“My hat!” cried Peter; “wake up!” And he cried it in a terrible voice, for he knew that if a signalman sleeps on duty, he risks losing his situation, let alone all the other dreadful risks to trains which expect him to tell them when it is safe for them to go their ways.
The signalman never moved. Then Peter sprang to him and shook him. And slowly, yawning and stretching, the man awoke. But the moment he WAS awake he leapt to his feet, put his hands to his head “like a mad maniac,” as Phyllis said afterwards, and shouted:—
“Oh, my heavens—what's o'clock?”
“Twelve thirteen,” said Peter, and indeed it was by the white-faced, round-faced clock on the wall of the signal-box.
The man looked at the clock, sprang to the levers, and wrenched them this way and that. An electric bell tingled—the wires and cranks creaked, and the man threw himself into a chair. He was very pale, and the sweat stood on his forehead “like large dewdrops on a white cabbage,” as Phyllis remarked later. He was trembling, too; the children could see his big hairy hands shake from side to side, “with quite extra-sized trembles,” to use the subsequent words of Peter. He drew long breaths. Then suddenly he cried, “Thank God, thank God you come in when you did—oh, thank God!” and his shoulders began to heave and his face grew red again, and he hid it in those large hairy hands of his.
“Oh, don't cry—don't,” said Phyllis, “it's all right now,” and she patted him on one big, broad shoulder, while Peter conscientiously thumped the other.
But the signalman seemed quite broken down, and the children had to pat him and thump him for quite a long time before he found his handkerchief—a red one with mauve and white horseshoes on it—and mopped his face and spoke. During this patting and thumping interval a train thundered by.
“I'm downright shamed, that I am,” were the words of the big signalman when he had stopped crying; “snivelling like a kid.” Then suddenly he seemed to get cross. “And what was you doing up here, anyway?” he said; “you know it ain't allowed.”
“Yes,” said Phyllis, “we knew it was wrong—but I wasn't afraid of doing wrong, and so it turned out right. You aren't sorry we came.”
“Lor' love you—if you hadn't 'a' come—” he stopped and then went on. “It's a disgrace, so it is, sleeping on duty. If it was to come to be known—even as it is, when no harm's come of it.”