his head, so that some little light was shed upon what was going on within. "What's this little argument?" he asked.

Seeing that Mr. Huffman was still holding Bailey firmly in his grasp, "Hold hard, big one," he said; "let the little chap get up. You ought to have your little arguments outside; this place isn't above half large enough to swing a cat in. Granny, bring a light!"

As the match was just on the point of going out he struck another, and entered the shop with it flaming in his hand. Mrs. Huffham's nerves were too shaken to allow her to pay that instant attention to the new-comer's orders which he seemed to demand.

"Look alive, old lady; bring a light! This old band-box is as dark as pitch."

Thus urged, the old lady disappeared, presently reappearing with a little table-lamp in her trembling hands.

"Put it somewhere out of reach-if anything is out of reach in this dog-hole of a place. I shouldn't be surprised if you had a little bonfire with the next lamp that's upset."

Mrs. Huffman placed it on a shelf in the extreme corner of the shop, from which post of vantage it did not light the scene quite so brilliantly as it might have done. Mr. Stephen and the boy, relaxing a moment from the extreme vigour of discussion, availed themselves of the opportunity to see what sort of person the stranger might chance to be.

He was a man of gigantic stature, probably considerably over six feet high, but so broad in proportion that he seemed shorter than he actually was. A long waterproof, from which the rain was trickling in little streams, reached to his feet; the hood was drawn over his head, and under its shadow was seen a face which was excellently adapted to the enormous frame. A huge black beard streamed over the stranger's breast, and a pair of large black eyes looked out from overhanging brows. He was the first to break the silence.

"Well, what is this little argument?" Then, without waiting for an answer, he continued, addressing Mr. Huffham, "You're rather a large size, don't you think, for that sized boy?"

"Who are you? and what do you want? If there's anything you want to buy, perhaps you'll buy it, and take yourself outside."

The stranger put his hand up to his beard, and began pulling it.

"There's nothing I want to buy, not just now." He looked at Bailey. "What's he laying it on for?"

"Nothing."

"That's not bad, considering. What were you laying it on for?" This to Huffham.

"I've not finished yet, not by no manner of means; I mean to take it out of all the lot of 'em. Call themselves gents! Why, if a working-man's son was to behave as they does, he'd get five years at a reformatory. I've known it done before today."

"I daresay you have; you look like a man who knew a thing or two. What were you laying it on for?"

"What for? why, look here!" And Mr. Huffham pointed to the broken bottles and the damaged case.

"And I'm a hard-working woman, I am, sir, and I'm seventy-three this next July; and it's hard work I find it to pay my rent: and wherever I'm to get the money for them there things, goodness knows, I don't. It'll be the workhouse, after all!" Thus Mrs. Huffham lifted up her voice and wept.

"And they calls themselves gents, and they comes in here, and takes advantage of an old woman, and robs her right and left, and thinks they're going to get off scot free; not if I know it this time they won't." Mr. Stephen Huffham looked as though he meant it, every word.

"Did you do that?" asked the stranger of Bailey.

"No, I didn't."

"I don't care who did it; they're that there liars I wouldn't believe a word of theirs on oath; they did it between them, and that's quite enough for me."

"I suppose one of you did do it?" asked the stranger.

Bailey thrust his hands in his pockets, looking up at the stranger with the dogged look in his eyes.

"The place was pitch dark; why didn't they have a light in the place?"

"Because there didn't happen to be a light in the place, is that any reason why you should go smashing everything you could lay your hands on? Why couldn't you wait for a light? Go on with you! I'll take the skin off your back!"

"How much?" asked the stranger, paying no attention to Mr. Stephen's eloquence.

"There's a heap of mischief done, heap of mischief!" wailed the old lady in the rear.

"How am I to tell all the mischief that's been done? Just look at the place; a sovereign wouldn't cover it, no, that it wouldn't."

"There isn't five shillings' worth of harm," said Bertie. "If you were to get five shillings, you'd make a profit of half a crown."

The stranger laughed, and Mr. Huffham scowled; the look which he cast at Bertie was not exactly a look of love, but the boy met it without any sign of flinching.

"I'll be even with you yet, my lad!" Mr. Stephen said.

"If I give you a sovereign you will be even," suggested the stranger.

Mr. Stephen's eyes glistened; and his grandmother, clasping her old withered palms together, cast a look of rapture towards the ceiling.

"Oh, deary me! deary me!" she said.

"It's a swindle," muttered Bertie.

"Oh, it's a swindle, is it?" snarled Mr. Stephen. "I'd like to swindle you, my fighting cock."

"You couldn't do it," retorted Bertie.

The stranger laughed again. Unbuttoning his waterproof, and in doing so distributing a shower of water in his immediate neighbourhood, out of his trousers pocket he took a heavy purse, out of the purse he took a sovereign, and the sovereign he handed to Mr. Stephen Huffham. Mr. Stephen's palm closed on the glittering coin with a certain degree of hesitation.

"Now you're quits," said the stranger, "you and the boy."

"Quits!" said Bertie, "it's seventeen-and-sixpence in his pocket!"

Mr. Stephen smiled, not quite pleasantly; he might have been moved to speech had not the stranger interrupted him.

"You're pretty large, and that's all you are; if this boy were about your size, he'd lay it on to you. I should say you were a considerable fine sample of a-coward."

Mr. Stephen held his peace. There was something in the stranger's manner and appearance which induced him to think that perhaps he had better be content with what he had received. After having paused for a second or two, seemingly for some sort of reply from Mr. Huffham, the stranger addressed the boys.

"Get out!" They went out, rather with the air of beaten curs. The stranger followed them. "Get up into the cart; I'm going to take you home to my house to tea." They looked at each other, in doubt as to whether he was jesting. "Do you hear? Get up into the cart! You, boy," touching Bailey on the shoulder, "you ride alongside me."

Still they hesitated. It occurred to them that they had already broken their engagement with the credulous Mr. Shane, broken it in the most satisfactory manner, in each separate particular. They were not only wet and muddy, looking somewhat as though they had recently been picked out of the gutter, but that half-hour within which they had pledged themselves to return had long since gone. But if they hesitated, there was no trace of hesitation about the stranger.

"Now then, do you think I want to wait here all night? Tumble up, you boy." And fairly lifting Wheeler off his legs, he bore him bodily through the air, and planted him at the back of the trap. And not Wheeler only, but Griffin and Ellis too. Before those young gentlemen had quite realized their position, or the proposal he had made to them, they found themselves clinging to each other to prevent themselves tumbling out of the back of what was not a very large dog-cart. "You're none of you big ones! Catch hold of each other's hair or something, and don't fall out; I can't stop to pick up boys. Now then, bantam, up you go."

And Bertie, handled in the same undignified fashion, found himself on the front seat beside the driver. The stranger, big though he was, apparently allowed his size to interfere in no degree with his agility. In a twinkling he was seated in his place by Bertie.

"Steady!" he cried. "Look out, you boys!" He caught the reins in his hands; the mare knew her master's touch, and in an instant, even before the boys had altogether yet quite realized their situation, they were dashing through the darkening night.

It was about as cheerless an evening as one could very well select for a drive in an open vehicle. The stranger, enveloped in his waterproof, his hood in some degree sheltering his face, a waterproof rug drawn high above his knees, was more comfortable than the boys. Bailey, indeed, had a seat to sit upon and a share of the rug, but his friends had neither seat nor shelter.

Perhaps, on the whole, they would have been better off had they been walking. The imperfect light and the hasty start rendered it difficult for them to have a clear view of their position. The mare-which, had it been lighter and they versed in horseflesh, they would have been able to recognise as a very tolerable specimen of an American trotter-made the pace so hot that they had to cling, if not to each other's hair, at least to whatever portion of each other's person they could manage to get hold of. Even then it was only by means of a series of gymnastic feats that they were able to keep their footing and save themselves from being pitched out on to the road.

They had not gone far when Griffin had a disaster.

"I've lost my hat!" he cried. Wind and pace and nervousness combined had loosened his headgear, and without staying to bid farewell to his head, it disappeared into the night.

The stranger gave utterance to a loud yet musical laugh.

"Never mind your hat! Can't stop for hats! The fresh air will do you good, cool your head, my boy!" But this was a point of view which did not occur to Griffin; he was rather disposed to wonder what Mr. Shane and Mrs. Fletcher would say.

"I wish you wouldn't catch hold of my throat; you'll strangle me," said Wheeler, as the vehicle dashed round a sharp turn in the road, and the hatless Griffin made a frantic clutch at his friend to save himself from following his hat.

"I-can't-help-it," gasped his friend in reply. "I wish he wouldn't go so fast. Oh-h!"

The stranger laughed again.

"Don't tumble out! we can't stop to pick up boys! Hullo! what are you up to there?"

The trio in the rear were apparently engaged in a fight for life. They were uttering choking ejaculations, and struggling with each other in their desperate efforts to preserve their perpendicular. In the course of their struggle they lurched against the stranger with such unexpected violence that had he not with marvellous rapidity twisted round in his seat and caught them with his arm, they would in all probability have continued their journey on the road. At the same instant, with his disengaged hand he brought the horse, who seemed to obey the directions of its master's hand with mechanical accuracy, to a sudden halt.

"Now, then, are you all right?"

They were very far from being all right, but were not at that moment possessed of breath to tell him so. Had they not lost the power of speech they would have joined in a unanimous appeal to him to set them down, and let them go anywhere, and do anything, rather than allow them to continue any longer at the mercy of his too rapid steed. But the stranger seemed to take their involuntary silence for acquiescence. Once more they were dashing through the night, and again they were hanging on for their bare lives.

"Like driving, youngster?" The question was addressed to Bailey. "Like horses? Like a beast that can go? Mary Anne can give a lead to a flash of lightning and catch it in two T's."

"Mary Anne" was apparently the steed. At that moment the trio in the rear would have believed anything of Mary Anne's powers of speed, but Bailey held his peace. The stranger went on.

"I like a drive on a night like this. I like dashing through the wind and the darkness and the rain. I like a thing to fire my blood, and that's the reason why I like you. That's the reason why I've asked you home to tea. What's your name?"

"Bailey, sir."

"I knew a man named Bailey down in Kentucky who was hanged because he was too fond of horses-other people's, not his own. Any relation of yours?" Bertie disclaimed the soft impeachment.

"I don't think so, sir."

"There's no knowing. Lots of people are hanged without their own mothers knowing anything about it, let alone their fathers, especially out Kentucky way. A cousin of mine was hanged in Golden City, and I shouldn't have known anything about it to this day if I hadn't come along and seen his body swinging on a tree. As nice a fellow as man need know, six-feet-one-and-three-quarters in his stockings-three-quarters of an inch shorter than me. They explained to me that they'd hanged him by mistake, which was some consolation to me, anyway, though what he thought of it is more than I can say. I cut him down, dug a hole seven foot deep, and laid him there to sleep; and there he sleeps as sound as though he'd handed in his checks upon a feather bed."

Bailey looked up at the speaker. He was not quite sure if he was in earnest, and was anything but sure that the little narrative which he rolled so glibly off his tongue might not be the instant coinage of his brain. But something in the speaker's voice and manner attracted him even more than his words; something he would have found it difficult to describe.

"Is that true?" he asked.

The stranger looked down at him and laughed.

"Perhaps it is, and perhaps it isn't." He laughed again. "Wet, youngster?"

"I should rather think I am," was Bertie's grim response. All the stranger did was to laugh again. Bailey ventured on an inquiry. "Do you live far from here?" He was conscious of a certain degree of interest as to whether the stranger was driving them to Kentucky; he, too, had Mr. Shane and Mrs. Fletcher in his mind's eye. "Shane'll get sacked for this, as sure as fate," was his mental observation. He was aware that at Mecklemburg House the sins of the pupils not seldom fell upon the heads of the assistant-masters.

"Pain's Hill," was the answer to his question. "Ever heard of Washington Villa?" Bertie could not say he had.

"I am George Washington Bankes, the proprietor thereof. Yes, and it isn't so long ago that if any one had said to me that I should settle down as a country gentleman, I should have said, 'There have been liars since Ananias, but none quite as big as you.'"

Bailey eyed him from a corner of his eye. His father was a medical man, with no inconsiderable country practice. He had seen something of country gentlemen, but it occurred to him that a country gentleman in any way resembling his new acquaintance he had not yet chanced to see.

"You at the school there?"

Taking it for granted that he referred to Mecklemburg House, Bertie confessed that he was.

"Why don't you run away? I would."

Bertie started; he had read of boys running away from school in stories of the penny dreadful type, but he had not yet heard of country gentlemen suggesting that course of action as a reasonable one for the rising generation to pursue.

"Every boy worth his salt ought to run away. I did, and I've never done a more sensible thing to this day." In that case one could not but wonder for how many sensible things Mr. George Washington Bankes had been remarkable in the course of his career. "I've been from China to Peru, from the North Pole to the South. I've been round the world all sorts of ways; and the chances are that if I hadn't run away from school I should never have travelled twenty miles from my old mother's door. Why don't you run away?"

Bertie wriggled in his seat and gasped.

"I-I don't know," he said.

"Ah, I'll talk to you about that when I get you home. You're about the best plucked lad I've seen, or you wouldn't have stood up in the way you did to that great hulking lubber there; and rather than see a lad of parts wasting his time at school-but you wait a bit. I'll open your eyes, my lad. I'll give you some idea of what a man's life ought to be! Books never did me any good, and never will. I say, throw books, like physic, to the dogs-a life of adventure's the life for me!"

Bertie listened open-eyed and open-mouthed; he began to think he was in a waking dream. There was a wildness about his new acquaintance, and about his mode of speech, which filled him with a sort of dull, startled wonder. There was in the boy, deep-rooted somewhere, that half-unconscious longing for things adventurous which the British youngster always has. Mr. Bankes struck a chord which filled the boy almost with a sense of pain.

"A life of adventure's the life for me!" Mr. Bankes repeated his confession of faith, laughing as he did so; and the words, and the voice, and the manner, and the laugh, all mixed together, made the boy, wet as he was, glow with a sudden warmth. "A life of adventure's the life for me!"

The drive was nearly ended, and during the rest of it Mr. Bankes kept silence. Wheeler's hat had followed Griffin's, but he had not mentioned it; partly because, as he thought, he would receive no sympathy and not much attention, and partly because, in his anxiety to keep his footing in the trap, and get out of it with his bones whole, it would have been a matter of comparative indifference to him if the rest of his clothing had followed his hat. But he, too, mistily wondered what Mr. Shane and Mrs. Fletcher would say.

Fortunately for his peace of mind, and the peace of mind of his two friends, the good steed, Mary Anne, brought them safely to the doors of Washington Villa. Fond of driving as they were, as a rule, they were conscious of a distinct sense of relief when that drive was at an end.

Chapter V
AN EVENING AT WASHINGTON VILLA

Washington Villa appeared, from what one could see in the darkness, to be a fairly sized house, standing in its own grounds. Considerable stabling was built apart from, but close to the house, and as the trap dashed along the little carriage-drive numerous loud-voiced dogs announced the fact of an arrival to whomever it might concern. The instant the vehicle stopped, the hall door was opened, and a little wizened, shrunken man came down the steps. Mr. Bankes threw him the reins.

"Jump out, you boys, and tumble into the house. Welcome to Washington Villa." Suiting the action to the word, and before his young friends had clearly realized the fact of their having arrived at their destination, he had risen from his seat, sprung to the ground, and was standing on the threshold of the door. The boys were not long in following suit.

"Come this way!" Striding on in front of them, through a hall of no inconsiderable dimensions, he led them into a room in which a bright fire was blazing, and which was warm with light. A pretty servant girl made a simultaneous entrance through a door on the other side of the room. "Catch hold." Tearing rather than taking off his waterproof and hood, he flung them to the maid. "Where are my slippers?" The maid produced a pair from the fender, where they had been placed to warm; and Mr. Bankes thrust his feet into them, flinging his boots off on to the floor. "Tea for five, and a good tea, too, and in about less time than it would take me to shoot a snake."

The maid disappeared with a laugh on her face; she was apparently used to Mr. Bankes, and to Mr. Bankes' mode of speech. Then, after having attended to his own comfort, the host turned his attention to his guests.

"Well, you're a nice lot of half-drowned puppies. By right, I ought to hang you up in front of the kitchen fire to dry."

His guests shuffled about upon their feet with not quite a graceful air. It was true that they looked in about as miserable a condition as they very well could do; but considering the circumstances under which they had travelled, it was scarcely to be wondered at. Had Mr. Bankes travelled in their place, he might have looked like a half-drowned puppy too.

"But a wetting will do you good, and as for mud, why, I don't care for mud. I've swallowed too much of it in my time to stick at a trifle. When I was a boy, I was the dirtiest little blackguard ever seen. Now, then, is that tea ready? Come along."

And off he strode into the hall, the boys following sheepishly in the rear. Wheeler poked Bailey in the side with his elbow, and Bailey poked Griffin, and they each of them poked the other, and they grinned. Their feelings were altogether too much for speech. What Mr. Shane and Mrs. Fletcher would think and say-but that was a matter on which they would not improbably be able to speak more fully later on. A more unguestlike-looking set of guests could hardly be conceived. Not only were their boots concealed beneath thick layers of mud, but they were spattered with mud from head to foot; their hands and faces were filthy, and their hair was in a state of untidiness better imagined than described. They had their everyday clothes on; their trousers were in general too short in the leg, and their coats too short in the sleeves; while Griffin was radiant with a mighty patch in the seat of his breeches of a totally different material to the original cloth. It was fortunate that Mr. Bankes did not stick at trifles, or he would never have allowed his newly-discovered guests to enter his well-kept residence.

They followed their host into a room on the other side of the hall, and the sight they saw almost took their breath away. A table laden with more delicacies than they remembered to have seen crowded together for a considerable space of time was, especially after the fare to which they were accustomed at Mecklemburg House, a spectacle calculated at any time to fill them with a satisfaction almost amounting to awe. But to come out of such a night to such a prospect! To come to feast from worse than famine! The revulsion of feeling was considerable, and the aspect of the guests became even more sheepish than before.

"Sit down, and pitch in. If you're as hungry as I am, you'll eat the table, legs and all."

The boys needed no second invitation. In a very short space of time host and guests alike were doing prodigies of execution. The nimble-handed servant-maid found it as much as she could do to supply their wants. On the details of the feast we need not dwell. It partook of the nature of a joke to call that elaborate meal tea. By the time it was finished the four young gentlemen had not only ceased to think of what Mrs. Fletcher and Mr. Shane might say, but they had altogether forgotten the existence of Mecklemburg House Collegiate School; and even Charlie Griffin was prepared to declare that he had thoroughly enjoyed that nightmare journey from Mrs. Huffham's to the present abode of bliss. The meal had been no less to the satisfaction of the host than of his guests.

"Done?" They signified by their eloquent looks as much as by their speech that they emphatically had. "Then let's go back to the other room." And they went.

A peculiarity of this other room was that all the chairs in it were arm-chairs; and in four of not the least comfortable of these arm-chairs the boys found themselves seated at their ease. Over the fire-place, arranged in the fashion of a trophy, were a large number of venerable-looking pipes. Taking one of these down, Mr. Bankes proceeded to fill it from a tobacco jar which stood in a corner of the mantelshelf. Then he lit it, and, planting himself in the centre of the hearthrug, right in front of the fire, he thrust his hands into his pockets and looked down upon his guests, a huge, black-bearded giant, puffing at his pipe.

"Had a good feed?"

They signified that they had.

"Do you know what I brought you here for?"

The food and the warmth combined had brought them into a state of exceeding peace, and they were inclined to sleep. Why he had brought them there they neither knew nor cared; they were beyond such trifling. They had had a good meal, the first for many days, and it behoved them to be thankful.

"I'll tell you. I brought you here because I want to get you, the whole lot of you, to run away."

His listeners opened their eyes and ears. Bailey had made some acquaintance with his host's character before, but his three friends stared.

"Every boy worth his salt runs away from school. I did, and it was the most sensible thing I ever did in my life."

When Mr. Bankes thus repeated the assertion which he had made to Bailey in the trap, his hearers banished sleep and began to wonder.

"What's the use of school? What do you do there? What do you do at that tumble-down old red-brick house on the Cobham road? Why, you waste your time."

This assertion, if, to a certain extent, true, as it applied to the establishment in question, was a random shot as applied to schools in general.

"Shall I tell you what I learnt at school? I learnt to hate it, and I haven't forgotten that lesson to this day; no, and I shan't till I'm packed away with a lot of dirt on top of me. My father," Mr. Bankes took his pipe out of his mouth, and pointed his remarks with it as he went on, "died of a broken heart, and so should I have done if I hadn't cut it short and run away."

No man ever looked less like dying of a broken heart than Mr. Bankes did then.

"A life of adventure's the life for me!"

They were the words which had thrilled through Bertie when he had heard them in the trap; they thrilled him again as he heard them now, and they thrilled his companions too. They stared up at Mr. Bankes as though he held them with a spell; nor would that gentleman have made a bad study for a wizard.

"A life of adventure's the life for me! Under foreign skies in distant lands, away from the twopenny-halfpenny twaddle of spelling-books and sums, seeking fortune and finding it, a man in the midst of men, not a finicking idiot among a pack of babies. Why don't you run away? You see me? I was at school at Nottingham; I was just turned thirteen: I ran away with ninepence-halfpenny in my pocket. I got to London somehow; and from London I got abroad, somehow too; and abroad I've picked up fortune after fortune, thrown them all away, and picked them up again. Now I've had about enough of it, I've made another little pile, and this little pile I think I'll keep, at least just yet awhile. But what a life it's been! What larks I've had, what days and nights, what months and years! Why, when I think of all I've done, and of what I might have done, rotted away my life, if it hadn't been for that little bolt from school, – why, when I think of that, I never see a boy but I long to take him by the scruff of the neck, and sing out, 'Youngster, why don't you do as I have done, cut away from school, and run?'"

Mr. Bankes flung back his head and laughed. But whether he was laughing at them, or at his own words, or at his recollections of the past, was more than they could say. They looked at each other, conscious that their host was not the least part of the afternoon's entertainment, and somewhat at a loss as to whether he was drawing the long bow, taking them to be younger and more verdant than they were, or whether he was seriously advancing an educational system of his own.

He startled them by putting a question point-blank to Bailey, one which he had put before.

"Why don't you run away?"

"I-I don't know!" stammered Bertie. Then, frankly, as the idea occurred to him, "Because I never thought of it."

Mr. Bankes laughed. His constant tendency to laughter, with or without apparent reason, seemed to be his not least remarkable characteristic.

"Now you have thought of it, why don't you run away?"

Bailey turned the matter over in his mind.

"Why should I?"

His friends looked at each other, thinking the conversation just a trifle queer.

"Why ever should he run away?" asked Griffin.

"And wherever would he run to?" added Wheeler.

Dick Ellis said nothing, but possibly he thought the more. Mr. Bankes directed his reply directly at Bailey.

"I'll tell you why you ought to run away; because that's the shortest cut into a world into which you will never get by any other road. I'll tell you where you ought to run to, out of this little fleabite of an island, into the lands of golden dreams and golden possibilities, my lad; where men at night lay themselves down poor, and in the morning rise up rich."

Mr. Bankes, warming with his theme, began to gesticulate and stamp about the room, the boys following him with all their eyes.

"I hate your huggermuggering existence; why should a lad of parts huggermugger all his life away? When I saw you stand up to that great lout, I said to myself, 'That lad has grit; he's just the very spit of what I was when I was just his age; he's too good to be left to muddle in this old worn-out country, to waste his time with books and sums and trash.' I said to myself, 'I'll lend him a helping hand,' and so I will. I'll show you the road, if I do nothing else; and if you don't choose to take it, it's yourself's to blame, not me.