'Wilfred,' he said, 'where are you going with that gun?'
The boy appeared embarrassed.
'Just shooting.'
Aubrey took the weapon from him and raised his voice slightly. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen that Charlotte was now well within hearing.
'Shooting, eh?' he said. 'Shooting? I see. And have you never been taught, wretched child, that you should be kind to the animals that crave your compassion? Has no one ever told you that he prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small? For shame, Wilfred, for shame!'
Charlotte had come up, and was standing there, looking at them inquiringly.
'What's all this about?' she asked.
Aubrey started dramatically.
'Miss Mulliner! I was not aware that you were there. All this? Oh, nothing. I found this lad here on his way to shoot sparrows with his air-gun, and I am taking the thing from him. It may seem to you a high-handed action on my part. You may consider me hyper-sensitive. You may ask, Why all this fuss about a few birds? But that is Aubrey Bassinger. Aubrey Bassinger will not lightly allow even the merest sparrow to be placed in jeopardy. Tut, Wilfred,' he said. 'Tut! Cannot you see now how wrong it is to shoot the poor sparrows?'
'But I wasn't going to shoot sparrows,' said the boy. 'I was going to shoot uncle Francis while he is having his sun-bath.'
'It is also wrong,' said Aubrey, after a slight hesitation, 'to shoot uncle Francis while he is having his sun-bath.'
Charlotte Mulliner uttered an impatient exclamation. And Aubrey, looking at her, saw that her eyes were glittering with a strange light. She breathed quickly through her delicately-chiselled nose. She seemed feverish, and a medical man would have been concerned about her blood-pressure.
'Why?' she demanded vehemently. 'Why is it wrong? Why shouldn't he shoot his uncle Francis while he is having his sun-bath?'
Aubrey stood for a moment, pondering. Her razor-like feminine intelligence had cut cleanly to the core of the matter. After all, now that she put it like that, why not?
'Think how it would tickle him up.'
'True,' said Aubrey, nodding. 'True.'
'And his uncle Francis is precisely the sort of man who ought to have been shot at with air-guns incessantly for the last thirty years. The moment I met him, I said to myself, ''That man ought to be shot at with air-guns.'' '
Aubrey nodded again. Her girlish enthusiasm had begun to infect him.
'There is much in what you say,' he admitted.
'Where is he?' asked Charlotte, turning to the boy.
'On the roof of the boathouse.'
Charlotte's face clouded.
'H'm!' she said. 'That's awkward. How is one to get at him?'
'I remember uncle Francis telling me once,' said Aubrey, 'that, when you went shooting tigers, you climbed a tree. There are plenty of trees by the boathouse.'
'Admirable!'
For an instant there came to disturb Aubrey's hearty joy in the chase a brief, faint flicker of prudence.
'But . . . I say . . . Do you really think . . . Ought we . . .?'
Charlotte's eyes flashed scornfully.
'Infirm of purpose,' she said. 'Give me the air-gun!'
'I was only thinking . . .'
'Well?'
'I suppose you know he'll have practically nothing on?'
Charlotte Mulliner laughed lightly.
'He can't intimidate
me
,' she said. 'Come! Let us be going.'
Up on the roof of the boathouse, the beneficent ultra-violet rays of the afternoon sun pouring down on his globular surface, Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake lay in that pleasant half-waking, half-dreaming state that accompanies this particular form of lumbago-treatment. His mind flitted lightly from one soothing subject to another. He thought of elks he had shot in Canada, of moufflon he had shot in the Grecian Archipelago, of giraffes he had shot in Nigeria. He was just on the point of thinking of a hippopotamus which he had shot in Egypt, when the train of his meditations was interrupted by a soft popping sound not far away. He smiled affectionately. So little Wilfred was out with his air-gun, eh?
A thrill of quiet pride passed through Colonel Pashley-Drake. He had trained the lad well, he felt. With a garden-party in progress, with all the opportunities it offered for quiet gorging, how many boys of Wilfred's age would have neglected their shooting to hang round the tea-table and stuff themselves with cakes. But this fine lad . . .
Ping!
There it was again. The boy must be somewhere quite close at hand. He wished he could be at his side, giving him kindly advice. Wilfred, he felt, was a young fellow after his own heart. What destruction he would spread among the really worthwhile animals when he grew up and put aside childish things and exchanged his air-gun for a Winchester repeater.
Sir Francis Pashley-Drake started. Two inches from where he lay a splinter of wood had sprung from the boathouse roof. He sat up, feeling a little less affectionate.
'Wilfred!'
There was no reply.
'Be careful, Wilfred, my boy. You nearly . . .'
A sharp, agonizing twinge caused him to break off abruptly. He sprang to his feet and began to address the surrounding landscape passionately in one of the lesser-known dialects of the Congo basin. He no longer thought of Wilfred with quiet pride. Few things so speedily modify an uncle's love as a nephew's air-gun bullet in the fleshy part of the leg. Sir Francis Pashley-Drake's plans for this boy's future had undergone in one brief instant a complete change. He no longer desired to stand beside him through his formative years, teaching him the secrets of shikar. All he wanted to do was to get close enough to him to teach him with the flat of his right hand to be a bit more careful where he pointed his gun.
He was expressing a synopsis of these views in a mixture of Urdu and Cape Dutch, when the words were swept from his lips by the sight of a woman's face, peering from the branches of a near-by tree.
Colonel Pashley-Drake reeled where he stood. Like so many out-door men, he was the soul of modesty. Once, in Bechuanaland, he had left a native witch-dance in a marked manner because he considered the chief 's third supplementary wife insufficiently clad. An acute consciousness of the sketchiness of his costume overcame him. He blushed brightly.
'My dear young lady . . .' he stammered.
He had got thus far when he perceived that the young woman was aiming at him something that looked remarkably like an air-gun. Her tongue protruded thoughtfully from the corner of her mouth, she had closed one eye and with the other was squinting tensely along the barrel.
Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake did not linger. In all England there was probably no man more enthusiastic about shooting: but the fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun. With an agility which no gnu, unless in the very pink of condition, could have surpassed, he sprang to the side of the roof and leaped off. There was a clump of reeds not far from the boathouse. He galloped across the turf and dived into them.
Charlotte descended from her tree. Her expression was petulant. Girls nowadays are spoiled, and only too readily become peevish when baulked of their pleasures.
'I had no idea he was so nippy,' she said.
'A quick mover,' agreed Aubrey. 'I imagine he got that way from dodging rhinoceroses.'
'Why can't they make these silly guns with two barrels? A single barrel doesn't give a girl a chance.'
Nestling among the reeds, Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake, in spite of the indignation natural to a man in his position, could not help feeling a certain complacency. The old woodcraft of the hunter had stood him, he felt, in good stead. Not many men, he told himself, would have had the initiative and swift intelligence to act so promptly in the face of peril.
He was aware of voices close by.
'What do we do now?' he heard Charlotte Mulliner say.
'We must think,' said the voice of his nephew Aubrey.
'He's in there somewhere.'
'Yes.'
'I hate to see a fine head like that get away,' said Charlotte, and her voice was still querulous. 'Especially after I winged him. The very next poem I write is going to be an appeal to air-gun manufacturers to use their intelligence, if they have any, and turn out a line with two barrels.'
'I shall write a Pastel in Prose on the same subject,' agreed Aubrey.
'Well, what shall we do?'
There was a short silence. An insect of unknown species crept up Colonel Pashley-Drake and bit him in the small of the back.
'I'll tell you what,' said Aubrey. 'I remember uncle Francis mentioning to me once that when wounded zebus take cover by the reaches of the Lower Zambesi, the sportsman despatches a native assistant to set fire to . . .'
Sir Francis Pashley-Drake emitted a hollow groan. It was drowned by Charlotte's cry of delight.
'Why, of course! How clever you are, Mr Bassinger.'
'Oh no,' said Aubrey modestly.
'Have you matches?'
'I have a cigarette-lighter.'
'Then would it be bothering you too much to go and set light to those reeds – about there would be a good place – and I'll wait here with the gun.'
'I should be charmed.'
'I hate to trouble you.'
'No trouble, I assure you,' said Aubrey. 'A pleasure.'
Three minutes later the revellers on the lawn were interested to observe a sight rare at the better class of English garden-party. Out of a clump of laurel-bushes that bordered the smoothly mown turf there came charging a stout, pink gentleman of middle age who hopped from side to side as he ran. He was wearing a loin-cloth, and seemed in a hurry. They had just time to recognize in this newcomer their hostess's brother, Colonel Sir Francis Pashley-Drake, when he snatched a cloth from the nearest table, draped it round him, and with a quick leap took refuge behind the portly form of the Bishop of Stortford, who was talking to the local Master of Hounds about the difficulty he had in keeping his vicars off the incense.
Charlotte and Aubrey had paused in the shelter of the laurels. Aubrey, peering through this zareba, clicked his tongue regretfully.
'He's taken cover again,' he said. 'I'm afraid we shall find it difficult to dig him out of there. He's gone to earth behind a bishop.'
Receiving no reply, he turned.
'Miss Mulliner!' he exclaimed. 'Charlotte! What is the matter?'
A strange change had come over the girl's beautiful face since he had last gazed at it. The fire had died out of those lovely eyes, leaving them looking like those of a newly awakened somnambulist. She was pale, and the tip of her nose quivered.
'Where am I?' she murmured.
'Bludleigh Manor, Lesser Bludleigh, Goresby-on-the-Ouse, Bedfordshire. Telephone 28 Goresby,' said Aubrey quickly.
'Have I been dreaming? Or did I really . . .Ah, yes, yes!' she moaned, shuddering violently. 'It all comes back to me. I shot Sir Francis with the air-gun!'