Free The Box of Delights by John Masefield Page B

holidays – I think it’s the purple pim!’ Peter said.
    ‘Oh, get up, Peter,’ Kay said. ‘We can forage in the larder. We can get heavenly breakfast foraging in the larder, then a real breakfast when we get in.’
    ‘Oh, all right,’ Peter said. So up they got.
    They went down into the larder, and got themselves ham and bread, which they spread with blobs of butter. Then, each had a big mincepie, and a long drink from a cream pan.
    Before they set out together, Kay looked at the little black box in his inner pocket. ‘I won’t examine this till I come back,’ he thought, ‘when I can be sure of being
alone. Now we must hurry, to see what comes to him . . . if it isn’t all an absurd dream.’
    They went out into the white world of the snow, and took the road to Arthur’s Camp. Nobody was about yet: a few upper windows showed lights, a few chimneys smoked. The way looked very
different from what it had been when he had ridden it at midnight. The buildings were back in their places and the lakes of water were gone. By the short cuts, it is only twenty minutes’ walk
to Arthur’s Camp.
    At the Camp, the wood (with its yew trees) was again in its place. All bracken and brambles were prone under the snow; there was no close cover left. There were no wolf-tracks in the snow under
the ramparts where the wolves had run: there were many rabbit-tracks. Now that it was beginning to be light, the boys found some fox-tracks and the tiny neat imprint of what they judged to be
rats’ feet.
    Kay was soon at the very place where he had stood within the stockade, when the fires had burned and the beasts had stampeded. That was the place, with Oxhill dead in front and Broadbarrow, or
Gibbet Hill, square to the right; the bearings proved it. Where the old man had spoken to him must have been a little to the left. Three great yew trees grew there now close together, all very old.
Kay moved towards them. In the space between them, which must have been the spot where the old man had given him the Box, someone had scuffled aside the snow, and had camped for the night, wrapped
in a woven stuff which had printed its texture on the snow: it must have been a coarse woollen. The strange thing was, that no footprints led to the place, although footprints led away from it.
    ‘Someone’s been here for the night,’ Peter said. ‘Look out for creepy-crawlies.’
    ‘No footprints to show where he came from,’ Kay said.
    ‘He must have come before the snow,’ Peter said. ‘Let’s follow to see where he goes. What a night to have been out in.’
    ‘Snow’s said to be warm, if you get really into it,’ Kay said. ‘But I dare say that’s one of the things they say.’
    They followed the footprints, which were those of a man about the size of Cole Hawlings. ‘But I don’t think it can be Cole,’ Kay thought, ‘because there are no tracks of
a Barney Dog: and he must have had Barney with him. But then, Rat said that the Lady was going to take the dog. Of course, she has him.’
    The tracks led on over the Camp wall, across the ditch, and presently out of the wood on to the bleak upland known as Bottler’s Down. There are some spinneys on the shoulders of Bottler,
the tracks led past these, going due west. As the boys came over one of the shoulders past a spinney edge, they sighted their quarry two hundred yards ahead, a little old man, trudging the snow,
bent under a green-baize-covered bale. He was near the spinney called Rider’s Wood.
    At that instant four men darted out of Rider’s Wood and ran at the old man, who dropped his bundle. One of the men had something that flew up: Kay gasped, as he thought it was a club, but
it seemed to be a sack or bag, which came down over the old man’s head. A second man in the same instant lashed rope round the old man’s arms and legs. In five seconds they had the old
man trussed up and lifted. Three of them hurried with him to the other side of the spinney; the fourth man