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We can't possibly get another man in the time. We start in half an hour. Can you play? For the space of, perhaps, one minute, Mike thought. 'Well? said Joe's voice. The sudden vision of Lord's ground, all green and cool in the morning sunlight, was too much for Mike's resolution, sapped as it was by days of restlessness.
The mendicant immediately wetted Mike's lips, and poured some spirits, copiously diluted with water, down his throat; after which he held the whiskey-bottle, like a connoisseur, between himself and the light. "I hope," said he, "this whiskey is the raal crathur."
Mike's message, accompanied by the box itself, however, recalled them, and Maud fancied that the major, considering himself to be in some dangerous emergency, had sent her the bauble in order that she might learn what that secret was. Possibly he meant her to communicate it to others.
The instruments needed for taking measurements were to be taken down beforehand by Houston, and concealed in a safe place near the mine, and on the night of the examination, he was to go from the house directly to the mine, where he would be joined by Jack and Van Dorn, the latter dressed in a suit of Mike's mining clothes, and personating him as closely as possible.
When we had stood there in the middle of the road five minutes, like a couple of idiots, with our hands aloft, freezing to death by inches, Mike's interest in the joke began to wane. He said: "The time's up, now, aint it?" "No, you keep still. Do you want to take any chances with these bloody savages?" Presently Mike said: "Now the time's up, anyway. I'm freezing." "Well freeze.
Locking up Mike, even threatening him, was, as the captain knew, an invasion of the rights of "The Avenue." Nobody within its confines had ever been entangled in the meshes of the law simply because nobody had wanted to break it. It was the howling boy who should have been locked up for getting under Mike's wheels, or his father who ought to have kept his son off the street.
"Yes, sir," cried Jem, eagerly; and taking the ladder as the constable sat astride the prostrate scoundrel, holding down his shoulders, and easing himself up, the ladder was passed between the officer's legs, and, in spite of a good deal of heaving, savage kicking, and one or two fierce attempts to bite, right along till it was upon Mike's back, projecting nearly two feet beyond his head and feet.
You needn't be throwin' up that lickin' to me every minute. I was surprised, I tell you. Astonished, as I might say. I wasn't lookin' to be pitched into by a low down Irish boy." "Oh, wasn't you?" queried his friend ironically. "Well, you keep on a-hectorin', and you'll be surprised again, or astonished, as you might say. That's all." Jim Barrows had not looked into Mike's eye for nothing.
Five minutes after Mike's departure, Corporal Grimsby entered, announced the abduction of Fanny Aubrey from the house of her friends, on the preceding night, and boldly accused Tickels of having been the cause of that outrage. The details of this interview are related in the sixth chapter of this narrative; it is consequently unnecessary to repeat them.
He could not hope to put his plans into operation for many months to come, however; so, with a sigh, he opened his eyes and ears again to what was passing around him, and was just in time to see Barney and Tommie marching to bed an hour later than usual. They had been permitted to sit up till half-past eight in honor of Mike's good fortune.
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