The Head of Kay'sWodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
General
The Head of Kay's
Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
Schools -- Fiction
So Jones had withdrawn his yarn from circulation. Kennedy's interest in
detective work waned after his interview with Walton. He was quite sure
that Walton had been one of the band, but it was not his business to
find out; even had he found out, he would have done nothing. It was
more for his own private satisfaction than for the furtherance of
justice that he wished to track the offenders down. But he did not
look on the affair, as Jimmy Silver did, as rather sporting; he had
a tender feeling for the good name of the school, and he felt that
it was not likely to make Eckleton popular with the other schools
that went to camp if they got the reputation of practical jokers.
Practical jokers are seldom popular until they have been dead a
hundred years or so.
As for Walton and his colleagues, to complete the list of those who
were interested in this matter of the midnight raid, they lay
remarkably low after their successful foray. They imagined that
Kennedy was spying on their every movement. In which they were quite
wrong, for Kennedy was doing nothing of the kind. Camp does not allow
a great deal of leisure for the minding of other people's businesses.
But this reflection did not occur to Walton, and he regarded Kennedy,
whenever chance or his duties brought him into the neighbourhood of
that worthy's tent, with a suspicion which increased whenever the
latter looked at him.
On the night before camp broke up, a second incident of a sensational
kind occurred, which, but for the fact that they never heard of it,
would have given the schools a good deal to talk about. It happened
that Kennedy was on sentry-go that night. The manner of sentry-go is
thus. At seven in the evening the guard falls in, and patrols the
fringe of the camp in relays till seven in the morning. A guard
consists of a sergeant, a corporal, and ten men. They are on duty for
two hours at a time, with intervals of four hours between each spell,
in which intervals they sleep the sleep of tired men in the
guard-tent, unless, as happened on the occasion previously described,
some miscreant takes it upon himself to loose the ropes. The ground to
be patrolled by the sentries is divided into three parts, each of
which is entrusted to one man.
Kennedy was one of the ten privates, and his first spell of sentry-go
began at eleven o'clock.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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