midnight
`` Then you might turn around , '' says I , `` and have a took behind you . '' Bill turns and sees the boy , and loses his complexion and sits down plump on the round and begins to pluck aimlessly at grass and little sticks . For an hour I was afraid for his mind . And then I told him that my scheme was to put the whole job through immediately and that we would get the ransom and be off with it by midnight if old Dorset fell in with our proposition . So Bill braced up enough to give the kid a weak sort of a smile and a promise to play the Russian in a Japanese war with him is soon as he felt a little better . I had a scheme for collecting that ransom without danger of being caught by counterplots that ought to commend itself to professional kidnappers . The tree under which the answer was to be left -- and the money later on -- was close to the road fence with big , bare fields on all sides .