ibbon by which it had
been fastened to his sister's shopping bag, from which, if the truth
must be told, he had surreptitiously detached it.

Pretending to consult it, as though it were some sort of pocket oracle,
Pudge flashed back, and presently had the satisfaction of seeing a
bright fleck of light travel across the shutter. Immediately there was
a responsive flicker from the window: one, two, three, he counted, and
flashed back: one, two, three.

Pudge's whole being was suffused with delicious thrills. He wished now
he had obeyed that oft-experienced presentiment and learned the Morse
code; it was a thing no man destined for adventure should be without.
This wordless interchange went on for a few moments, and then a hand,
a woman's hand--O fair, imprisoned ladies of all time!--appeared
cautiously at the open shutter, waved and pointed.

It pointed toward the buckeye tree. Pudge threw a stone in that
direction and sauntered after it, pitching and throwing. Once at the
corner, after a suitable exhibition of casualness, he climbed until he
found himself higher than the fence, facing the house.

While he was thus occupied, things had been happening there. The shutter
had been thrown back and a woman was climbing down by the help of a
window ledge below and a pair of knotted window curtains.

Another woman prepared to follow her, gesticulating forcibly to the
other not to wait, but to run. Run she did, but it was not until Pudge,
lying full length on the buckeye bough, reached her a hand that he
discovered her to be his sister's friend, Genevieve Remington.

In the interval of her scrambling up by the aid of the bent bough and
such help as he could give her, they had neglected to observe the other
woman. Now, as Mrs. Remington's heels drummed on the outside of the
fence, Pudge was aware of some commotion in the direction of the house,
and saw Miss Eliot running toward him, crying: "Run, run!" while two
men pursued her. She made a desperate jump toward the tree, caught
the branch, hung for a moment, lost her hold, and brought Pudge
ignominiously down in a heap beside her.

If Miss Eliot had not contradicted it, Pudge would have believed to his
dying day that bullets hurtled through the air; it was so necessary to
the dramatic character of the adventure that there should be bullets.
He recovered from the shock of his fall in time to hear Miss Eliot
say: "Better not touch me, Mike; if there's so much as a bruise when