The Triple Alliance | Page 3

don't want to."
"But I say you must!"
"Oh! please, Acton, I really can't, I--"
"Shut up! Look here, some one's got to go down that slide on skates, so just put 'em on."
It was at this moment that Diggory Trevanock stepped forward, and remarked in a casual manner that if Mugford didn't wish to do it, but would lend him the skates, he himself would go down the slide.
His companions stared at him in astonishment, coupled with which was a feeling of regret: he was a nice little chap, and they had already begun to like him, and did not wish to see him dashed to pieces against the playground wall before their very eyes. Acton, however, had decreed that "some one had got to go down that slide on skates," and it seemed only meet and right that if a victim had to be sacrificed it should be a new boy rather than an old stager.
"Bravo!" cried the dux; "here's one chap at least who's no funk. Put 'em on sharp; the bell 'll ring in a minute."
Several willing hands were stretched out to assist in arming Diggory for the enterprise, and in a few moments he was assisted to the top of the slide.
"All right," he said; "let go!"
The spectators held their breath, hardly daring to watch what would happen. But fortune favours the brave. The adventurous juvenile rushed down the path, shot like an arrow through the doorway, and the next instant was seen ploughing up the snow in the playground, and eventually disappearing head first into the middle of a big drift.
His companions all rushed down in a body to haul him out of the snow. Acton smacked him on the back, and called him a trump; while Jack Vance presented him on the spot with a mince-pie, which had been slightly damaged in one of the donor's many tumbles, but was, as he remarked, "just as good as new for eating."
From that moment until the day he left there was never a more popular boy at The Birches than Diggory Trevanock.
"I say," remarked Mugford, as they met a short time later in the cloak-room, "that was awfully good of you to go down the slide instead of me; what ever made you do it?"
"Well," answered the other calmly, "I thought it would save me a lot of bother if I showed you fellows at once that I wasn't a muff. I don't mind telling you I was in rather a funk when it came to the start; but I'd said I'd do it, and of course I couldn't draw back."
The numerous stirring events which happened at The Birches during the next three terms, and which it will be my pleasing duty to chronicle in subsequent chapters, gave the boys plenty of opportunity of testing the character of their new companion, or, in plainer English, of finding out the stuff he was made of; and whatever his other faults may have been, this at least is certain, that no one ever found occasion to charge Diggory Trevanock with being either a muff or a coward.
One might have thought that the slide episode would have afforded excitement enough for a new boy's first day at school; yet before it closed he was destined to be mixed up in an adventure of a still more thrilling character.
The Birches was an old house, and though its outward appearance was modern enough, the interior impressed even youthful minds with a feeling of reverence for its age. The heavy timbers, the queer shape of some of the bedrooms and attics, the narrow, crooked passages, and the little unexpected flights of stairs, were all things belonging to a bygone age, of which the pupils were secretly proud, and which caused them to remember the place, and think of it at the time, as being in some way different from an ordinary school.
"I say, Diggy," exclaimed Jack Vance, addressing the new boy by the friendly abbreviation, which seemed by mutual consent to have been bestowed upon him in recognition of his daring exploit--"I say, Diggy, you're in my bedroom: there's you, and me, and Mugford. Mug's an awful chump, but he's a good-natured old duffer, and you and I'll do the fighting."
"What do you mean?"
"Why, sometimes when Blake is out spending the evening, and old Welsby is shut up in his library, the different rooms make raids on one another. It began the term before last. Blake had been teaching us all about how the Crusaders used to go out every now and then and make war in Palestine, and so the fellows on the west side of the house called themselves the Crusaders, and we were Infidels, and they'd come over and rag us, and we should drive them back. Miss Eleanor came up