Voice from the house. "If you keep your father out too long he'll be catching another nasty cold."
ON THE SPY TRAIL.
The milkman told Jimmy that the Kaiser was like a gambler who had mortgaged his resources up to bursting point, and now with every tooth drawn was chewing the bitter dregs of remorse to the bone. The milkman says these things come to him whilst he is milking, and the reason is that when he presses his head to the cow's side the heat of the cow thaws the blood in his brain for a time.
He told Jimmy that he could make a speech with anybody when he had got his brain like that, and that he thought of addressing meetings, but that the cow would be uneasy on a public platform.
Then he looked round to see where Jimmy's bloodhound, Faithful, was. You see Faithful sometimes makes the milkman's horse try to get into the milk-cart and hide its head under the seat, you know, like an ostrich in the dreary desert when it is pursued by its enemies. But Faithful was chained up for the sake of the deaf-and-dumb woman who comes round once a fortnight. The deaf-and-dumb woman has a blind husband, who squeezes a concertina whilst she shakes some coppers in a tin cup at you. Jimmy's mother always gives her sixpence.
Jimmy says bloodhounds don't like coppers jumping about in tin cups; it makes them harbour resentment, and then you have to show people where the piece came out of your dress. The milkman told Jimmy that he had met the deaf-and-dumb woman that morning. She was all by herself in one of his fields, practising "Where is my wandering boy to-night" Her husband had enlisted, that was why, and she had sold the business. Jimmy wanted to see the woman, but she never came past, so he went down to the railway-station with Faithful to see if she were there. But there was only a man with a parcel under his arm looking about for a train.
Jimmy says that people often go to the station like that, just to see if there is a train in it; they want to use up their return tickets, Jimmy says. But there is only the porter to look at, Jimmy says. The man seemed to think the porter was hiding the trains somewhere, and asked him for a Bradshaw. Jimmy says the porter scratched his head so hard that Jimmy thought he would get a splinter in his finger, you know, like they tell you at school, and then he fetched the man a bradawl. "Didn't he ask me for a gimlet and didn't I bring him one?" the porter appealed to Jimmy.
Jimmy says the man was very rude to the porter; he said things you have to be sorry about when you have time to think them over. Jimmy says the man actually made the porter unlock the waiting-room door and throw open the window, although the porter told him that he had a hen sitting on some eggs there.
The man seemed very restless, Jimmy says, because he didn't stay long in the waiting-room. You see Jimmy's bloodhound wanted to see what the hen smelt like, and how it was getting on; but the hen was not quite herself that day, and would keep on flying about the waiting-room at Faithful, just to try and vex him.