He felt shaken by this, but he made his way doggedly along the loose ballasted walk, through the dark, still night, trying not to think of what he was doing; nevertheless, he still counted the gaunt telegraph posts, and told each of them its number. He had been walking, he thought, about an hour and a half, when he saw specks of coloured lights in the distance, and he knew that he was nearing a station. From thence he would have to branch off to the right.
“I’m getting on a fair treat,” he said, cheerfully.
At Paddock Wood, noise and commotion that were grateful after the silence of the walk. Goods trains blundering about in sidings and excited men with lamps begging them to be reasonable, but the trucks of goods trains declining to listen to advice, and quarrelling and nudging and punching and shoving each other in a great state of ill-temper. Engines, on the earnest appeal of the men with lamps, hurried to restore order, and the occasion being one demanding drastic remedy, half a dozen specially quarrelsome trucks were selected for punishment, a masterful engine drew them out on a middle line, and when one of the men with lamps had uncoupled them, the engine made a sudden rush and sent them all flying away into a distant siding where they could no longer interfere with the general order. Something of quiet ensuing upon this, the engine-drivers drank hot tea out of tin cans, and the shunters with lamps made a hasty meal of thick bread and thick bacon—a meal interrupted by the arrival of a long, overgrown goods train, which insisted upon ridding itself of a dozen trucks, and went after a while with an exultant shriek at having got the best of somebody. Bobbie stood away from all this, watching it with great delight. He had begun to feel sleepy. This awakened him.
He went out through the flat, silent, straggling village, and found, by climbing a finger-post and striking a match, the direction that he had to take for Brenchley. There was a vague touch of lightness now in the starless sky; passing by the quick-set hedge, bordering a churchyard, he could see upright tombstones, dimly white, and the sight depressed the boy, for he knew that here were those whose memory to some was dear. The boy came to cross roads, and then found that his box of matches had disappeared through a hole in his frock-coat pocket. He sat down with his back against the post fixed in the grass triangle at the centre of the roads; before he had time to warn himself to keep awake, his eyes closed. He slept.
“Now, then!” said a voice. “Time all boys was out of bed.”
“It’s all right, mother,” said the boy sleepily. “I was just getting—”
He rubbed his eyes and looked around. Instead of the neat room with its red-counterpaned beds, and the mother of Collingwood Cottage shaking his shoulder—broad daylight and the open country. The person who had awakened him was a uniformed man, with a straight-peaked cap which bore the figure of a horse.
“Know where you are?” asked the uniformed man.
“Just beginning to guess,” said the boy blinking.
“Where you bound for?”