I was not at all likely to forget it. But I had much rather he had been head foremost up that narrow tunnel, and I out in the green aisles of the forest waiting for him with a rope in my hands. CHAPTER XII THE BRICKED PASSAGE Now I don't know whether you have ever been up a drain pipe which just takes you, and no more. I suppose you have--in nightmares, after supping on cold boiled pork and greens, or some nice little digestible morsel like that. But really awake, and with the birds singing on the trees, the winds lightly scented with bog myrtle and pine and bracken breathing all about you--to be told to shove yourself up a built rabbit hole, not knowing what you may come on the next time you put out your hand!--Well, Hayfork Minister or no Hayfork--I had the hardest row to hoe that time! I don't think any fellow, even if he has climbed all the mountains that are, has any right to let a boy in for a thing like that without telling him beforehand. And smiling about it all the time, as if he were merely sending you into Miss Payne's to buy butter-scotch! I felt as if I could have killed him the first half-dozen "creeps" I took. And what was the worst of his cheek, he shoved me behind with the oak branch, which he had sharpened, and said, "Go on!" If I could have got him then--up a drain--me with that same oak goad, I would have given it to him--cheerful, I would. Cheerful is no name for it! Inside the tunnel the bricks were not all of the same size. Some had dropped a little and pinched my shoulders. Some were wanting altogether. And that fiend of a Hayfork, at the mouth, all safe outside with the rope's-end in his hand kept singing up to me, "A-a-all right--a-a-right--it will get wider as you get farther in!" Much he knew! Had he been up, I'd like to know? However, he was right as it happened--right without knowing anything about it. The passage did widen a bit. I found offshoots--smaller passages leading I don't know where. And I didn't put in my hand to feel, having a dislike to be bitten by water rats--or any other kind of rats. And it was an awful "ratty" place that, by the smell of it. Also, for all that Mr. Ablethorpe said, I was in mortal fear of coming across poor Harry's leg, or of Mad Jeremy arriving and "settling" Mr. Ablethorpe, without my knowing anything about it. And when I came out--I should find myself face to face with the oily curls, the sneering lip, and--specially, with the knife I had seen gleaming in his teeth when he swam the Moat to make an end of Elsie and me. I wasn't frightened, of course. Only I just thought what a fool I was to be there. I am not the first, nor will I be the last to think the same thing--when, like me, they are doing something dreadful noble and heroic.