with a fury that suggested he intended taking the opposing pack's with it, and tackling a fly-half so ferociously that the fellow was carried off the field with concussion while Peregrine claimed his shorts as a trophy.
It was the same with boxing. Peregrine brought a violence to the sport that terrified his opponents and alarmed the instructor. 'When I said, 'Now let's see who can shove the other bloke's teeth through his tonsils,' I didn't mean belt the blighter when he's unconscious,' he protested, after Peregrine, having knocked another boy stone-cold, proceeded to hold him against the ropes with one hand while punching him repeatedly in the mouth with the other.
Even Major Fetherington was impressed. Mr Clyde-Browne's boast that his son was a keen shot proved true. Peregrine had an unerring eye. On the small-bore range his bullets so seldom missed the bull that the Major, suspecting he was missing the target with all but one, put up a large paper screen behind it and was amazed to find he was wrong. All Peregrine's bullets hit the bull. And the Assault Course held no terrors for him. He scaled the brick wall with remarkable agility, dropped cheerfully into the muddy ditch, swung across the gully, and squirmed through the waterlogged tunnel without a qualm. Only the Death Slide caused him some problems. It wasn't that he found difficulty sliding down it, clinging to a toggle rope, but that he misunderstood the Major's instruction to return to the starting point and proceeded to climb back up the wire hawser hand over hand. By the time he was halfway up and hanging forty feet above the rocks at the bottom of the quarry, the Major was no longer looking and had closed his eyes in prayer.
'Are you all right, sir?' Peregrine asked when he reached the top. The Major opened his eyes and looked at him with a mixture of relief and fury. 'Boy,' he said, 'This is supposed to be an Assault Course, not a training ground for trapeze artists and circus acrobats. Do you understand that?'
'Yes, sir,' said Peregrine.
'Then in future you will do exactly what you are told.'
'Yes, sir. But you said to return to...'
'I know what I said and I don't need reminding,' shouted the Major and cancelled the rest of the afternoon's training to get his pulse back to normal. Two days later, he was to regret his outburst. He returned from a five mile cross-country run in the rain to discover that Peregrine was missing.
'Did any of you boys see where he got to?' he asked the little group of exhausted Overactive Underachievers when they assembled in the changing room.
'No, sir. He was with us when we reached the bottom of Leignton Gorge. You remember he asked you something.'
The Major looked out on the darkening sky it had begun to snow and seemed to recall Peregrine asking him if he could swim the river instead of using the bridge. Since the question had been put when the Major had just stumbled over a stone into a patch of stinging nettles, he couldn't remember his answer. He had an idea it had been abrupt.
'Oh, well, if he isn't back in half an hour, we'll have to send out a search party and notify the police,' he muttered and went up to his room to console himself over a brandy with the thought that Clyde-Browne had probably drowned in the river. Twelve hours later his hopes and fears were proved to be unfounded. The police, using Alsatians, had discovered Peregrine sheltering quite cheerfully in a barn ten miles away.
'But you definitely told me to get lost, sir,' he explained when he was brought back to the school at five in the morning.
Major Fetherington fought for words. 'But I didn't mean you...' he began.
'And the other day you said I was to do exactly what you told me to,' continued Peregrine.
'God help us,' said the Major.
'Yes sir,' said Peregrine, and went off with the School Sister to the Sanatorium.
But if his consistency was a pain in the neck to the Major, his popularity with the boys
