it.

But when we got to Stoneham Lock, and Dicky dragged the two heavy
crowbars from among the elder bushes behind a fallen tree, and began to
pound away at the sluice of the lock, Oswald felt it would not be manly
to stand idly apart. So he took his turn.

It was very hard work but we opened the lock sluices, and we did not
drop the crowbar into the lock either, as I have heard of being done by
older and sillier people.

The water poured through the sluices all green and solid, as if it had
been cut with a knife, and where it fell on the water underneath the
white foam spread like a moving counterpane. When we had finished the
lock we did the weir--which is wheels and chains--and the water pours
through over the stones in a magnificent waterfall and sweeps out all
round the weir-pool.

The sight of the foaming waterfalls was quite enough reward for our
heavy labours, even without the thought of the unspeakable gratitude
that the bargees would feel to us when they got back to their barge and
found her no longer a stick-in-the-mud, but bounding on the free bosom
of the river.

When we had opened all the sluices we gazed awhile on the beauties of
Nature, and then went home, because we thought it would be more truly
noble and good not to wait to be thanked for our kind and devoted
action--and besides, it was nearly dinner-time and Oswald thought it was
going to rain.

On the way home we agreed not to tell the others, because it would be
like boasting of our good acts.

'They will know all about it,' Noel said, 'when they hear us being
blessed by the grateful bargees, and the tale of the Unknown Helpers is
being told by every village fireside. And then they can write it in the
Golden Deed book.'

So we went home. Denny and H. O. had thought better of it, and they were
fishing in the moat. They did not catch anything.

Oswald is very weather-wise--at least, so I have heard it said, and he
had thought there would be rain. There was. It came on while we were
at dinner--a great, strong, thundering rain, coming down in sheets--the
first rain we had had since we came to the Moat House.

We went to bed as usual. No presentiment of the coming awfulness clouded
our young mirth. I remember Dicky and Oswald had a wrestling match, and
Oswald won.

In the middle of the night Oswald was awakened by a hand on his face.
It was a wet hand and very cold. Oswald hit out, of course, but a voice
said, in a hoarse, hollow whisper-