“Woorow! Why that’s the other side of the county!” She looked at him aghast. “Do you mean to say that you walked to Woorow in your state? Really men oughtn’t to be allowed to run about loose.”
“I’ve run about loose since I was fourteen,” said he.
“And a pretty mess you seem to have made of it. And then what did you do?”
She took away the cup of Bovril and poached egg which he had devoured ravenously, to her womanly satisfaction, and handed him another. He continued his story, recounting it, between spoonfulls, in his imaginative way. When he found he could go no further he curled up to sleep in a wood. When things went wrong, he assured her, there was nothing like going to sleep in a wood. All the pixies and elves and rabbits and stoats and weasels came and sat round you in a magic circle, shielding you from harm. What would have happened to the Babes in the Wood, he cried, if it hadn’t been for the robins?
“I wonder what your temperature is,” said Mrs. Pettiland.
“Normal,” said he. “This is the first hour I’ve been normal for months.”
“I’ll take it before I leave you,” she said. “Well, you went to sleep?”
Yes. He slept like an enchanted dog. He woke up four hours afterwards to find it pouring with rain. What could he do? He had to get back. Walking, with his rotten old leg, was out of the question. In the daytime a decent looking pedestrian may have the chance of stopping a motoring Good Samaritan and, with a tale of sudden lameness, get a lift by the side of the chauffeur. But at night it was impossible. To stand with arresting arms outspread in front of the hell-lamps of an advancing car would be an act of suicidal desperation. No; he had returned by all sorts of stages. He had almost forgotten them. A manure cart had brought him some way. Then he had gone dot and carry one for a mile. Then something else. He could only hail slow moving traffic in the wet and darkness. Then he spent an endless time in the cab of a steam traction engine which he had abandoned on seeing a two-seater car with flaring head-lamps, stationed at a cottage gate.
“The old campaigner’s instinct, Mrs. Pettiland. What should it be but a doctor’s car, outside a poor little cottage? And as the head-lamps were pointing to where I had come from, I concluded he had drawn up and would turn round and go where I wanted to get to.”
“And was it a doctor?”