So soon as ever they were gone, down swooped Walnut and myself, and, sending the frightened young pheasants scuttling in every direction, set to work on the corn. It was nearly a year since I had tasted this delicacy, which Jack Fortescue used to give me as a treat in the old, quiet days at the Hall. The food was a godsend to us, for, as I have said, the supply of nuts, mast, and acorns, was of the shortest in our neighbourhood that season. I let my mother know, and she as well as Cob and my sister and their young ones were very soon on the spot. The pheasants got precious little of that meal, or of many subsequent ones which the keeper carefully brought day by day. However, they were not much to be pitied, for the supply of ants’ eggs was plentiful all over the coppice, and pheasants do better on ants’ eggs than on almost any artificial food they can be given. I noticed that Rusty never troubled to come down to the pheasant food, though his wife and family of three sturdy sons regularly attended our daily free feed. I had my own suspicions, and these were confirmed when his wife told me that he was often away for whole days together. When she remonstrated with him he only laughed, and this made her seriously uneasy. Rusty had grown to be the largest and most powerful squirrel that I have ever seen in my life. No other in the wood could have stood up to him for a minute. He was also astonishingly brave and independent, and would venture across open fields for any distance. One day he said to me: ‘Hulloa, Scud! why don’t you ever come to the Hall nowadays? I believe you’re scared. Don’t you want another taste of those cob-nuts?’ ‘You don’t mean to say you go there?’ exclaimed I. ‘Of course I do. Great polecats! do you think I’ve got nothing better to do than mess about here all day picking up a few rotten grains of corn or green acorns?’ ‘You ran fast enough on the day you and I got shot at,’ I retorted, rather annoyed at his insinuations. ‘A precious pair of young idiots we were!’ he returned scornfully. ‘I take jolly good care they don’t see me nowadays.’ ‘How do you manage that?’ ‘Why, in the first place I go at dawn, before any one is about; in the second, I don’t cut across the lawn, but round to the right of the house. Are you game to come to-morrow morning?’ A longing to see the old place once more came over me. I was also anxious to find out what Rusty was about, for I did not believe for a moment that the attraction lay in the cob-nuts. I hesitated. ‘Very well,’ said Rusty, taking my silence for consent. ‘Meet me at sun-up by the pool at the other end of the wood.’