As for me, I was dazed. Motor bandits may terrorize France, and desperadoes hold up trains in America, but this was peaceful England. The fact that Buck MacGinnis was at large in the neighbourhood did not make the thing any the less incredible. I had looked on my affair with Buck as a thing of the open air and the darkness. I had figured him lying in wait in lonely roads, possibly, even, lurking about the grounds; but in my most apprehensive moments I had not imagined him calling at the front door and holding me up with a revolver in my own classroom.
And yet it was the simple, even the obvious, thing for him to do. Given an automobile, success was certain. Sanstead House stood absolutely alone. There was not even a cottage within half a mile. A train broken down in the middle of the Bad Lands was not more cut off.
Consider, too, the peculiar helplessness of a school in such a case. A school lives on the confidence of parents, a nebulous foundation which the slightest breath can destroy. Everything connected with it must be done with exaggerated discretion. I do not suppose Mr MacGinnis had thought the thing out in all its bearings, but he could not have made a sounder move if he had been a Napoleon. Where the owner of an ordinary country-house raided by masked men can raise the countryside in pursuit, a schoolmaster must do precisely the opposite. From his point of view, the fewer people that know of the affair the better. Parents are a jumpy race. A man may be the ideal schoolmaster, yet will a connection with melodrama damn him in the eyes of parents. They do not inquire. They are too panic-stricken for that. Golden-haired Willie may be receiving the finest education conceivable, yet if men with Browning pistols are familiar objects at his shrine of learning they will remove him. Fortunately for schoolmasters it is seldom that such visitors call upon them. Indeed, I imagine Mr MacGinnis’s effort to have been the first of its kind.
I do not, as I say, suppose that Buck, whose forte was action rather than brain-work, had thought all this out. He had trusted to luck, and luck had stood by him. There would be no raising of the countryside in his case. On the contrary, I could see Mr Abney becoming one of the busiest persons on record in his endeavour to hush the thing up and prevent it getting into the papers. The man with the pistol spoke. He sighted me–I was standing with my back to the mantelpiece, parallel with the door–made a sharp turn, and raised his weapon.
‘Put ’em up, sport,’ he said.
It was not the voice of Buck MacGinnis. I put my hands up.
‘Say, which of dese is de Nugget?’
He half turned his head to the class.
‘Which of youse kids is Ogden Ford?’
The class was beyond speech. The silence continued.
‘Ogden Ford is not here,’ I said.
Our visitor had not that simple faith which is so much better than Norman blood. He did not believe me. Without moving his head he gave a long whistle. Steps sounded outside. Another, short, sturdy form, entered the room.
‘He ain’t in de odder room,’ observed the newcomer. ‘I been rubberin’!’
This was friend Buck beyond question. I could have recognized his voice anywhere!
‘Well dis guy,’ said the man with the pistol, indicating me, ‘says he ain’t here. What’s de answer?’
‘Why, it’s Sam!’ said Buck. ‘Howdy, Sam? Pleased to see us, huh? We’re in on de ground floor, too, dis time, all right, all right.’
His words had a marked effect on his colleague.
‘Is dat Sam? Hell! Let me blow de head off’n him!’ he said, with simple fervour; and, advancing a step nearer, he waved his disengaged fist truculently. In my role of Sam I had plainly made myself very unpopular. I have never heard so much emotion packed into a few words.
Buck, to my relief, opposed the motion. I thought this decent of Buck.
‘Cheese it,’ he said curtly.
The other cheesed it. The operation took the form of lowering the fist. The pistol he kept in position.