It was a minute or two before the noise, loud as it was, had reached the ears of two sleepers in the bedroom, just above his head. A much less startling sound would have awakened a whole city household; but slumber in the country has a slumber of its own: in summer time a slumber born of night-air, laden with the odors of vegetation, and silent except for the drowsy chirp of birds that stir in vine and tree. The wife awoke first, listened for a second, and aroused her husband, who went to the window. He raised the screen and looked out. [Illustration] "Who is it?" he said, without nervousness or surprise, though ten years before in his city home such a summons might have shaken his spirit with anxious dread. "I'm Latimer," said the man on the horse, briefly. "That boy of Penrhyn's--the little one with the yellow hair--is lost. He got up and slipped out the house, somehow, about an hour ago, they think, and they've found one of his playthings nearly half a mile down the Romneytown Road." "Where shall I meet you?" asked the man at the window. "At the Gun-Club grounds on the hill," replied Latimer; "we've sent a barrel of oil up there for the lanterns. So long, Halford. Is Dirck at home?" "Yes," said Halford; and without another word Latimer galloped into the darkness, and in a minute the sound of his tattoo was heard on the hollow pillars of the veranda of the house next door. This was the summons--a bare announcement of an event without appeal, request, suggestion, or advice. None of these things was needed. Enough had been said between the two men, though they knew each other only as distant neighbors. Each knew well what that summons meant, and what duty it involved. The rat-tat of Latimer's crop had hardly sounded before a cheery young voice rang out on the air. "All right, old man! I heard you at Halford's. Go ahead." It was Dirck's voice. Dirck had another name, a good long, Holland-Dutch one, but everybody, even the children, called him by his Christian name, and as he had lived to thirty without getting one day older than eighteen, we will consider the other Dutch name unnecessary. Dirck and Halford were close friends and close neighbors. They were two men who had reached a point of perfect community of tastes and inclinations, though they came together in two widely different starting-places--though they were so little alike to outward seeming that they were known among their friends as "the mismates." Though one was forty and the other but thirty, each had closed a career, and was somewhat idly seeking a new one. As Dirck expressed it, "We two fellows had played our games out, and were waiting till we strike another that was high enough for our style. We ain't playing limit games."