Eggs told King to poultice his nose! Did you hit Rabbits-Eggs, Stalky?"
"Did I jolly well not? Tweaked him all over. Did you hear him curse? Oh, I shall be sick in a minute if I don't stop."
But dressing was a slow process, because McTurk was obliged to dance when he heard that the musk basket was broken, and, moreover, Beetle retailed all King's language with emendations and purple insets.
"Shockin'!" said Stalky, collapsing in a helpless welter of half-hitched trousers. "So bad, too, for innocent boys like us! Wonder what they'd say at 'St. Winifred's, or the World of School.' By gum! That reminds me we owe the Lower Third one for assaultin' Beetle when he chivied Manders minor. Come on! it's an alibi, Samivel; and besides, if we let 'em off they'll be worse next time."
The Lower Third had set a guard upon their form-room for the space of a full hour, which to a boy is a lifetime. Now they were busy with their Saturday evening businesses—cooking sparrows over the gas with rusty nibs; brewing unholy drinks in gallipots; skinning moles with pocket-knives; attending to paper trays full of silk-worms, or discussing the iniquities of their elders with a freedom, fluency, and point that would have amazed their parents. The blow fell without warning. Stalky upset a form crowded with small boys among their own cooking utensils, McTurk raided the untidy lockers as a terrier digs at a rabbit-hole, while Beetle poured ink upon such heads as he could not appeal to with a Smith's Classical Dictionary. Three brisk minutes accounted for many silk-worms, pet larvæ, French exercises, school caps, half-prepared bones and skulls, and a dozen pots of home-made sloe jam. It was a great wreckage, and the form-room looked as though three conflicting tempests had smitten it.
"Phew!" said Stalky, drawing breath outside the door (amid groans of "Oh, you beastly ca-ads! You think yourselves awful funny," and so forth). "That's all right. Never let the sun go down upon your wrath. Rummy little devils, fags, got no notion o' combinin'."
"Six of 'em sat on my head when I went in after Manders minor," said Beetle, "I warned 'em what they'd get, though."
"Yes, but they don't combine, as we used to do. 'Member when Blundell major came in and tried to slap McTurk's head for cheek at call-over? That was our second term."
"Your second, my first," said Beetle, "My hat! wasn't Blundell major wrathy! I got hold of his legs and hung on, like Billy O!"
"Well, we tore the clothes off his back," said McTurk, reflectively. "We fought him from just after tea till prep. 'Member he tried to say it was a joke, and we half slew him! Never tried to touch any one of us again."
"Any three o' those little beasts could have tackled us in the same way. If they only kept it up," said Stalky.
"Lucky job for us they don't," said Beetle, as they strolled along the corridor.
"Everybody paid in full—beautiful feelin'," said McTurk, absently. "Don't think we'd better say much about King, though, do you, Stalky?"
"Not much. Our line is injured innocence, of course—same as when the Sergeant reported us on suspicion of smoking in the Bunkers. If I hadn't thought of buyin' the pepper and spillin' it all over our clothes, he'd have smelt us. King was gha-astly facetious about that. Called us bird-stuffers in form for a week."
"Ah, King hates the Natural History Society because little Hartopp is president. Mustn't do anything in the Coll. without glorifyin' King," said McTurk. "But he must be a putrid ass, you know, to suppose at our time o' life we'd go out and stuff birds like fags."
"Poor old King!" said Beetle. "He's awf'ly unpopular in common-room, and they'll chaff his head off about Rabbits-Eggs. Golly! How lovely! How beautiful! How holy! But you should have seen his face when the first rock came in! And the earth from the basket!"
So they were all stricken helpless for five minutes.
They repaired at last to Abanazar's study, and were received reverently.
"What's the matter?" said Stalky, quick to realize new atmospheres.
"You know jolly well," said Abanazar. "You'll be expelled if you get caught. King is a gibbering maniac."
"Who? Which? What? Expelled for how? We only played the war-drum. Got turned out for that already."
"Do you chaps mean to say you didn't make Rabbits-Eggs drunk and bribe him to rock King's rooms?"
"Bribe him? No, that I'll swear we didn't," said Stalky, with a relieved heart, for he loved not to tell lies. "What a low mind you've got, Pussy! We've been down having a bath. Did Rabbits-Eggs
