I won’t say much about what happened, because the thing failed even more fearfully than Dr. Jameson’s affair long ago. We were deceived in a most peculiar manner, owing to the deliberate cunning of Cherry Ripe; and afterwards, talking it over while we wrote two thousand Latin lines each, we came to the conclusion that there was a traitor at work. Naturally we thought of Fowle, but Fowle knew nothing; besides, he was in the hospital at the time with something the matter with his knee.
To go back, I must explain that all went well until we got on the top of Cherry Ripe’s wall. Then what should we see but Cherry Ripe up a cherry tree and his daughters down below! They were a long way off, and we saw at a glance that it would take Cherry Ripe about a year to climb down from his tree, even if he saw us. As for his daughters, seeing our ages were fifteen and upwards, except Chilvers, who was certainly only thirteen, but could run faster than his sister, who was seventeen, we did not fear them.
As Cherry Ripe was picking cherries, we went for the green gooseberries. I dropped down first in a very stealthy manner, that Freckles had taught me before he went home to Australia; then Pedlar and Methuen dropped, and then Chilvers. He fell rather awkwardly and smashed off a large purple cabbage, and was glad of it.
But Steggles stopped on the wall, for some private reason. He said afterwards, when taxed with treachery, that it wasn’t so in the least; but that from the very beginning he had had a curious feeling when he woke up that day. It is the feeling you get when you wake up on a day that you are going to be flogged; and you have the same feeling, only far, far worse, on the day when you are going to be hung. All criminals know this. Steggles certainly shouted "Cave!" as soon as the horrible moment came; but when he did finally drop off the wall, it was on the other side. In fact, he escaped and left us to our fate. Nothing could be done to Steggles, but we never felt the same to him again.
What happened was this. We were just eating a few gooseberries rather fast, before settling down steadily to fill our pockets, when Steggles gave the alarm. But it was too late. Suddenly there sprang up from their hiding-places no less than three men—the youngest not less than twenty years old; and the eldest was Cherry Ripe himself. This so much horrified us, as we had seen him at the top of a high cherry tree two hundred yards away only a second before, that we lost our instinct of self-preservation and fell a prey to the enemy. We were all caught, in fact, except Steggles, and we were then marched down to Cherry Ripe’s house, and then along the road, and so back to Merivale. His hateful daughters stood and sniggered at us as we were taken past them; and then we saw that the whole thing was a mean plot, and, in fact, a swizz. A swizz is a chouse, and a chouse is the same as a sell. It was a scarecrow in the tree and not Cherry Ripe at all! The scarecrow wore his green hat, and his daughters pretended to be talking to him. As Peters said afterwards, Sherlock Holmes himself would have been almost deceived by such a deadly plot. Afterwards we found, curiously enough, that we had collected exactly thirteen gooseberries before the crash came, which shows that thirteen is an unlucky number, whatever scientific people may say against it.