‘No, I don’t,’ said Anne.
‘Well,’ said Mr Luffy, ‘under this big moor run two or three long tunnels to take trains from one valley to
another. Didn’t you know? They make the rumbling noise you heard, and the sudden smoke you saw was the smoke sent up by a train below. There are big vent-holes here and there in the moor for the smoke to escape from.’
‘Oh, good gracious me!’ said Anne, going rather red. ‘I didn’t even know there were trains under here. What an extraordinary thing! I really did think I was sitting on a volcano, Mr Luffy. You won’t tell the others will you. They would laugh at me dreadfully.’
‘I won’t say a word,’ said Mr Luffy. ‘And now I think we’ll go back. Have you had breakfast? I’m terribly hungry. I went out early after a rather rare butterfly I saw flying by my tent.’
‘We’ve had breakfast ages ago,’ said Anne. ‘But if you like to come back with me now I’ll cook you some bacon, Mr Luffy. And some tomatoes and fried bread.’
‘Aha! It sounds good,’ said Mr Luffy. ‘Now – not a word about volcanoes. That’s our secret.’
And off they went to the tents, where the others were wondering what in the world had become of Anne. Little did they know she had been ‘sitting on a volcano’!
4 Spook-trains
The boys and George were full of talk about the farm. ‘It’s a nice little place,’ said Julian, sitting down while Anne began to cook breakfast for Mr Luffy. ‘Pretty farmhouse, nice little dairy, well-kept sheds. And even a grand piano in the drawing-room.’
‘Gracious! You wouldn’t think they’d make enough money to buy a thing like that, would you?’ said Anne, turning over the bacon in the pan.
‘The farmer’s got a fine car,’ went on Julian. ‘Brand new. Must have cost him a pretty penny. His boy showed it to us. And he showed us some jolly good new farm machinery too.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Mr Luffy. ‘I wonder how they make their money, farming that bit of land? The last people were hard-working folk, but they certainly couldn’t have afforded a new car or a grand piano.’
‘And you should have seen the lorries they’ve got!’ said Dick. ‘Beauties! Old army ones, I should think. The boy said his father’s going to use them for carting things from the farm to the market.’
‘What things?’ said Mr Luffy, looking across at the little farmhouse. ‘I shouldn’t have thought they needed an army of lorries for that! An old farm wagon would carry all their produce.’
‘Well, that’s what he told us,’ said Dick. ‘Everything certainly looked very prosperous, I must say. He must be a jolly good farmer.’
‘We got eggs and butter and fruit, and even some bacon,’ said George. ‘The boy’s mother didn’t seem worried about how much we had, and she hardly charged us anything. We didn’t see the farmer.’
Mr Luffy was now eating his breakfast. He was certainly very hungry. He brushed away the flies that hung round his head, and when one settled on his right ear he waggled it violently. The fly flew off in surprise.
‘Oh, do that again!’ begged Anne. ‘How do you do it? Do you think if I practised hard for weeks I could make my ear move?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Mr Luffy, finishing his breakfast. ‘Well, I’ve got some writing to do now. What are you going to do? Go for a walk?’
‘We might as well take a picnic lunch and go off somewhere,’ said Julian. ‘How about it?’
‘Yes,” said Dick. ‘Can you pack us dinner and tea, Anne? We’ll help. What about hard-boiled eggs?’
It wasn’t long before they had a picnic meal packed in greaseproof paper.
‘You won’t get lost, will you?’ said Mr Luffy.
‘Oh no, sir,’ said Julian, with a laugh. ‘I’ve got a compass, anyway, and a jolly good bump of locality, too. I usually know the way to go. We’ll see you this evening, when we get back.’
‘You won’t get lost, Mr Luffy, will you?’ asked Anne, looking worried.
‘Don’t be cheeky, Anne,’ said Dick, rather horrified at Anne’s question. But she really meant it. Mr Luffy was so absent-minded that she could quite well picture him wandering off and not being able to find his way back.
He smiled at her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I know my way about here all right-I know every stream and path and er-volcano!’
Anne giggled. The others stared at Mr Luffy, wondering what in the world he meant, but neither he nor Anne told them. They said goodbye and set off.
‘It’s heavenly walking today,’ said Anne. ‘Shall we follow a path if we find one or not?’
‘Might as well,’ said Julian. ‘It’ll be a bit tiring scrambling through heather all the day.’
So when they did unexpectedly come across a path they followed it. ‘It’s just a shepherd’s path, I expect,’ said Dick. ‘I bet it’s a lonely job, looking after sheep up on these desolate heathery hills.’
They went on for some way, enjoying the stretches of bright heather, the lizards that darted quickly away from their feet and the hosts of butterflies of all kinds that hovered and fluttered. Anne loved the little blue ones best and made up her mind to ask Mr Luffy what all their names were.
They had their lunch on a hill-top overlooking a vast stretch of heather, with grey-white blobs in it here and there – the sheep that wandered everywhere.
And, in the very middle of the meal, Anne heard the same rumbling she had heard before, and then, not far off, out spouted some white smoke from the ground. George went quite pale. Timmy leapt to his feet, growling and barking, his tail down. The boys roared with laughter.
‘It’s all right, Anne and George. It’s only the trains underground here. We knew they ran under the moors and we thought we’d see what you did when you first heard them rumbling, and saw the smoke.’
‘I’m not a bit frightened,’ said Anne, and the boys looked at her, astonished. It was George who was the scared one! Usually it was quite the other way round.
George got back her colour and laughed. She called Timmy. ‘It’s all right, Tim. Come here. You know
what trains are, don’t you?’
The children discussed the trains. It really did seem strange to think of trains in those hollowed-out tunnels down below the moors – the people in them, reading their newspapers and talking – down in tunnels where the sun never shone at all.
‘Come on,’ said Julian, at last. ‘Let’s go on. We’ll walk to the top of the next slope, and then I think we ought to turn back.’
They found a little path that Julian said must be a rabbit-path, because it was so narrow, and set off, chattering and laughing. They climbed through the heather to the top of the next slope. And at the top they got quite a surprise.
Down in the valley below was a silent and deserted stretch of railway lines! They appeared out of the black hole of a tunnel-mouth, ran for about half a mile, and then ended in what seemed to be a kind of railway yard.
‘Look at that,’ said Julian- ‘Old derelict lines – not used any more, I should think. I suppose that tunnel’s out of date, too.’
‘Let’s go down and have a squint,’ said Dick. ‘Come on! We’ve got plenty of time, and we can easily go back a shorter way.’
They set off down the hill to the lines. They arrived some way from the tunnel-mouth, and followed the lines to the deserted railway yard. There seemed to be nobody about at all.
‘Look,’ said Dick, ‘there are some old wagons on that set of lines over there. They look as if they haven’t been used for a hundred years. Let’s give them a shove and set them going!’
‘Oh, no!’ said Anne, afraid. But the two boys and George, who had always longed to play about with
real railway trucks, ran over to where three or four stood on the lines. Dick and Julian shoved hard at one. It moved. It ran a little way and crashed into the buffers of another. It made a terrific noise in the silent yard.
A door flew open in a tiny hut at the side of the yard, and a terrifying figure came out. It was a one-legged man, with a wooden peg for his other leg, two great arms that might quite well belong to a gorilla, and a face as red as a tomato, except where grey whiskers grew.
He opened his mouth and the children expected a loud and angry yell. Instead out came a husky, hoarse whisper:
‘What you doing? Ain’t it bad enough to hear spook-trains a-running at night, without hearing them in the daytime, too?’