When we got to where we live he said, 'All right, I don't want to tell you. You'll wish I had afterwards. You never saw such a guy.'
'I can see you!' said H. O. It was very rude, and Oswald told him so at once, because it is his duty as an elder brother. But H. O. is very young and does not know better yet, and besides it wasn't bad for H. O.
Albert-next-door said, 'You haven't any manners, and I want to go in to my tea. Let go of me!'
But Alice told him, quite kindly, that he was not going in to his tea, but coming with us.
'I'm not,' said Albert-next-door; 'I'm going home. Leave go! I've got a bad cold. You're making it worse.' Then he tried to cough, which was very silly, because we'd seen him in the morning, and he'd told us where the cold was that he wasn't to go out with.
When he had tried to cough, he said, 'Leave go of me! You see my cold's getting worse.'
'You should have thought of that before,' said Dicky; 'you're coming in with us.'
'Don't be a silly,' said Noel; 'you know we told you at the very beginning that resistance was useless. There is no disgrace in yielding. We are five to your one.'
By this time Eliza had opened the door, and we thought it best to take him in without any more parlaying. To parley with a prisoner is not done by bandits.
Directly we got him safe into the nursery, H. O. began to jump about and say, 'Now you're a prisoner really and truly!'
And Albert-next-door began to cry. He always does. I wonder he didn't begin long before - but Alice fetched him one of the dried fruits we gave Father for his birthday. It was a green walnut. I have noticed the walnuts and the plums always get left till the last in the box; the apricots go first, and then the figs and pears; and the cherries, if there are any.
So he ate it and shut up. Then we explained his position to him, so that there should be no mistake, and he couldn't say afterwards that he had not understood.
'There will be no violence,' said Oswald - he was now Captain of the Bandits, because we all know H. O. likes to be Chaplain when we play prisoners - 'no violence. But you will be confined in a dark, subterranean dungeon where toads and snakes crawl, and but little of the light of day filters through the heavily mullioned windows.
You will be loaded with chains. Now don't begin again, Baby, there's nothing to cry about; straw will be your pallet; beside you the gaoler will set a ewer - a ewer is only a jug, stupid; it won't eat you - a ewer with water; and a mouldering crust will be your food.'
But Albert-next-door never enters into the spirit of a thing. He mumbled something about tea-time.
Now Oswald, though stern, is always just, and besides we were all rather hungry, and tea was ready. So we had it at once, Albert-next-door and all - and we gave him what was left of the four-pound jar of apricot jam we got with the money Noel got for his poetry. And we saved our crusts for the prisoner.
Albert-next-door was very tiresome. Nobody could have had a nicer prison than he had. We fenced him into a corner with the old wire nursery fender and all the chairs, instead of putting him in the coal-cellar as we had first intended. And when he said the dog-chains were cold the girls were kind enough to warm his fetters thoroughly at the fire before we put them on him.
We got the straw cases of some bottles of wine someone sent Father one Christmas - it is some years ago, but the cases are quite good.
We unpicked them very carefully and pulled them to pieces and scattered the straw about. It made a lovely straw pallet, and took ever so long to make - but Albert-next-door has yet to learn what gratitude really is. We got the bread trencher for the wooden platter where the prisoner's crusts were put - they were not mouldy, but we could not wait till they got so, and for the ewer we got the toilet jug out of the spare-room where nobody ever sleeps.
And even then Albert-next-door couldn't be happy like the rest of us. He howled and cried and tried to get out, and he knocked the ewer over and stamped on the mouldering crusts. Luckily there was no water in the ewer because we had forgotten it, only dust and spiders. So we tied him up with the clothes-line from the back kitchen, and we had to hurry up, which was a pity for him. We might have had him rescued by a devoted page if he hadn't been so tiresome. In fact Noel was actually dressing up for the page when Albert-next-door kicked over the prison ewer.
We got a sheet of paper out of an old exercise-book, and we made H.
