“Well, wherever she is, I’ve got hardly any money left,” said Max, in the depths of gloom. “There’s nothing for it, my lamb—we’ll have to part. I can’t marry you now. I can’t ask you to share the life of a pauper.”

“Move over, mate, you can’t sit there,” said another voice from behind us.

We looked around, and saw old Gunther the baker, carrying some complicated apparatus made of wood. He nodded at me importantly.

“What’s that?” I said.

“This is the target!” he said. “For the contest! It’s going to stand right here. You don’t want to get shot, do you?”

“It’s not such a bad idea,” said Max, and he sounded so mournful that I couldn’t help laughing.

“What’s the prize?” asked Eliza.

“Fifty gold crowns,” said Gunther, setting his wooden structure on the ground and unbolting various bits and pieces, “and the title of Chief Ranger of the Forest. It’s a great honor, that is.”

“Maxie, you ought to enter! You might win!” said Eliza.

“That’s all very well, but I ain’t got a musket—remember?”

“Oh, no, I’d forgotten,” she said sadly. “That’s the end of that, then.”

We moved aside to let Gunther get on with setting the target up.

“I wonder what’ll happen to them kids, when they come back,” said Max after a moment.

“There’s no one to look after ’em,” said Eliza. “They’ll be taken into the care of the court, I expect.”

“Orphans, are they?” said Max. “Just like me. I was a foundling, too. I didn’t have no family to grow up with. Poor little things—they’ve been through a lot, they have. If I could win that contest…Oh, well, never mind. I ain’t got a musket, so that’s the end of it.”

Suddenly Eliza jumped and squealed, as if she’d been stung by a wasp, and shook his arm.

“Maxie!” she cried.

“What is it?”

“Maxie, your trombone!”

“It ain’t a trombone, Eliza, it’s a coach-horn—”

But Eliza was already turning away and speaking eagerly to old Gunther.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, curtsying prettily so that he stopped what he was doing and looked at her with interest, “could you tell me what the rules are for the shooting contest, please?”

“Certainly, me dear!” he said. “See this little straw with the feather in it? Well, that’s connected to this bit here, that joins on to the spring underneath, and—well, they have to hit the target smack in the middle, and that makes the feather fly into the air. That’s all. But it ain’t as easy as it looks.”

“They all shoot in turn, do they?” said Max.