“Heads!” called the boy.
The next moment the paint-can came flying through the open window between Dick and Dorothea. The coil of rope whirled round and shot in after it. The door was opened and the boy flung himself in head first and landed on all fours.
Dorothea pulled the door to. Dick said: “They always like it shut,” and reached out and closed the handle.
The porter, left far behind, stopped running.
“Just in time,” said the boy. “I didn’t want to miss it. Lucky for me you had your window open.”
“Haven’t you hurt yourself?” said Dorothea.
“Not I,” said the boy, dusting his hands together, hands that looked so capable and hard-worked that Dick, at the sight of them, wanted to hide his own.
Dorothea looked at him while he picked up his paint-can, badly dinted but not burst, took his blocks and shackles and a packet of brass hinges and a bag of brass screws out of his pockets, to see that he had lost nothing by his fall, and then carefully re-coiled his shining new rope on the seat. He looked, she thought, most awfully strong, and his hands, and the blue knitted jersey, and those boots and rope and things made her almost think he might be a sailor, but his jacket was quite like Dick’s own, and his flannel shorts … hundreds of boys wore flannel shorts.
The train pulled out of Norwich, and Dick, looking from the window, noticed a bit of a ruin, with a narrow arch in it, left at the side of the line.
“Pretty old,” he said to Dorothea.
Dorothea, somehow feeling that this needed explaining to the strange boy, said, “Our father’s an archæologist.”
“Mine’s a doctor,” said the boy.
And then the train was running close beside the river, and they saw a steamer going down from Norwich. They crossed a bridge, and there was a river on both sides of the line, the old river on the left curving round by the village of Thorpe with crowds of yachts and motor boats tied up under the gardens, and, on the right, a straight ugly cutting. In another minute they had crossed the old river again, and the train was slowing up at a station. Close by, across a meadow, they could see a great curve of the river, and three or four houseboats moored to the bank, and a small yacht working her way up.
“Interested in boats?” said the boy, as the others hurried across the carriage.
“Yes, very much,” said Dorothea. “Last holidays we were in a houseboat frozen in the ice.”
“They’re always getting frozen in, houseboats,” said the boy. “Done much sailing?”
“We haven’t done any at all,” said Dick. “Not yet.”
“Except just once, on the ice, in a sledge,” said Dorothea.
“It wasn’t really sailing,” said Dick. “Just blowing along.”
“You’ll get lots of sailing at Wroxham,” said the boy, looking up at the big black and white labels on the two small suit-cases.
“We’re going to live in a boat,” said Dorothea. “She isn’t at Wroxham. She’s somewhere down the river.”
“What’s her name?” said the boy, “I know most of them.”
“We don’t know,” said Dorothea.
“Mine’s Titmouse. She’s a very little one, of course. But she’s got an awning. I slept in her last night. And she can sail like anything. This rope is for her. Blocks, too. And the paint. Birthday present. That’s why I’ve been into Norwich.”
Dick and Dorothea looked at the blocks and fingered the silky smoothness of the new rope. It certainly did seem that they had come to the right place to learn about sailing.
Dorothea already saw herself and Dick meeting Nancy and Peggy Blackett and the Walkers, too, with whom they had spent a happy month on the shores of a wintry lake, and surprising them with the news that she and Dick could count themselves sailors more or less. After that winter holiday they had set their hearts on learning, but it was no good going north at Easter, for the Blacketts were away with their uncle, and the Walkers were in the south with their father, who was home in England on leave. They had given up all hope of getting any sailing before the summer. And then, half-way through the Easter holidays, the letter from Mrs. Barrable had come in the very nick of time. Mrs. Barrable, long ago, had been Mrs. Callum’s school-mistress, but she painted pictures and was the sister of a very famous portrait painter. And she had written to Mrs. Callum to say that her brother and she had chartered a small yacht on the Norfolk Broads, and that her brother had had to go off to London to paint portraits of some important Indians, so that she was all alone in the boat with her pug-dog William, and that if Dick and Dorothea could be spared she would like to have their company. Just then they could very well be spared, as their father had to go to a conference of archæologists upon the Roman wall and, of course, wanted their mother to go with him. Everything had been arranged in a couple of days, and here they were, and already, before they had got to Wroxham, they had met this boy who seemed more of a sailor even than John or Nancy. Things were certainly coming out all right.
“Hullo,” said Dick, soon after they passed Salhouse Station. “There’s a heron. What’s he doing on that field where there isn’t any water?”
“Frogging,” said the strange boy, and then, suddenly, “Are you interested in birds, too?”
“Yes,” said Dick. “But there are lots I’ve never seen, because of living mostly in a town.”
“You don’t collect eggs?” said the boy, looking keenly at Dick.
“I never have,” said Dick.
“Don’t you ever begin,” said the boy. “If you don’t collect eggs, it’s all right … you see we’ve got a Bird Protection Society, not to take eggs, but to watch the birds instead. We know thirty-seven nests this year….”
“Thirty-seven?” said Dick.
“Just along our reaches…. Horning way….”
“Our boat’s near there,” said Dorothea.
“By the way,” said the boy, “you didn’t see two girls in this train—twins? No? They were in Norwich this morning, but I expect they drove back with their father. Otherwise they’d have come this way. We always do. Going by bus, you don’t see anything of the river worth counting.”
“There’s a hawk,” said Dick.
“Kestrel,” said the boy, looking at the bird hovering above a little wood. “Hullo! We’ll be there in a minute.”
The train was slowing up. It crossed another river, and for a moment they caught a glimpse of moored houseboats with smoke from their chimneys where people were cooking midday meals, an old mill, and a bridge, and a lot of masts beyond it. And then the train had come to a stop at Wroxham station.
The strange boy was looking warily out of the window.
On the platform he saw an old lady looking up at the carriage windows. He also saw the station-master. He chose his moment and, slipping down from the carriage with his paint-can and coil of rope, was hurrying off to give up his ticket to the collector at the gate. But the station-master was too quick for him.
“Hum,” he said, “I might have guessed it was you, when they rang me up from Norwich about a boy with a ticket for Wroxham jumping on the train after it had fairly got going. Told me to give you a good talking to. Well, don’t you do it again. Not broken any bones this time, I suppose?”
The boy grinned. He and the station-master were very good friends, and he knew that the railway officials in Norwich had not meant him to get off so easily.
“I was on the platform in time,” he said. “Only I was looking for Port and Starboard, and then