Held Fast For England | Page 8

was standing, with his
back to him, holding a pistol in his hand. Another, similarly armed,
stood by the side of a young woman who, in a loose dressing gown, sat
shrinking in an armchair, into which she had evidently been thrust. A
third was in the act of crawling under the bed. An elderly man, in his
nightshirt, was standing up. A gag had been thrust into his mouth; and
he was tightly bound, by a cord round his waist, to one of the bedposts.
Bob sprang forward, whirling his hockey stick round his head, and
giving a loud shout of "Down with the villains!" the others joining, at
the top of their voices.
Before the man had time to turn round, Bob's stick fell, with all the
boy's strength, upon his ankle; and he went down as if he had been shot,
his pistol exploding as he fell. Bob raised his stick again and brought it
down, with a swinging blow, on the robber's head.
The others had made a rush, together, towards the man standing by the
lady. Taken utterly by surprise, he discharged his pistol at random, and
then sprang towards the door. Two blows fell on him, and Sankey and
Fullarton tried to grapple with him; but he burst through them, and
rushed out.
Bob and Wharton sprang on the kneeling man, before he could gain his
feet; and rolled him over, throwing themselves upon him. He was
struggling furiously, and would soon have shaken them off, when the
other boys sprang to their assistance.

"You help them, Jim. I will get this cord off!" Fullarton said and,
running to the bed, began to unknot the cord that bound the admiral.
The ruffian on the ground was a very powerful man, and the three boys
had the greatest difficulty in holding him down; till Fullarton slipped a
noose round one of his ankles and then, jumping on the bed, hauled
upon it with all his strength--the admiral giving his assistance.
"Get off him, he is safe!" he shouted; but the others had the greatest
difficulty in shaking themselves free from the man--who had,
fortunately, laid his pistol on the bed, before he crawled under it to get
at the box.
Jim Sankey was the first to shake himself free from him and, seeing
what Fullarton was doing, he jumped on to the bed and gave him his
assistance and, in half a minute, the ruffian's leg was lashed to the
bedpost, at a height of five feet from the ground.
Just as this was done there was a rush of feet outside; and three men,
one holding a cutlass and the other two armed with pokers, ran into the
room. It was fortunate they did so, for the man whom Bob had first
felled was just rising to his feet; but he was at once struck down again,
by a heavy blow over the head with the cutlass. By this time the
admiral had torn off the bandage across his mouth.
"Another of them ran downstairs, Jackson. Give chase. We can deal
with these fellows."
The three men rushed off.
"Well, I don't know who you are," the admiral went on, turning to the
boys, "but you turned up at the nick of time; and I am deeply indebted
to you, not only for saving my money--although I should not have liked
to lose that--but for having captured these pirates.
"That villain has not hurt you much, I hope?" for both Bob and Jim
Sankey were bleeding freely, from the face, from the heavy blows the
robber had dealt them.

"No, sir, we are not hurt to speak of," Bob said. "We belong to
Tulloch's school."
"To the school!" the admiral exclaimed. "What on earth are you doing
here, at four o'clock in the morning?
"But never mind that now. What is it, Jackson, has he got away?"
"No, sir; he was lying in a heap, at the bottom of the stairs. There was a
lanyard fastened across."
"We tied a string across, sir, as we came up," Bob explained.
"Well done, lads!
"Are there any more of them, Jackson?"
"Don't see any signs of any more, admiral. There are the two plate
chests in the passage, as if they had been brought out from the butler's
strong room, in readiness to take away."
"Where is the butler? He must have heard the pistol shots!" the admiral
exclaimed angrily.
"He is not in his room, admiral. We looked in to bring him with us. The
door was open, but he isn't there."
"There is another man in the drawing room, tied." Bob said. "He was
putting a lot of things into a sack."
"The scoundrel! Perhaps that is the butler," the admiral said.
"Well, Emma, you had