Our plan was this. We were all to go up on to the Heath. Our house is
in the Lewisham Road, but it's quite close to the Heath if you cut up
the short way opposite the confectioner's, past the nursery gardens and
the cottage hospital, and turn to the left again and afterwards to the
right. You come out then at the top of the hill, where the big guns are
with the iron fence round them, and where the bands play on Thursday
evenings in the summer.

We were to lurk in ambush there, and waylay an unwary traveller. We were
to call upon him to surrender his arms, and then bring him home and put
him in the deepest dungeon below the castle moat; then we were to load
him with chains and send to his friends for ransom.

You may think we had no chains, but you are wrong, because we used to
keep two other dogs once, besides Pincher, before the fall of the
fortunes of the ancient House of Bastable. And they were quite big
dogs.

It was latish in the afternoon before we started. We thought we could
lurk better if it was nearly dark. It was rather foggy, and we waited a
good while beside the railings, but all the belated travellers were
either grown up or else they were Board School children. We weren't
going to get into a row with grown-up people--especially strangers--and
no true bandit would ever stoop to ask a ransom from the relations of
the poor and needy. So we thought it better to wait.

As I said, it was Guy Fawkes Day, and if it had not been we should never
have been able to be bandits at all, for the unwary traveller we did
catch had been forbidden to go out because he had a cold in his head.