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On the other side, for uniformity's sake, was a precautionary annunciation of spring-guns and man-traps of such formidable powers that, said the rubrick, with an emphatic nota bene 'if a man goes in they will break a horse's leg.
It was with no surprise at all that I heard that the master was missing. In the very first of the morning, it seemed, or ever the earliest under-housemaid had begun to set man-traps on the stairs and along the passages, he must have quietly left the house.
As he lay there, thinking, Benson's sense of admiration gradually got to the surface. "Well, of all the slick man-traps!" he gasped. "I never heard of anything more clever. Nor was there ever a bigger idiot than I, to walk stupidly into this same trap! What's the game, I wonder? Robbery, it must be.
The posts were set firmly in the ground, but there were movable segments, every fifty or sixty yards, which could be put to one side in case an attack was to be launched against the German lines. At certain positions there were what appeared to be openings through the wire, but these were nothing less than man-traps which have been found serviceable in case of an enemy attack.
Wemmick was at his desk, lunching and crunching on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as if he were posting them. "Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a man-trap and was watching it. Suddenly-click you're caught!" Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he was very skilful?
And then it was that I took to wandering much in the Manor woods, having no fear of man-traps, for I knew their place as soon as they were put down, but often catching sight of Grace, and sometimes finding occasion to talk with her.
But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds.
"How we ever managed to reach the wall I could never tell, but as we scrambled over it, regardless of man-traps and bruises, and plunged into the heather on the other side, we heard the weird footsteps receding in the direction of the castle, and, ere we had reached home, the rat-tat, tat, rat-tat, tat, had completely died away.
Vane stood the shock well and promptly set me on my feet. "I say!" he exclaimed sympathetically, "not hurt, are you? Beastly nuisance, you know, these ropes lying about regular man-traps, I call 'em." "Thanks, I'm quite all right," I said, and as I spoke two large genuine tears welled up into my eyes.
I have detected him once or twice attempting to sound my thoughts, and watch the expression of my countenance. He has talked of the flageolet more than once; and has, at different times, made eulogiums upon the watchfulness and ferocity of his dogs, and the regularity with which the keeper makes his rounds with a loaded fowling-piece. He mentioned even man-traps and spring-guns.
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