"Are you on?" said Gerald in haste. "Hold your jaw, Jimmy, you idiot!"
"Yes," said Johnson.
"Then when you're on duty you go down to the wood-yard, and the place where you see me blow my nose is the place. The sacks are tied with string to the posts under the water. You just stalk by in your dignified beauty and make a note of the spot. That's where glory waits you, and when Fame elates you and you're a sergeant, please remember me."
Johnson said he was blessed. He said it more than once, and then remarked that he was on, and added that he must be off that instant minute.
Johnson's cottage lies just out of the town beyond the blacksmith's forge and the children had come to it through the wood. They went back the same way, and then down through the town, and through its narrow, unsavoury streets to the towing-path by the timber yard. Here they ran along the trunks of the big trees, peeped into the saw-pit, and the men were away at dinner and this was a favourite play place of every boy within miles made themselves a see-saw with a fresh cut, sweet-smelling pine plank and an elm-root.
"What a ripping place!" said Mabel, breathless on the seesaw's end.
"I believe I like this better than pretending games or even magic."
"So do I," said Jimmy. "Jerry, don't keep sniffing so you'll have no nose left."
"I can't help it," Gerald answered; "I daren't use my hankey for fear Johnson's on the lookout somewhere unseen. I wish I'd thought of some other signal." Sniff! "No, nor I shouldn't want to now if I hadn't got not to. That's what's so rum. The moment I got down here and remembered what I'd said about the signal I began to have a cold and Thank goodness! here he is."
The children, with a fine air of unconcern, abandoned the see-saw. "Follow my leader!" Gerald cried, and ran along a barked oak trunk, the others following. In and out and round about ran the file of children, over heaps of logs, under the jutting ends of piled planks, and just as the policeman's heavy boots trod the towing-path Gerald halted at the end of a little landing-stage of rotten boards, with a rickety handrail, cried "Pax!" and blew his nose with loud fervour.
"Morning," he said immediately.