Apart from the battles there were the luxurious camps, where cigarettes at five a penny were smoked to the last puff and were succeeded by the consumption of highly scented sweets to remove the traces of tobacco. These camps were mostly pitched in the gravelly hollows, where Michael and the Macalisters and Norton used to sit round a camp-fire on the warm evenings of summer, while silhouetted against the blue sky above stood the minor Macalister and the junior Nortons in ceaseless vigilance. The bait held out to these sentries, who sometimes mutinied, was their equipment with swords, guns, pistols, shields, bows, arrows and breastplates. So heavily and decoratively armed and sustained by the prospect of peppermint bull’s-eyes, Dicky Macalister and the two Nortons were content for an hour to scan the horizon for marauding cads, while down below the older boys discussed life in all its ambiguity and complication. These symposiums in the gravel-pit tried to solve certain problems in a very speculative manner. “There must be _some_ secret about being married,” said Michael one Saturday afternoon, when the sun blazed down upon the sentries and the last cigarette had been smoked. “There _is_ ,” Norton agreed, “I can’t make out about twins,” Michael continued, looking critically at the Macalisters. Siegfried Macalister, generally known as ‘Smack’ in distinction to his brother Hugh always called ‘Mac,’ felt bound to offer a suggestion. “There’s twenty minutes’ difference between us. I heard my mater tell a visitor, and besides I’m the eldest.” Speculation was temporarily interrupted by a bout between Smack and Mac, because neither was allowed to claim priority. At the end of an indecisive round Michael struck in: “But why are there twins? People don’t like twins coming, because in Ally Sloper there’s always a joke about twins.” “I know married people who haven’t got any children at all,” said Norton in order still more elaborately to complicate the point at issue. “Yes, there you are,” said Michael. “There’s some secret about marriage.” “There’s a book in my mater’s room which I believe would tell us,” hinted Smack. “There’s a good deal in the Bible,” Norton observed. “Only it’s difficult to find the places and then you can’t tell for certain what they mean.” Then came a long whispering at the end of which the four boys shook their heads very wisely and said that they were sure that was it. “Hullo!” Michael shouted, forgetting the debate. “Young Dicky’s signalling.” “Indians,” said Mac. “Sioux or Apaches?” asked Smack anxiously. “Neither. It’s Arabs. Charge,” shouted Norton. All problems went to the winds in the glories of action, in the clash of stick on stick, in the rending of cad’s collar and cad’s belt, and in the final defeat of the Arabs with the loss of their caravan—a sugar-box on a pair of elliptical wheels.