"It’s awful," acknowledged Billy. "I feel funny in my stomach and have creeps up my back." "So have I," said Henrietta, and nodded grimly. "Do what you please," said Bartlett. "But don’t get caught." "They won’t come," said the Watermelon. "They have been gone for quite a time and aren’t coming back." "Ah, my dear Holmes," said Henrietta, "explain your deductions." "They’ve been gone long because there is so much dust on everything and the house smells so close. They won’t be back to-night because none of the neighbors have been in to leave anything for them to eat and there aren’t any chickens in the chicken-house. Alphonse would have stirred ’em up if they had been there." "Suppose some one passes and sees the light," suggested the general, tempted to the breaking point by the dainty supper so near at hand and the thought of the terrible apology of a meal they would get at the dilapidated hotel they had passed in the village. And above all things, the general loved his meals. "We are at the back of the house and it is almost twelve. Every one is in bed and those who aren’t are drunk and wouldn’t be believed anyway." "It’s five miles to the village," added Bartlett with no apparent relevance. "Aw, be game," encouraged the Watermelon. "Be sports." "Just being hungry is enough for me," declared Henrietta, taking the last of the edibles from the basket. *CHAPTER XI* *A NIGHT’S LODGING* The general hesitated. It was not lawful, not right. They had broken into another man’s house and should leave at once. But all his life he had lived by rules and regulations, followed life’s blue book as persistently and as well as he did the auto blue book. Now he was lost, the blue book was gone and there was an indefinable pleasure in letting go the rules and regulations that had governed him so long. In the warm June night, with the youthful, foolish Billy, and the irresponsible Watermelon, the general’s latent criminal tendency came uppermost, that tendency in all of us once in a while to do wrong for the sake of the adventure in it, for the excitement and fascination, rather than for any material gain. In the experience of being in another man’s house unknown and uninvited by the owner, of listening for the rattle of a wagon turning in at the gate, for the crunch of a foot on the gravel without, there was an exhilaration he had not known for years. He felt that a bold lawlessness which he had never had and had always felt rather proudly was only kept under by the veneer of civilization, was rising in him and that he was growing young again. He had always believed that if the occasion arose, he could out-Raffle Raffles. "It will not do any harm," he thought with the remains of his old conscience. "We will go directly after supper."