It was more than two hours after he left Bobby in Queen Margaret’s Chapel that the sergeant turned into the officers’ mess-room and tried to get an orderly to take a message to the captain who had noticed the little dog in the barracks.  He wished to report that Bobby could not be found, and to be excused to continue the search.

He had to wait by the door while the toast to her Majesty was proposed and the band in the screened gallery broke into “God Save the Queen”; and when the music stopped the bandmaster came in for the usual compliments.

The evening was so warm and still, although it was only mid-April, that a glass-paneled door, opening on the terrace, was set ajar for air.  In the confusion of movement and talk no one noticed a little black mop of a muzzle that was poked through the aperture.  From the outer darkness Bobby looked in on the score or more of men doubtfully, ready for instant disappearance on the slightest alarm.  Desperate was the emergency, forlorn the hope that had brought him there.  At every turn his efforts to escape from the Castle had been baffled.  He had been imprisoned by drummer boys and young recruits in the gymnasium, detained in the hospital, captured in the canteen.

Bobby went through all his pretty tricks for the lads, and then begged to be let go.  Laughed at, romped with, dragged back, thrown into the swimming-pool, expected to play and perform for them, he rebelled at last.  He scarred the door with his claws, and he howled so dismally that, hearing an orderly corporal coming, they turned him out in a rough haste that terrified him.  In the old Banqueting Hall on the Palace Yard, that was used as a hospital and dispensary, he went through that travesty of joy again, in hope of the reward.

Sharply rebuked and put out of the hospital, at last, because of his destructive clawing and mournful howling, Bobby dashed across the Palace Yard and into a crowd of good-humored soldiers who lounged in the canteen.  Rising on his hind legs to beg for attention and indulgence, he was taken unaware from behind by an admiring soldier who wanted to romp with him.  Quite desperate by that time, he snapped at the hand of his captor and sprang away into the first dark opening.  Frightened by the man’s cry of pain, and by the calls and scuffling search for him without, he slunk to the farthest corner of a dungeon of the Middle Ages, under the Royal Lodging.

When the hunt for him ceased, Bobby slipped out of hiding and made his way around the sickle-shaped ledge of rock, and under the guns of the half-moon battery, to the outer gate.  Only a cat, a fox, or a low, weasel-like dog could have done it.  There were many details that would have enabled the observant little creature to recognize this barrier as the place where he had come in.  Certainly he attacked it with fury, and on the guards he lavished every art of appeal that he possessed.  But there he was bantered, and a feint was made of shutting him up in the guard-house as a disorderly person.  With a heart-broken cry he escaped his tormentors, and made his way back, under the guns, to the citadel.