Aunt Cal had reached the bushes. She had picked up a stick and now began poking at them fiercely. "Come out of there!" she repeated. "Or I shall call the police!"
All of a sudden my eyes, which had been vainly trying to pierce the shadows, were attracted upward. In the house beyond the hedge a light had winked on. It was in the little upper window facing our way. Aunt Cal saw it too for she paused momentarily in her poking.
And while our attention was thus distracted, a figure hurtled from between the bushes and the hedge and plunged headlong through the latter and on across Captain Trout's back yard, a rubber coat flapping about its ankles as it ran. "There! What'd I tell you!" Aunt Cal exclaimed. "The miserable loafer!"
We watched the figure disappear into the darkness. "Tomorrow," said my aunt, "I shall make a complaint. Come, you must go back to bed at once, you'll catch your death on this wet grass."
"Yes, Aunt Cal," I said meekly, and followed her back into the house. And without further ado I presently found myself back in my own room again with the door, by special admonition of Aunt Cal, locked on the inside.
But the light in Captain Trout's upstairs window still winked across the grass and now and then, I could see it blink as if a figure stepped between it and the window. Perhaps the cook had had another chill, I thought with an inward chuckle, and had demanded still more blankets! Well anyway Hamish had got safely away. Then, suddenly as it had come, the light winked out.
"What're you looking at?" Eve stirred sleepily.
"Nothing," I began and stopped. Someone was coming out of the house next door--a short figure in white duck trousers, dark coat and visored cap. The Captain? Where on earth could he be going at this ungodly hour?
Eve was beside me, I could hear her catch her breath. "It's him!" she said.
"You mean the Captain?" I asked, puzzled at her intensity.
"Of course not. Can't you see the way he walks and--and his legs!"
"You mean it's the cook all togged up like that?"
"Disguised of course. We might have expected something like this. I suppose Hamish is asleep by now."
"No," I said, "I don't think so. The last I saw him he was hoofing it across Captain Trout's back yard in the general direction of the sea." And I told her what had happened.