On the first day of term, it may be remembered he had wrenched away the
wooden bar which bisected the window frame, thus rendering exit and
entrance almost as simple as they had been for Wyatt during Mike's first
term at Wrykyn.
He proceeded to scale this water pipe.
He had got about halfway up when a voice from somewhere below cried,
"Who's that?"
16
PURSUIT
These things are Life's Little Difficulties. One can never tell
precisely how one will act in a sudden emergency. The right thing for
Mike to have done at this crisis was to have ignored the voice, carried
on up the water pipe, and through the study window, and gone to bed. It
was extremely unlikely that anybody could have recognized him at night
against the dark background of the house. The position then would have
been that somebody in Mr. Outwood's house had been seen breaking in
after lights-out; but it would have been very difficult for the
authorities to have narrowed the search down any further than that.
There were thirty-four boys in Outwood's, of whom about fourteen were
much the same size and build as Mike.
The suddenness, however, of the call caused Mike to lose his head.
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