The Runaways by Victor Canning Read Free Book Online

the small cross lever on the inside of the door free from its notch so that the door would swing open. The door, he remembered, was awkwardly hung. Once the catch was free the door would swing inwards of its own weight.
    With his head stuck out of the window he considered his plan of campaign. The window was big enough for him to get through. He could hang on to the sill and drop to the ground. It was a fair drop but not so far that it worried him. Once in the yard all he had to do was … Well, what? Press the thumb latch down, give the door a push and then run for his life while that animal came through the opening after him like a streak of gold light? Not so-and-so likely he told himself. All right then, what? Just drop to the ground, and then go off and tell the police or someone that he had found the cheetah and it was shut in the barn? Not so-and-so likely! He’d never get away with that one. It would be giving himself up and they’d have him back in reform school before you could say knife. No – there was only one way. He had to get the door open from up here and let Yarra go off on her own. Then, when she was well away, he could go down himself.
    He turned back into the loft. What he wanted was a long stick with which to reach down and press the thumb catch. The loft ran well back beyond the bales of hay he had been using for a bed. When he had first come up he had made a careful inspection of the place. At the back of the loft he found a long-handled hayfork with the head broken off. It was about four feet long and would not reach the door. But in one of the corners of the loft he found a disused hutch for hens. The floor was made of long narrow strips of wood. Smiler pulled one of the slats free. Because he enjoyed problems like this, he was soon all set to try to open the door. The hay bales were all bound by lengths of binder twine. He took a couple of lengths of twine from the hay bales and lashed the hutch slat to the end of the broken hayfork. He had no trouble with making a proper lashing. His father, though a ship’s cook, was also a seaman and Smiler had had a thorough grounding in tying knots. He spliced the two lengths of wood together, finishing off the whipbinding, neat and tight, so that he had a firm join. The rest was easy.
    He took another look down through the loft trap at Yarra just in time to see her raise herself against the door and begin to tear at it with her forepaws. She saw his face through the hatch and turned at once and came in a swift bound to the foot of the ladder.
    Smiler dropped the hatch with a bang and shot the bolt across. He went to the window quickly. Yarra was getting angry at being shut in. He pushed his home-made pole through the window and after a couple of attempts managed to bang down the thumb catch. The door slowly began to swing open.
    Before he could get his pole back through the window Yarra was out. She came out slowly, stopped a yard from the open door, and then looked up at Smiler. She gave him a quick snapping hiss and then loped away around the corner of the barn. Seeing her only for a few moments in the full sunlight, Smiler was awed by her beauty. Her picture remained in his mind long after she was gone. He only had to shut his eyes and he could see the tawny gold pelt with its close-spaced black spots, the blunt, short-eared head with the long bracketing black face markings, the amber eyes and the graceful droop and upturned tuft of her tail and, most of all, the slow muscle flow of shoulders and haunches as she moved away.
    Yarra passed that day in the same area. The restlessness in her she was used to now and, since she had her freedom, the habit was strong in her to want to come back to her barn shelter at night.
    She went up the river and stopped to drink just above the barn where a small carrier stream came into the main stream over a low waterfall. In the woods higher up the river she marked the movement of a cock pheasant foraging