‘Took long enough, didn’t you?’ complained Toby ungratefully, going blindly where he was urged, by a guide so close to the ground that he trod it as knowingly as a mouse.
‘I know, we waited outside for a bit, and then we had to get into cover because the coppers came round there. They’re watching the place now, they’d never have let us come in. We had to go a long way round, and we got a bit lost in the dark. But we’ve been here ages now, only we didn’t know then what to do.’
But now they did know? Marvellously, the small, fierce voice sounded sure of itself. Somebody had thought of something that could be done, and this mite was both spy to report the latest state of battle inside the north walk, and now recruiting sergeant for the cause. If a police constable had wandered round the corner he might have hesitated; any civilian was as good as in uniform. He hauled his prize in among the stacked timbers and scaffolding poles under the wing of the house, and three more shadows popped up to receive them. The tallest stood slightly higher than Toby’s shoulder.
‘There’s a bloke here got a bit more weight,’ announced Spuggy tersely. ‘I think he’s game.’
The tallest of the nocturnal waifs eyed the larger shape dimly outlined, and said at once: ‘Eh, you’re the chap who visits at Bossie’s place, aren’t you? Look, we’ve got to have some help. Where do we need the top-weight on this thing, fore or aft? For a ram?’
Toby peered at the ground, dropping to his knees to be sure of what was being offered him. A large, folding ladder, three-fold, and long at that, left here among the plant. Surely more than aluminium by its weight, some sort of stout alloy. By the size of it, it was meant to be strong, and its ends jutted formidably.
‘For God’s sake!’ said Toby, awed. ‘That wall’s heaven knows how thick.’
‘I know, but part of it’s rotten as rubble,’ said Ginger, whose father had taught him about building. ‘We saw it inside, this afternoon, you could see daylight through. Look, you can see light through it now.’
It was true. From this modest distance, and square to the affected area, Colin Barron’s protective light shone through very clearly in several starry points, the weak joint in his armour.
‘We were inside this afternoon. That part, it’s just left of where they’re standing. The wall bulges. I reckon it’s ready to go if we hit it right.’
‘We might kill them,’ doubted Toby fearfully.
‘There isn’t any other way. We’ve got to try.’
From the darkness under the house wall a hearty whisper blew into their colloquy like a gale-force wind. ‘You have positively got something there,’ owned Willie the Twig, coming round the concrete-mixer, ‘that I wish I’d thought of.’
They knew him, and were not disconcerted; everybody knew Will Swayne could move among the wild things in the forest and never be detected unless he wished. And he was an ally after their own hearts. Where Willie was, Barbara would not be far away. Her scent was on the air, shadowy there at Willie’s shoulder.
‘Weight forward of amidships, I’d say, either side now we’re two matched. You lot will have to gallop. And Barbie, make yourself useful, go back and tip off the police, they’ll have to rush him the instant they hear us hit. In case!’
Barbara, glittering, whispered: ‘Yes!’ as roused and resolute as the children, and turned and whisked away into the dark. ‘Give her two minutes,’ said Willie, ‘enough to pass the word, not enough for them to interfere.’ He lifted his side of the ladder, shifting back far enough to give it a prow calculated to do maximum damage before its crew reached the point of risk. Six of them now to man it, and the forward two could hoist most of its weight and balance it, while the lightest weights, Spuggy Price and Jimmy Grocott, manfully matched their small persons but immense pugnacity next in the line, and Toffee Bill and Ginger, the architect of the whole enterprise, brought up the rear with no spare length going to waste, and all their force behind the ram. It was all crazy and improvised and amateur, but at least it was action and thought, the sort of desperate sortie men might have mounted in the centuries when this place was first built.
The steady pattern of terrestial stars in the stone wall made their target perfectly clear. An area not more than five feet across, and a little below the middle of the height of the wall. That, Ginger said with certainty, was where the bulge was. And if anything was going to shatter Colin Barron, short of a thunderbolt from heaven, it was the whole wall at his left shoulder exploding on top of him.
‘Is it time?’ whispered Ginger, still captain of this venture, but without a watch.
‘Now!’ said Willie the Twig softly, and they all braced their arms firmly in the frame of the ladder, and leaned forward for the word.
‘Charge!’ croaked Ginger, and the whole half-dozen, eyes fixed unrelentingly on the area of stars, launched themselves forward in a vehement, unsteady trot, instinctively feeling for a rhythm, lurched into the double, gathered breath and accelerated into full, triumphant gallop many yards from the target.
It was something out of another world, mad and marvellous and exhilarating in its desperation, something that happens only once in a lifetime. Toby thought of all those short legs twinkling behind him, and all those enlarged hearts pumping adrenalin like crazy, enough to flood the old fish-ponds and overflow into the river.
The twin poles of the ladder hit the target dead-centre, with six translated personalities for motor. The check was merely momentary, no more than a slight jolt, before the points sheered on with only slightly retarded momentum, exploding into the light beyond in an avalanche of flying stones. Through a quivering, quaking gap three yards wide the victorious team with their battering-ram burst into Bossie’s prison. From the doorway George Felse, Sergeant Moon and two or three constables, closely followed by Barbara Rainbow, exultant, with streaming hair, surged in to meet them.
Through a stifling acrid dust-storm, thick as old-fashioned fog, George dived headlong for Colin Barron’s half- buried body, and fell on his knees to dig like a terrier at the litter of stones and rubble that covered him. Praise God, at the instant of total, deafening shock he had done the instinctive thing, dropped his captive to throw up both arms to cover his head. Not too successfully; there was blood as well as dirt in the thick fair hair, and he was stunned, but the damage looked relatively trivial. Concussion, probably, but no fractures. Like so many of the mediaeval walls that look so irreproachably solid, this one had been rubble-filled within the stone shell. But the point of impact had been barely six feet from his left ear, and the heavier ammunition had sprayed at that level, and effectively knocked him out. Bossie, held closely in front of him and shielded by his body, was somewhere there underneath, and with any luck no worse than winded.
George on one side and Moon on the other were still scooping away debris and lifting Barron’s weight aside, as Willie the Twig and Toby Malcolm came clambering in recklessly through the gap they had made, four dusty
