“What do you mean, it gets you?” said George.

“Well, it may last for days,” said old Ben. “And if you’re lost on them moors, you’re lost proper, and you never come back. Ah, smile if you like, young sir, but I knows!” He went off into memories of long ago, looking down at his pipe. “Let’s see now, there was old Mrs Banks, who went bilberry-picking with her basket on a summer’s afternoon, and no one ever heard of her again, after the mist came down. And there was young Victor who played truant and went off to the moors, and the mist got him too.”

“I can see we’d better watch out for the mist if we go riding there,” said Dick. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“Yes. You keep your eyes skinned,” said old Ben. “Look away to the coast-side and watch there, that’s where it comes from. But there baint many mists nowadays, l don’t know for why. No, now I think on it, there haven’t been a mist, not a proper wicked one, for nigh on three years.”

“What I’d like to know is why was the name changed to Mystery Moor,” said Henry. “I can understand its being called Misty Moor, but now everyone calls it Mystery, not Misty.”

“Well now, that must have been about seventy years ago, when I were a bit of a boy,” said Ben, lighting his pipe and puffing hard. He was enjoying himself. He didn’t often get such an interested audience as this, five of them, including a dog who sat and listened too!

“That was when the Bartle Family built the little railway over the moor,” he began, and stopped at the exclamations of his five listeners.

“Ah! We wanted to know about that!”

“Oh! You know about the railway then!”

“Do go on!”

The blacksmith seemed to get some trouble with his pipe and pulled at it for an exasperatingly long time. George wished she was a horse and could stamp her foot impatiently!

“Well, the Bartle Family was a big one,” said Ben at last. “All boys, but for one ailing little girl. Big strong fellows they were, I remember them well. I was scared of them, they were so free with their fists. Well, one of them, Dan, found a mighty good stretch of sand out there on the moor...”

“Oh yes, we thought there might have been a sand-quarry,” said Anne. Ben frowned at the interruption.

“And as there were nine or ten good strong Bartles, they reckoned to make a fine do of it,” said Ben. “They got wagons and they went to and from the quarry they dug, and they sold their sand for miles around, good, sharp sand it were...”

“We saw some,” said Henry. “But what about the rails?”

“Don’t hurry him,” said Dick, with a frown.

“They made a mort of money,” said Ben, remembering. “And they set to work and built a little railway to carry an injin and trucks to the quarry and back, to save labour. My, my, that were a nine days’ wonder, that railway! Us youngsters used to follow the little injin, puffing along, and it were the longing of us all to drive it. But we never did. Them Bartles kept a big stick, each one of them, and they whipped the hide off any boy that got too near them. Fierce they were, and quarrelsome.”