“Thank you, Monsieur, I don’t want your knife; and the imposition is half done, and will be finished next time you come.” Then Frenchy called him a silly boy, and tried to make a joke and pinch Freckles by the ear. But nobody saw the joke, and Freckles dodged away. Then Frenchy sighed, and looked round to see who should have the knife, and didn’t seem to see anybody in particular, and left it on his desk. He often sighed in class, and sometimes told us he was without friends, unless he might call us friends; and we said he might. When he went, Freckles told me he considered the knife was another insult. Then he explained what he was going to do. He said: “I shall finish the impot first, so as not to be obliged to him for anything, and then I shall stick him up.” “Stick him up--how?” I said. “It’s a bushranging expression,” he explained. “To ‘stick up’ a man is to make him stand and deliver what he’s got. I see my way to do this with Frenchy. He always goes and comes from Merivale through the woods, as you know, and now he’s up here on Friday nights coaching Slade and Betterton for their army exam. Afterwards he has supper with Mr. Thompson or the Doctor. There you are. I wait my time in the wood, which is jolly lonely by night, though it is such a potty little place hardly worth calling a wood; then he comes along, and I stick him up.” “It’s highway robbery,” I said. “You might get years and years of imprisonment.” “I might,” he said, “but I sha’n’t. You must begin your career some time, and I’m going to next Friday night. I’ve often got out of the dormitory and been in that wood by night, and only the chaps in the dormitory have known it.” Well, the night came, and all that we heard about it till afterwards was that about eleven o’clock, or possibly even later than that, there was a fearful pealing at the front door of Dunston’s, and looking out we could see a stretcher and something on it. That something was actually Freckles, though the few chaps who knew what was going to be done felt sure it must be Frenchy; because Freckles is five feet ten and growing, and Frenchy isn’t more than five feet six at the outside, and a poor thing at that. But it _was_ Freckles all right, and two laboring men had brought him back, and Frenchy had come with them. Not until five weeks afterwards, when Freckles could get up and limp about, did I hear the truth; and I’ll tell it in his own words, because they must be better than a chap’s who wasn’t there. He seemed frightfully down in the mouth, and said that he could never look fellows in the eyes again; but it cheered him telling me, and when I told him he was thundering well out of it he admitted he was. He said: