nother hour could he begin operations,
and all he and his accomplice had to do was to sit and wait.

Ten of the occupants of the room were pretending to be asleep, except
two or three who, wearied with waiting to see what was going to happen,
actually were so. The others noiselessly arose. Both were dressed, but
instead of their boots wore light running shoes. Then the other inmates
of the dormitory thrilled with excitement and admiration as, peeping
furtively from beneath the clothes, they beheld in the moonlight, which
streamed into the room, their ex-prefect busily engaged in knotting a
cord to the framework of the two iron bedsteads which stood right under
the outside window.

This long wing of the school buildings ended here. Without, the chapel
wall, buttressed and lofty, extended at right angles to it. Another
convenient buttress on the other side of the window screened the corner
thus formed, in most effective fashion.

Haviland and his dusky satellite proceeded to pay out the cord. The end
just swung clear of the ground, and the height, from twenty-five to
thirty feet, was a mere nothing to such practised climbers. Down they
went, hand over hand, first one, then the other. Then, taking advantage
of the shadows thrown out by the rose bushes that grew outside, they
flitted along the chapel wall, then over the fence and into the field
beyond.

How good it was to be out again, to move freely over this glorious open
country spreading around so still and soft and mysterious in the
moonlight! Half hundred fragrant scents seemed to blend and fuse,
distilled from grass and bank and hedgerow, upon the pure night air, and
mingled with the odour of kine asleep in the pasture meadows. A
nightingale "jug-jugged" in an adjacent copse, and was answered by
another; a large hare, long-eared and ghostly, sprang out of their way
and loped off into misty dimness--but, over all, that sense of freedom,
of entire and complete liberty, which a sense of risk, and very real
risk, did but add to.

For a keeper would likely be on his beat these moonlight nights, and to
encounter one such would be almost fatal. And to-night they had higher
game in view than bird-nesting.

"Here it is," said Mpukuza, diving into a bed of leaves at the bottom of
a dry ditch and dragging forth--an air-gun. "Now we have fun. _Au_!"

Haviland's hand shook with excitement as he took the weapon. Fun
indeed! Wouldn't they? He was not unpract