THE WOULDBEGOODS
said he wondered whether Mrs. Pettigrew was being robbed, or only murdered.
In the kitchen we saw that Noël was wrong as usual. It was neither. Mrs. Pettigrew, screaming like a steam-siren and waving a broom, occupied the foreground. In the distance the maid was shrieking in a hoarse and monotonous way, and trying to shut herself up inside a clothes-horse on which washing was being aired. On the dresser—which he had ascended by a chair—was Billy, the acrobatic goat, doing his Alpine daring act. He had found out his Andes for himself, and even as we gazed he turned and tossed his head in a way that showed us some mysterious purpose was hidden beneath his calm exterior. The next moment he put his off-horn neatly behind the end plate of the next to the bottom row, and ran it along against the wall. The plates fell crashing on to the soup tureen and vegetable dishes which adorned the lower range of the Andes.
Mrs. Pettigrew's screams were almost drowned in the discording crash and crackle of the falling avalanche of crockery.
Oswald, though stricken with horror and polite regret, preserved the most dauntless coolness.
Disregarding the mop which Mrs. Pettigrew kept on poking at the goat in a timid yet cross way, he sprang forward, crying out to his trusty followers, "Stand by to catch him!"
But Dick had thought of the same thing, and ere Oswald could carry out his long-cherished and
126
