ly. "Why, wot's wrong?" he added,
for a tragic cry had broken from the engineer.

"Mate," he stammered tremulously, "where did you keep your policy?"

"Meanin' the bit o' blue-printed paper I 'ad from the Popular Thrifty?
Wot do you want to know for?" snapped the stoker suspiciously.

"It just come into my 'ead to arsk," said the engineer, in faltering
accents.

"In my little locker in the van, since you're so curious," said the
stoker grudgingly.

"I 'ad mine stitched up in the piller o' my bunk with my Post Office
Savin's book," said the engineer in the deep, hollow voice of a funeral
bell. "An' it's burned to hashes, an' so is yours!"

"Then it's nineteen to one the company won't pay up," said the stoker
after an appalled silence.

"Ten 'underd to one," groaned the engineer.

Another blank silence was broken by the stoker's saying, with a savage
oath:

"I wish that boy was alive, I do."

"I know your feeling," agreed the engineer sympathetically. "It 'ud be
a comfort to you to kick 'im--or any-think else weak and small wot
didn't durst to kick back."

"If I was to give you a bounce on the jor," inquired the stoker,
breathing heavily, "should you 'ave the courage to land me another?"

The engineer promptly hit out in the darkness, and arrived safe home on
the stoker's chin. With a tiger-like roar of fury, the stoker charged,
and on the engineer's dodging conjecturally aside, fell heavily over the
parish boundary-stone. He rose, foaming, and a pitched battle ensued, in
which the combatants saw nothing but the brilliant showers of stars
evoked by an occasional head-blow, and the general advisability of
homicide. Toward dawn fatigue overcame them. The stoker lay down and
declined to get up again and the engineer even while traveling on all
fours in search of him, lost consciousness in slumber.

A yellow glare in the east heralded the rising of the orb of day, as the
figures of an aged man and a ragged boy moved from the shelter of the
belt of elms that screened the village of Dorton Ware, and proceeded
along the right-of-way.

"It's burned, right enough, Billy, my boy," said the old man, shading
his bleared eyes with his horny hand as he gazed at the blackened
skeleton of the living-van. "An' all considered, you can't be called to
blame."

Billy whistled.

"If you'd bin asleep inside the van when that theer blaze got started,"
said old Abey, rebukingly, as he hobbled along by the boy's side, "you
wo