which was also the window-seat, lifted cautiously. It had been a
tight fit, even for the lithe Stalky, his head between his knees, and
his stomach under his right ear. From a drawer in the table he took a
well-worn catapult, a handful of buckshot, and a duplicate key of the
study; noiselessly he raised the window and kneeled by it, his face
turned to the road, the wind-sloped trees, the dark levels of the
Burrows, and the white line of breakers falling nine-deep along the
Pebbleridge. Far down the steep-banked Devonshire lane he heard the
husky hoot of the carrier's horn. There was a ghost of melody in it,
as it might have been the wind in a gin-bottle essaying to sing,
"It's a way we have in the Army."

Stalky smiled a tight-lipped smile, and at extreme range opened fire:
the old horse half wheeled in the shafts.

"Where he gwaine tu?" hiccoughed Rabbits-Eggs. Another buckshot tore
through the rotten canvas tilt with a vicious zipp.

"_Habet_!" murmured Stalky, as Rabbits-Eggs swore into the patient
night, protesting that he saw the "dommed colleger" who was
assaulting him.


"And so," King was saying in a high head voice to Beetle, whom he had
kept to play with before Manders minor, well knowing that it hurts a
Fifth-form boy to be held up to a fag's derision, "and so, Master
Beetle, in spite of all our verses, which we are so proud of, when we
presume to come into direct conflict with even so humble a
representative of authority as myself, for instance, we are turned out
of our studies, are we not?"