meditate getting along the branch for a plunge, and scramble to the other side; but the small branches are so thick, and the opposite bank so difficult, that the keeper will have lots of time to get round by the ford before he can get out, so he gives that up. And now he hears the keeper beginning to scramble up the trunk. That will never do; so he scrambles himself back to where his branch joins the trunk, and stands with lifted rod.
“Hullo, Velveteens, mind your fingers if you come any higher.”
The keeper stops and looks up, and then with a grin says, “Oh! be you, be it, young measter? Well, here’s luck. Now I tells ’ee to come down at once, and ’t’ll be best for ’ee.”
“Thank ’ee, Velveteens, I’m very comfortable,” said Tom, shortening the rod in his hand, and preparing for battle.
“Werry well, please yourself,” says the keeper, descending however to the ground again, and taking his seat on the bank; “I bean’t in no hurry, so you may take your time. I’ll larn ’ee to gee honest folk names afore I’ve done with ’ee.”
“My luck as usual,” thinks Tom; “what a fool I was to give him a black. If I’d called him ‘keeper’ now I might get off. The return match is all his way.”
The keeper quietly proceeded to take out his pipe, fill, and light it, keeping an eye on Tom, who now sat disconsolately across the branch, looking at keeper—a pitiful sight for men and fishes. The more he thought of it the less he liked it. “It must be getting near second calling-over,” thinks he. Keeper smokes on stolidly. “If he takes me up, I shall be flogged safe enough. I can’t sit here all night. Wonder if he’ll rise at silver.”
“I say, keeper,” said he meekly, “let me go for two bob?”
“Not for twenty neither,” grunts his persecutor.
And so they sat on till long past second calling-over, and the sun came slanting in through the willow- branches, and telling of locking-up near at hand.
“I’m coming down, keeper,” said Tom at last, with a sigh, fairly tired out. “Now what are you going to do?”
“Walk ’ee up to School, and give ’ee over to the Doctor, them’s my orders,” says Velveteens, knocking the ashes out of his fourth pipe, and standing up and shaking himself.
“Very good,” said Tom; “but hands off, you know. I’ll go with you quietly, so no collaring or that sort of thing.”
Keeper looked at him a minute—“Werry good,” said he at last; and so Tom descended, and wended his way drearily by the side of the keeper, up to the School-house, where they arrived just at locking-up. As they passed the School-gates, the Tadpole and several others who were standing there caught the state of things, and rushed out, crying, “Rescue!” but Tom shook his head, so they only followed to the Doctor’s gate, and went back sorely puzzled.
How changed and stern the Doctor seemed from the last time that Tom was up there, as the keeper told the story, not omitting to state how Tom had called him blackguard names. “Indeed, sir,” broke in the culprit, “it was only Velveteens.” The Doctor only asked one question.
“You know the rule about the banks, Brown?”
“Yes, sir.”