y allowed for him to get up a
gossip, the young officer looking fiercely important, and the men making
no advance.

"Beautifully clean and smart," said Tom. "Wonder how long Master
Aleck'll be."

Then he swept the edge of the pier ten feet above his head in search of
inimical boys, letting one hand down by his side to finger his cudgel,
and indulging in a chuckle at the skilful way in which he had brought
down the young offender a short time before.

"Pretty well scared him away," said Tom to himself; "he won't show
himself here again to-day."

But as it happened Tom was wrong, for the boy, after landing in safety,
with the water streaming down inside his ragged breeches and escaping at
the bottom of the legs when it did not slip out of the holes it
encountered on its way, had made his way up the steep cliff and round to
the back of the town so as to get up on the moorland, where the sun came
down hotly, when he began to drip and dry rapidly.

He could sweep the pier and harbour now easily, looking over the
fishing-boats and watching those belonging to the man-o'-war and Aleck
Donne, with Tom Bodger sitting with his legs sticking straight out.

And then he called Tom Bodger a very seaside salt and wicked name, in
addition to making a vow of what he would do to "sarve him out."

The boy gave another glance round as if in search of coadjutors, but all
his comrades had disappeared; so he stood thinking and drying as he
turned his thoughts inland, with the result that he had a happy thought,
under whose inspiration he set off at a trot round by the back of the
little town till he came within view of a group of patches of sandy land
roughly fenced in and divided by posts of wreck-wood and rails covered
with pitch--rough fragments that had once been boat planks.

He ran a little faster now, and externally did not seem wet, for his
hair was cropped so short that no water could find a lodgment, and his
worn-old, knitted blue shirt and cloth breeches had ceased to show the
moisture they had soaked up.

Once within hearing of the rough fenced-in gardens he put both hands to
his mouth and uttered a frightful yell, with the result that a head
suddenly shot up from behind one of the fences, and its owner was seen
down to the waist, looking as if he were leaning upon an old musket.

But this was only the handle of a hoe, and the holder proved to be Big
Jem, occupied in his father's garden, where he had been hoeing and
ea