Sissy's hands flew to her breast. Something hurt her there, cried out to her, threatened her. She was furious with rage and choked with sympathetic sobs. She wanted to hurt somebody, and Jack Cody's insistent whistle, which kept sounding the retreat, so irritated and confused her that she fancied it was he that she would have liked to beat, as a representative of his cruel sex. But when she looked down, at last awake to the world on this side of the knot-hole, she saw Crosby Pemberton on the box at her feet, and knew who it was that she longed to punish for his own sins and every other man's. "Quick--quick, Sissy! He's coming!" he cried, tugging at her skirt. "Who? Go 'way!" Sissy stamped viciously, as she stood clinging to a limb; yet in that very instant she had seen that all the Madigans and their train had fled, save this poor servitor at her feet. "Jan Lally--oh, hurry!" Around the corner of the opera-house came a short-legged, bald little German, so stout and so loosely put together that, as he ran, his jelly-like flesh shook as though it was about to break the loose bag of skin that held it. It was Lally's opera-house, and Lally was come to catch trespassers in the act of seeing without paying. Sissy's heart jumped to her throat. In the course of their maraudings, the Madigans were not unaccustomed to a stern-chase and a lively one, yet now it seemed to her that strategy was the watchword. Perched high up in the tree, hidden by its foliage, who would notice her--if only Crosby would go away! But Crosby would not budge. He begged, he implored, he became confused in trying to explain to her her danger, and at last burst into bitter tears as he felt Lally's fat, moist hand upon his collar, and saw a hereafter peopled with wrathful motherly faces in various stages of disgust and despair. "You come vid me. I gif you to Riddle. He lock you oop, you bat boy!" A suppressed giggle of pleasure, at the thought of neat little Crosby in the hands of the constable, shook Sissy, perched snugly like a malicious little bird in the tree. It served him right, she said to herself gleefully, ascribing the basest motives to Crosby, as one loves to do when one's friends are not in good standing with one's self. He had had no business to hang around and point the way to her hiding-place! "Oh, I say, Jan, let me off!" begged Crosby, white with terror of the jail--and his lady mother. "I'll never peek again, sure I won't!" "Nu! You come vid me. And _you_, too!" Sissy looked down. Was it possible there was another laggard whom she had not seen? "I say--you, too!" bellowed Lally. "Vill you come now?" In the very certainty of security a sudden panic fell upon Sissy. If she only dared to move, to reassure herself! Of course it couldn't mean herself--oh! She felt a sudden tug that almost dislodged her. "You t'ink I don't see--huh?" shouted the perspiring Teuton below. "What for you leave dis trail hang down den--hey?" And he tugged again.