tcoat button if we can help it.

Unless it's the President, for he did not behave at all badly. For a
man of his age I think he behaved exceedingly well. Oswald can picture
a very different scene having been enacted over those rotten pots if the
President had been an otherwise sort of man.

But that picture is not pleasing, so Oswald will not distress you by
drawing it for you. You can most likely do it easily for yourself.

CHAPTER 11. THE BENEVOLENT BAR

The tramp was very dusty about the feet and legs, and his clothes were
very ragged and dirty, but he had cheerful twinkly grey eyes, and he
touched his cap to the girls when he spoke to us, though a little as
though he would rather not.

We were on the top of the big wall of the Roman ruin in the Three Tree
pasture. We had just concluded a severe siege with bows and arrows--the
ones that were given us to make up for the pistol that was confiscated
after the sad but not sinful occasion when it shot a fox.

To avoid accidents that you would be sorry for afterwards, Oswald, in
his thoughtfulness, had decreed that everyone was to wear wire masks.

Luckily there were plenty of these, because a man who lived in the Moat
House once went to Rome, where they throw hundreds and thousands at
each other in play, and call it a Comfit Battle or Battaglia di Confetti
(that's real Italian). And he wanted to get up that sort of thing among
the village people--but they were too beastly slack, so he chucked it.

And in the attic were the wire masks he brought home with him from Rome,
which people wear to prevent the nasty comfits getting in their mouths
and eyes.

So we were all armed to the teeth with masks and arrows, but in
attacking or defending a fort your real strength is not in your
equipment, but in your power of Shove. Oswald, Alice, Noel and Denny
defended the fort. We were much the strongest side, but that was how
Dicky and Oswald picked up.

The others got in, it is true, but that was only because an arrow hit
Dicky on the nose, and it bled quarts as usual, though hit only
through the wire mask. Then he put into dock for repairs, and while the
defending party weren't looking he sneaked up the wall at the back and
shoved Oswald off, and fell on top of him, so that the fort, now that
it had lost its gallant young leader, the life and soul of the besieged
party, was of course soon overpowered, and had to surrender.

Then we sat on the top and ate some peppermint