It was early dawn. The first faint rays of day were peering in on both sides of the drawn blind, the speaker was Glyn, and the words were uttered in consequence of a peculiar clanking noise heard out in the play-yard.
Now, the most common-sense way of finding out the meaning of the noise which had awakened the boy from a deep sleep would have been to jump out of bed, draw up the blind, and throw up the window, letting in the fresh, cool morning air, as the head was thrust out and eyes brought to bear upon the dimly seen shadowy space below. But Glyn felt very drowsy, exceedingly comfortable, and not in the slightest degree disposed to stir. Consequently he called across the little room to the other bed, and, as before said, there was no reply.
“Oh, you are a sleepy one!” muttered the boy, and reaching up his hands he turned them into a catapult, seizing the pillow by both ends, and drawing it upwards from beneath his head, when without rising he hurled it across at Singh, striking him with a pretty good whop.
“Great cowardly bully; that’s what you are,” muttered the boy. “Oh, I wish I was ten times as strong! Take that, and that, and that!”
The commands were accompanied by a heavy panting, and the sound of blows.
“Why, what’s he doing?” said Glyn to himself, growing more wakeful, and beginning to chuckle as he grasped the situation. “Oh, what a game!” he said softly. “He’s lying on his back, and got the nightmare, only it’s a morning mare; and he’s dreaming he’s fighting with old Slegge again, and punching my pillow, thinking it’s his head. I only wish it had been as soft, and then I shouldn’t have had so much skin off my knuckles.—There! There it goes again! It must be the workpeople come to open a drain or something. They must be cross at having to get up so early, or else they wouldn’t be banging their tools down like that! Hi! Singhy!”
“Cowardly brute!”
“Singhy!”
“Eh? What’s the matter? Time to get up? I haven’t heard the bell.”
“There it goes again,” cried Glyn, as the jangling rattle rose to his ears once more.