“My word!” he said at last. “I’ve never heard such things in my life before. Aren’t you lucky? You just go about having adventures all the time, don’t you? I say — do you think you’ll have one here, these hols?”

Julian laughed. “No. Whatever kind of adventure would there be on these lonely moorlands? Why, you yourself have lived here for three years, and haven’t even had a tiny adventure.”

Jock sighed. “That’s true. I haven’t.” Then his eyes brightened again. “But see here — what about those spook-trains you’ve been asking me about? Perhaps you’ll have an adventure with those?”

“Oh, no, I don’t want to,” said Anne, in a horrified voice. “An adventure with spook-trains would be simply horrid.”

“I’d like to go down to that old railway yard with you and see Wooden-Leg Sam,” said Jock longingly. “Why, that would be a real adventure to me, you know — just talking to a queer old man like that, and wondering if he was suddenly going to throw cinders at us. Take me with you next time you go.”

“Well — I don’t know that we meant to go again,” said Julian. “There’s really nothing much in his story except imagination — the old watchman’s gone queer in the head through being alone there so much, guarding a yard where nothing and nobody ever comes. He’s just remembering the trains that used to go in and out before the line was given up.”

“But the shepherd said the same as Sam,” said Jock. “I say — what about going down there one night and watching for a spook-train!”

“NO!” said Anne, in horror.

“You needn’t come,” said Jock. “Just us three boys.”

“And me,” said George at once. “I’m as good as any boy, and I’m not going to be left out. Timmy’s coming, too.”

“Oh, please don’t make these awful plans,” begged poor Anne. “You’ll make an adventure come, if you go on like this.”

Nobody took the least notice of her. Julian looked at Jock’s excited face. “Well,” he said, “if we do go there again, we’ll tell you. And if we think we’ll go watching for spook-trains, we’ll take you with us.”

Jock looked as if he could hug Julian. “That’s wizard of you,” he said. “Thanks most frightfully. Spook-trains! I say, just suppose we really did see one! Who’d be driving it? Where would it come from?”

“Out of the tunnel, Wooden-Leg Sam says,” said Dick. “But I don’t see how we’d spot it, except by the noise it made, because apparently the spook-trains only arrive in the dark of the night. Never in the day-time. We wouldn’t see much, even if we were there.”

It was such an exciting subject to Jock that he persisted in talking about it all the afternoon. Anne got tired of listening, and went to sleep with Biddy’s puppy in her arms. Timmy curled up by George and went to sleep too. He wanted to go for a walk, but he could see that there was no hope with all this talking going on.