"Was the ringleader's face blackened?--Answer at once!" said Mr. Smith sternly.
The General extracted his bruised and battered right hand from under the clothes and looked at it.
"I think so," he said, "leastways some has come off on my knuckles!"
Mr. Davenant Carter burst into a peal of jovial mirth.
"Didn't I tell you?--It isn't a bit of use badgering children when they don't want to tell. Let's go over to the castle."
And with that the three gentlemen went out, while Napoleon Smith, Prissy, and Sir Toady Lion were left alone.
The General beckoned them to his bedside with his nose--quite an easy thing to do if you have the right kind of nose, which Hugh John had.
"Now look here," he said, "if you'd told, I'd have jolly well flattened you when I got up. 'Tisn't our business to tell p'leecemen things."
"That wasn't a p'leeceman," said Sir Toady Lion, "hadn't no shiny buttons."
"That's the worst kind," said the General in a low, hissing whisper; "all the same you stood to it like bricks, and now I'm going to get well and begin on the campaign at once."
"Don't you be greedy-teeth and eat it all yourself!" interjected Toady Lion, who thought that the campaign was something to eat, and that it sounded good.
"What are you going to do?" said Prissy, who had a great belief in the executive ability of her brother.
"I know their secret hold," said General-Field-Marshal Smith grandly, "and in the hour of their fancied security we will fall upon them and----"
"And what?" gasped Prissy and Toady Lion together, awaiting the revelation of the horror.
"Destroy them!" said General Smith, in a tone which was felt by all parties to be final.
He laid himself back on his pillow and motioned them haughtily away. Prissy and Sir Toady Lion retreated on tiptoe, lest Janet should catch them and send them to the parlour--Prissy to read her chapter, and her brother along with her to keep him out of mischief.
And so the great soldier was left to his meditations in the darkened hospital chamber.
General Smith, having now partially recovered, was mustering his forces and arranging his plans of campaign. He had spoken no hasty word when he boasted that he knew the secret haunt of the robbers. For, some time before, during a brief but glorious career as a pirate, he had been brought into connection with Nipper Donnan, the strongest butcher's boy of the town, and the ringleader in all mischief, together with Joe Craig, Nosie Cuthbertson, and Billy M'Robert, his ready followers.