Then one day Daddy was brought home, straight and stiff, on a stretcher. There had been a drunken row at the "Pig and Whistle," and Daddy had fallen backwards on the pavement, and died of a fractured skull. An inquest was held, and much more interest was shown in Daddy's dead body than any one had evinced in his living one. A coroner and a doctor and twelve jurymen "sat" gravely on the corpse, and decided he had died "an accidental death."
Then there was a funeral and a long drive in a carriage with much crape and black about, and Daddy was left in a deep yellow hole with muddy water at the bottom. And peace came again to the widow and orphans.
Peace, but starvation, for the mother's wage did not suffice to buy bread for them all. The rent got behind, and finally, with many tears and much pressure from various black-coated men, who seemed always worrying at the door, he and Mabel had been taken to a big, terrible place called a workhouse. And, after some preliminary misery at another place, called a "Receiving Home," wretchedness had culminated in this strange vastness of loneliness and greenery. Only two days had passed, but they seemed like years, and he trembled lest his sentence here should be a life-one, and he would never see his mother again. He had not killed nor robbed nor hurt any one, and he wondered with the bewilderment of seven years why men and women could be so cruel to him. Then he determined to run away. It had not taken long in the train. If he started soon, he would be home by bedtime.
"Where's London?" he asked a boy who was hitting a smaller one to pass the time.
"Dunno. You go in a train."
"I know. But which way?"
"Dunno, I tell you."
Near him stood one of the teachers, but as a natural enemy the boy felt he was not to be trusted, and did not ask him.
Then the bell rang for dinner, and they took their seats round the long, bare tables, in front of a steaming plate of stewed meat and vegetables. His pulses were beating with excitement at his secret plot, and the food was like sawdust in his mouth. Afternoon school began, and he sat with the resigned boredom of his kind, chanting in shrill chorus the eternal truths of the multiplication table.