The Adventures of a Stowaway, etc

Front matter

THE ADVENTURES OF A STOWAWAY THE HKE INSTANTLY BLAZED UP. Frontispiece. ] [.Page 255. THE ADVENTURES OF A STOWAWAY BY FRED. WHISHAW AUTHOR OF "THE WHITE WITCH OF THE MATABELE " "gubbins minor" uA BOYAR OF THE terrible" " HAROLD THE NORSEMAN " "THE EMPEROR'S ENGLISHMAN ETC. etc. ILLUSTRATED BY s. A. CHRISTIE GRIFFITH FARRAN BROWNE & CO. LIMITED 35 BOW STREET, COVENT GARDEN LONDON [ The Rights of Translation and of Reproduction are Reserved.] CONTENTS — ♦ — CHAP. rAGK I. THE NEW BOY 9 II. A RUNAWAY 23 III. NEWS OF THE RUNAWAY 32 IV. THE STOWAWAY HAS A FRIGHT 48 V. THE STOLEN JEWELS 62 VI. A PENITENT THIEF 72 VII. OUT-FOXING THE FOX 82 VIII. A VERY NARROW ESCAPE 91 IX. THE JEWELS LOST 104 X. THE JEWELS FOUND 118 XL SAFE IN INDIA . . 128 XII. AN AWFUL SURPRISE 139 XIII. ON THE SCENT . 148 XIV.

THAT NICE MAN JACKSON 159 XV. WE LAY A TRAP FOR THE FOX 170 XVI. THE FOX-HUNT BEGINS 180 XVII. GEORGE AND JACKSON SETTLE ACCOUNTS . - . .191 XVIII. THE MYSTIC IDOL 203 XIX. OFF TO KASHMIR 216 XX. A NAUGHTY NATIVE AND A CRUEL CROCODILE . . 227 XXI. MORE ABOUT THE CROCODILE 237 XXII. A NIGHT OF TERROR 250 XXIII. IN THE NICK OF TIME 263 XXIV. RATS IN A TRAP 273 XXV. THE END OF TROUBLE AND OF THIS HISTORY . . LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS — ♦ — PAGE THE FIRE INSTANTLY BLAZED UP ... . Frontispiece OUTSIDE AN INN STOOD A GREAT BIG VAN .... 35 HE TOOK A WILD JUMP FOR THE BOAT IOI JACKSON BEING CARRIED OFF INTO THE DESERT . . .Ill JACKSON MADE A RUSH AT ME 165 THE MYSTERIOUS IDOL KILLED HIM 209 ONCE THE CROCODILE CAME TO THE SURFACE . . . 243 " STEADY ! THAT STONE NEARLY HAD ME " . . . .281 — ♦ —

Chapter I The New Boy

T REMEMBER very vividly the day that poor -**- little Attley came to Toddlestone. He arrived with his mother, a pale, pretty woman, very young looking to be the mother of even a small boy like Attley, in the middle of the summer term, and they walked about the place together arm-in-arm; I think the mother had tears in her eyes most of the time, and as for " Alice," as we used to call young Attley by reason of his girl-like appearance, he was undoubtedly crying all the while his mother was with him. She was just going off to India, as we afterwards learned, to join her husband, and was to be absent from England for at least three years, if not more ; so that the pair had some excuse for their lachrymose conduct during that last day they were to spend together, though Alice certainly overdid the thing shockingly.

When his pretty, tearful mother had departed, and Alice was left alone among his future schoolfellows, I should say there never existed a more woebegone little schoolboy on this earth than he was for several days. He could not be got to talk to anyone, much less to join in any of the games. He went to school daily, but spent most of his time during class with his eyes fixed upon vacancy, and the tears slowly forming in them and rolling down his cheeks. Luckily for him, his class-master was a soft-hearted person, and felt sorry for the poor child, — he was but twelve years old, or possibly thirteen, — and did not either laugh at him or bully him, as some masters might have done, but just left him as much as possible to himself, in the hope that matters would right themselves shortly, and that time would do its usual healing work with him as with others.

Perhaps it did, to a certain extent. He certainly, after a day or two, became more friendly towards one or two small fellows who " cottoned up " (to use a common school expression) to him. Alice was provided with an enormous hamper of good things, as well as with plenty of cash ; and in the middle of term, such things are a powerful attraction, and will inevitably provide a large circle of friends for their fortunate possessor. Some of the friend ships thus formed last only as long as the last pot of jam or box of sardines; but others endure for quite a long period, being still in existence when the next hamper arrives, and then friendship re ceives its proper reward. Then also those who have shown that their love was but of the cupboard quality receive no encouragement when their advances are renewed : so that their offers of a knife to cut the string of the hamper are returned to their own bosoms ; and their knocks at the study door during the unpacking of the hamper are disregarded ; and when they inquire the time, the exact state of the clock is shouted back to them through the panels of the unopened door, without the desired offer of a slice of cake.

Then those boys wish that they had been polite to the owner of the hamper through the dark grubless days as well as in the sunny ones of plenty ; and when the current hamper is quite finished without their assistance, and their last hope of plunder has vanished, they kick its late owner, if they are bigger than he is, as often and as hard as they can. But Alice was a generous little chap, and so long as there was anything in his hamper, no person anxious as to the time of day left the door of his study without satisfaction in the inner as well as in the outer sense of his application; and when the good things were finished, a few small friends still stood by Alice, and were occasionally to be seen strolling about the quad with him, or visiting the tuck-shops in his company and at his expense.

Nevertheless, he was generally alone, wandering moodily about and thinking, doubtless, of his mother on board the big steamer that carried her hourly farther away from her miserable and lonely little son. Our letters used to be handed to us after breakfast at Rhodes's (Rhodes was our house-master) ; and I shall never forget the morning when poor little Alice received his first letter from his mother, with the Gibraltar postmark upon it and enclosed in a P. & O. envelope. He snatched it out of the matron's hand, and his cheeks grew the colour of geranium and his eyes began to sparkle as though a match were burning within each. He gave a sort of short laugh, and rushed out into the quad with the precious missive tightly clutched in his hand. We were glad the poor little chap seemed so happy to hear from his mother, and naturally supposed that the letter would console and delight him ; but in this we were quite mistaken, as I shall now proceed to show.

Alice made straight for a corner of the quad in which stood a tree much used by the smaller fry of the house as a retreat to sit and read in, and also by reason of a little swing just large enough for one boy to rock himself in, which hung from one of the lower branches. Up this tree went Alice, who was rather an active child than otherwise, and sat himself comfortably amid the leaves to read his mother's first letter. When school-time came, and he was obliged to descend and attend to his duties as by regulation established, it soon appeared that Alice had been thrown back into as low a condition of dejection as the lowest he had reached on the day of Mrs. Attley's departure. Perhaps his passionate love for his mother had been stirred by the letter ; perhaps his sense of loneliness and separation from her was intensified by some expression she had used — hoping and expecting to produce an exactly opposite effect.

At anyrate, all through school hours poor Alice sat at his desk, or in his place in class, and cried quietly, to the annoyance of even patient and sympathetic Mr. Harrison, who felt that a relapse into the somewhat excusable lachrymosity of the first day or two was morbid ■5 and inexcusable, and told Alice so. This only made the child still more miserable ; and the boys, finding that Mr. Harrison had turned against poor little Attley, turned against him also, and laughed at him behind their books. I do not suppose that the whole class did so, but some certainly did ; probably those who had tasted the sweets of his late hamper, and did not propose to be friendly towards Alice until he should have received another. Some of these individuals chaffed Attley after school in the heartless manner common to school boys of the baser sort, and I daresay the heart of poor little woebegone, emotional, lonely Alice was feeling about as nearly broken as the heart of a youngster of his age ever does feel, when he crept once more, pale and tearful, to the friendly old rowan tree, and took refuge in its branches, there to read over and over again the precious letter which ought to have been so great a comfort to him, but which, as a matter of fact, had made him exceedingly miserable.

Some of his enemies were for baiting him up there ; but we bigger ones did not allow it, and chased them away, considering it "bad form," though I daresay even our sympathy for the" poor little beggar" had begun to evaporate under the annoyance of this new outbreak. Alice was, we considered, carrying this " water-cart business " too far. We were playing " squash cricket," I think, at the end of the quad ; it was a game we often indulged in at odd moments, and consisted of single-wicket cricket, with a soft ball and a stump for bat, the three wickets being chalked up against the study wall, this being an exceedingly favourite game with us at odd moments (when there was not time to adjourn to the real playing-fields), when Alice suddenly gave us the first great surprise of several to which he was destined to treat us.

Being deeply interested in our cricket, we had not noticed the arrival of Hawkley beneath Alice's tree, nor the fact that this bully of a fellow (cordially detested by all the small fry of the school, and as cordially despised by the bigger boys) was engaged in "baiting" poor Alice by making cruel remarks about his " mammy," alternating this form of annoyance with accurately aimed shots with a fives ball, which must have been as painful to the poor child physically, as the chaff about his mother was to his feelings. The first we knew of the matter was a cry from Alice, as a shot from Hawkley's fives ball tore his precious letter out of his fingers and brought it fluttering in fragments and loose pages to the ground. " Give it back, give it back, you cad, you blackguard ! " shrieked Alice ; but the bully Hawkley had no intention of doing anything of the kind ; he gathered up the fragments, and, standing under the tree, began, or pretended to begin, to read the letter aloud.

"'My darling Arthur'" — read Hawkley. " Shut up, Hawkley, and don't be a cad ! " shouted Bates ; " give the little chap his letter ! " " Hawkley, if you read another word I'll half kill you ! " cried, or almost shrieked, Alice himself at the same moment. We all laughed at this, we could not help it, for the idea of poor little Attley "half killing" Hawkley was too funny for any thing, since the small boy on tiptoes would hardly have reached the other's shoulder. " ' My darling Arthur,' " continued Hawkley, un dismayed by Alice's threats or Bates' scorn, " ' I write from ' " — but Hawkley never finished that sentence, for — like a bolt from the blue — Attley's little body dropped straight as a die upon the bully's head, bringing him down, like a felled ox, on the gravel of the quad. So astonished and perhaps stunned was Hawkley by this unexpected catastrophe, that plucky little Alice had time to inflict considerable punishment upon the bully before he recovered his wits sufficiently to realise what manner of thing had happened to him.

Alice was very busy during that minute. He pommelled his enemy in face, neck, and chest, wherever his little fists chanced to fall. With the greatest determination he rained blow upon blow ; he had rescued and pocketed his precious letter before ever the pommelling began, and now he was free to make the best use of his time and of the passion of rage which consumed him and rendered him desperate. Well, he did make the best use of his time, and I doubt whether Hawkley ever spent a worse quarter of an hour (it was actually scarcely more than a quarter of a minute) than when in the hands of this little desperado. But Hawkley came to his senses presently. Two black eyes, and a face that looked as though a family of kittens had used it as a play ground, served at last to remind him that some thing had gone amiss.

He struggled himself free of the busy little Fate that sat upon his chest, and looked around him. There was a shriek of laughter from all of us as his battle-stained face appeared. At the same time Alice dauntlessly rushed once more into the fray. No one, certainly, would have believed him possessed of so much pluck. But this time Hawkley was ready for him, and sprang to his feet ; and in a moment or two Alice's position would have been dangerous in the extreme at the hands of this ferocious and enraged bully — but here we interfered. " Let him go, Hawkley, you great bully ! " said Teddie Bates. " You deserved all you got and more for reading out another fellow's letter." "Not I," panted Hawkley; "I'll half kill the young brute for this ! " Gubbins and Bates and I now took the matter into our own hands.

We released Alice, first of all, and bade him run, which, after a grimace at Hawkley, he did, pausing at intervals to shout back at him such expressions of opinion as " Sneak ! bully ! letter-reading cad ! " and so on, until he disappeared within the sanctuary of the study door. " Now, Hawkley," said Bates, "have you had enough ? " " All right," said Hawkley ; " three to one is your idea of honour, I know !— but wait till I get hold of him alone, or of any of you by yourselves, and " — This sort of thing never alarmed old Bates. " My dear chap," he said, " here am I, practi cally alone — these fellows won't interfere ! But there ! — what's the good of wasting time in talk ; you won't fight, everyone knows that ; you can only bully the kids, that's all you are good for. Now look here ; will you undertake to keep your hands off young Attley, and say and do no more about this, or will you have the finest drubbing you ever had in your life?

You deserve it, you know, and I'm not sure that we won't drub you anyhow for your caddishness : you ought to be ashamed of yourself reading out another fellow's letters ; no one but a cad and a bully would do such a thing ! " Dear old Teddie Bates ! he was not very eloquent, but he was as sturdy and honest as any orator that ever breathed ; and as for Hawkley, he understood Bates as well as, or perhaps better than he would have followed Cicero or John Bright, or any other gentleman whose way of saying the same thing might have been considerably more eloquent and classical ! At all events, Hawkley did not choose the drub bing. He made the required promise to leave Alice alone, and was allowed to retire. Hawkley's promises were not very valuable commodities ; but we were going to keep our eye upon him !

Chapter II

A RUNAWAY A LICE improved considerably after this, and between the Mondays " he would enjoy fairly good spirits. He received his letters on Mondays, and though the weekly fits of depression were just as regular as his mother's letters (and these never by any chance failed to reach him on the proper day), yet sometimes his dejection was very much less than at others. One Monday evening, however, — I think it was about a year or rather more after his arrival at school, — the letter he re ceived appeared to throw poor Alice into greater tribulation than usual. He could be heard moaning and crying within his study, and when he appeared at prayers just before bedtime, his eyes were all swollen with weeping. Alice slept in a rooni with six or seven other small boys and one big one, each boy having a "cubicle" partitioned off to himself.

Alice certainly went to bed when the rest turned in, and was certainly asleep at about half-past ten ; for Gubbins, who slept in the same dormitory, and next to him, remembered asking him a question about half an hour after the gas was put out by the " Nipper," who used to come round at ten for that purpose, and Alice made no reply. Never theless it is equally positive that when morning came, and the senior boy looked into Alice's cubicle to see whether he had heard the " getting up bell," and was duly out of bed — the cubicle was empty ! It so happened that the weather was hot at the time and the windows were all open throughout the night, and when the matter was looked into, it was found that Alice had made ropes of his two sheets, which he had knotted together with some dexterity, and had then fastened one end to the rail of his bed, which was close to the window, and contrived to let himself down until within a few feet of the ground.

The ropes were still hanging there, but Alice was gone. When he escaped, and how he got out of the quad, which had a very high gate and a brick wall dividing it from the next garden, remained an impenetrable mystery. No one had heard him go, though Gubbins, in thinking the matter over, believed he did hear Alice rustling and fidgeting about. He did not, however, attach any importance to the circumstance, because, as he said, Alice was a " fidgety little beggar " at all times, and was for ever talking, or laughing, or crying in his sleep, and never seemed to be in one position for more than a very few minutes at a time ; so that he naturally thought nothing of a little rustling from next door, and simply went to sleep again without even going through the ceremony of throwing a boot or a slipper over the partition, which was his usual engaging way of intimating to his neighbour that a little less fidgeting was desirable.

Well, Alice was gone, and no one could say how long a start he had taken or in which direction he had departed. If he had had a home anywhere near, no doubt Perkins (the school policeman) would have been sent straight there, as he always was when young Faulkner (our champion runaway) indulged in one of his periodical attempts to quit Toddlestone without waiting for the sanction of the authorities. But Alice, it was well known, had no friends within a couple of hundred miles, and there was nothing whatever to indicate whether he had gone north or south or east or west. Young Attley was always provided with plenty of money, — far too much, Rhodes used to say, — so that whatever ridiculous enterprise he might have hatched in that poor little woe begone brain of his, it was to be hoped that he would not starve.

On the other hand, with money in his pocket, it would not be so difficult for the boy to escape, supposing that he should have reached some outlying station and taken a train before he could be caught. But what was his object in departing, and what objective point would he be likely to make for? — these were the puzzling questions. It was felt that if only a correct understanding of the poor little fellow's motives could be arrived at, there would be less difficulty about finding him. Many theories were propounded, some of them of the most pessi mistic kind ; but no one guessed within measur able distance of the real solution of the mystery Perkins was sent about the country in his dogcart, and declared afterwards that he must have covered, one way and another, a couple of hundred miles without ever being farther than twenty or so from Toddlestone ; but not a trace could he find of the runaway.

I remember how we all chaffed young Faulkner, our permanent truant, pointing out to him that he was a mere amateur in the art in comparison with Alice, who was his junior by two years, and yet succeeded in his first attempt where he (Faulkner) had failed for years ; but Faulkner only replied that if he liked to " slither into a pond and lie at the bottom till the newts ate him, as Alice had probably done, he too could give old Perkins the slip very nicely ! " But Alice had not done anything half so tragic and foolish, as it proved ; and though every pond and river within a radius of ten miles was carefully searched, and even, in most cases, dragged ; and though the woods were scoured, and though every country railway station was visited, and every porter and ticket-office man was interviewed and interrogated, yet no trace of Alice, whether alive or dead, could be found ; and two or three weeks passed away without solution of the mystery.

Mr. Rhodes had written to Alice's mother immediately after the boy's disappearance, giving every detail of the occurrence, as far as known, and had kept her advised of the subsequent hue-andcry ; and though I believe he did his best to simulate a hopeful view of the matter, for the sake of poor Mrs. Attley, I am certain that he was one of those who entertained the worst fears about it ; for he looked the very picture of dejection, and went haggardly and mournfully about his work during those weeks of suspense, and required to be asked every question at least twice over ; and this was not at all like dear old Rhodes. There were one or two who said all along that Alice had gone to India to his mother ; but the P. & O. authorities, and other steamboat people, had long since been requested to instruct their captains and crews to look out for a truant schoolboy, in case he should turn up and demand a passage by one of their steamers, yet nothing had been heard of him from that quarter.

Indeed, the notification had only been made in deference to the views of those few persons whose imagination was sufficiently aspiring to permit of their entertaining so wild an idea ; but neither the Head nor Rhodes, nor anyone else of light and leading, really believed for a moment that such a solution of the mystery even came into the list of possible, though improbable contingencies. For how, they said, could the child have found his way to London, without leaving a trace behind him at any railway station within a day's journey? Besides which, they pointed out, even had he succeeded in reaching London, he would hardly be equally successful in finding his way unobserved to the Docks, and in knocking about there, waiting for an opportunity to speak to the captain, or to slink on board, without being seen and noticed by those who had promised to keep their eyes open in case of his appearance !

The police, too, had been warned, and were on the look-out for the little truant : it was practically impossible that he should have run the gauntlet of all these watching eyes and shipped himself off for Bombay ! But one day Gubbins received a letter which not only relieved the mind of Rhodes and of the Head, and of the whole school, but caused those who had insisted upon it that Alice had gone to India to say, " I told you so ! " and to think very highly of their own ingenuity for ever afterwards ; though they certainly had not hit upon the whole truth, but only upon a somewhat erratic path which eventually led, by tortuous ways, to the truth. And almost simultaneously — that is, on the same day or the next, I forget which — Rhodes received a telegram from Bombay which confirmed the news of Alice's safety.

Chapter III News Of The Runaway

A LICE'S letter to Gubbins is too precious a ■*• *■ literary gem to deny even partially to the reader. I will therefore give it in extenso, according to the notes which Gubbins allowed some of us to take at the time, and of which I still preserve my own. " My dear Gubbins," — the letter began, — " I write to you because I know I ought to write to old Rhodes, but I dursn't ! " (It may be mentioned, once for all, that wherever Alice wrote "old Rhodes," Gubbins carefully and skilfully changed the word "old" to "Mr." before passing on the letter to our popular house-master, in order, as NEWS OF THE RUNAWAY 33 Gubbins explained, to spare Rhodes's feelings. I thought it rather nice of Gubbins, and decidedly considerate in a schoolboy.) " He must be so jolly mad with me," the letter proceeded, "but I must get away if he's ever so mad, for my poor mother is ill, and I simply can't Bear to be any longer at Toddlestone while she's bad, so I'm on my way to her.

You can tell old Rhodes I'm all right, and if ever you get this, you'll know I'm half-way to mother's house in India, for I'm going to post it wherever the steamer stops first, and not till then. I daresay you'd like to know how I've done it — well, I'll just tell you, for it can't hurt now. First I got a lot of cheese and bread — I stayed behind at supper and took it. When we all went to bed and lights were out, I twisted up the sheets as quietly as I could to make ropes ; one of your boots, or it may have been Pike's, came on my head as I sat up in bed, and pained me a good deal, so I suppose you were awake, but I don't mind now, and soon you all snored. Then I knotted the end of the sheet to the bedrail and THE ADVENTURES OF A STOWAWAY climbed out. I came a bit of a mucker on the quad gravel, but it didn't hurt much, and nobody saw me but the cat — I nearly dropt on it while it was playing with that beastly ginger one next door, you know, and, my hat ! how they did skoot.

Then I climbed the quad wall and out of the next garden into the street, and then I Breathed Free ! I walked along as far as Teddington, and there, outside an inn, stood a great big van full of empty beer-barrels. As I was jolly tired and sleepy, I had a little bread and cheese, and then got in and hid among the barrels and went to sleep. It was quite warm and comfortable, and I slept like anything, and didn't wake up until the thing was trundling along towards Oxford. The man hadn't seen me, and I just lay on making up my mind whether I'd let out I was there and offer to pay my fare (I had thirty bob, as you know), or lie low for a bit. Jolly lucky I lay low, as it happened, for somewhere about ten or eleven o'clock old Perkins drove by in his dogcart, looking for me, and asked my man if he had seen me* which of OUTSIDE AN INN STOOD A GREAT BIG VAN course he hadn't, and old Perkins went off again.

When he was well away, and I didn't think there was any danger of his coming back by the same road, I came out from the barrels and said good morning to the Johnnie on the box. Didn't he just start ! Then he stared at me and asked who I was, and I told him the truth — all about my mother and that. He said he'd be butchered if ever he saw such a ' rum start ' as this in all his life, and said he thought he ought to telegraph back from the next place to old Rhodes ; but I implored him not to, and said if I didn't get to my mother I'd die, and so I believe I should. Then he was awfully decent, and said he'd help me, as I didn't seem to be up to much harm, and I offered him ten bob to take me to London. He said he wasn't going so far, but would take me to High Wycombe, which was about thirty miles from London, and get a friend to take me from there or else I could go by train.