of conflict where----"

Here the boys interrupted with cat calls, and Ernest shied a green apple
which Katy successfully dodged.

"How'd you get up?"

"For me to know and you to find out."

"Say, Alice, how'd she get up?"

"Climbed."

"Oh, say, honest how did she?"

"The same way that Philip and Richard got into Acre."

"Ladder?"

"Yes, the man who fixed the eave troughs this morning left a ladder
here. It's on the other side."

[Illustration: By way of reply Katy opened the book and began.]

The three boys made a bolt to investigate and soon swarmed up on the
roof with Jane close behind.

The old white house with its big front porch and green blinds was a
notable one. Built upon a terrace, it stood several feet above the
tree-shaded lawns about it. A group of old apple trees crowded close up
to the windows at the side and rear. Both the western and southern
gables were overhung with great wistaria vines, so old the stems were
like huge cables and could easily bear a man's weight, as the children's
grown brother Frank had already discovered. He had been locked out one
night, and wishing to get in without disturbing the family, had quietly
gone up the vines, hand-over-hand, to his own window.

The old house boasted many gables and more dormer windows, each bedroom
having one or more. The children found these little nooks cosy places to
play and read, indeed only a little less fascinating than the great
rambling closets which were only partly enclosed and seemed to end, no
one knew where, off under the roof. They had never been able to fully
explore these--indeed their mother had not encouraged such voyages of
discovery, because there were sundry narrow places, dark and dusty,
where wriggling through in snake-fashion wrought havoc with their
clothes.

The children were on the roof of the low kitchen, a kitchen that had
apparently been an afterthought, for the roof sloped both ways like an
inverted V and had no connection with the main roof.

"I tell you what, boys," said Ernest after they had explored it to their
satisfaction, "let's play the 'Siege of Acre.' We could use this roof
for the tower."

"Aren't enough of us!" objected Carol, a big, handsome boy with tight
blond curls who was inclined to be lazy.

"Can't we play, too?" put in Chicken Little.

"Shucks, girls don't know how to fight."

"Don't be too sure of that," said Alice. "We girls used to play all
sorts of games when I was a child.