Part 18 (1/2)

'Of course I know a Star Cave,' he said at length, when Jimbo had finished his recitation, and Monkey had added the details their father had told them. 'I know the very one your Daddy spoke about. It's not far from where we're sitting. It's over there.' He pointed up to the mountain heights behind them, but Jimbo guided his hand in the right direction--towards the Boudry slopes where the forests dip upon the precipices of the Areuse.

'Yes, that's it--exactly,' he said, accepting the correction instantly; 'only _I_ go to the top of the mountains first so as to slide down with the river of starlight.'

'We go straight,' they told him in one breath.

'Because you've got more star-stuff in your eyes than I have, and find the way better,' he explained.

That touched their sense of pity. 'But you can have ours,' they cried, 'we'll share it.'

'No,' he answered softly, 'better keep your own. I can get plenty now.

Indeed, to tell the truth--though it's a secret between ourselves, remember--that's the real reason I've come out here. I want to get a fresh supply to take back to London with me. One needs a fearful lot in London----'

'But there's no sun in London to melt it,' objected Monkey instantly.

'There's fog though, and it gets lost in fog like ink in blotting- paper. There's never enough to go round. I've got to collect an awful lot before I go back.'

'That'll take more than a week,' she said triumphantly.

They fastened themselves closer against him, like limpets on a rock.

'I told you there was lots to do here,' whispered Monkey again.

'You'll never get it done in a week.'

'And how will you take it back?' asked Jimbo in the same breath. The answer went straight to the boy's heart.

'In a train, of course. I've got an express train here on purpose----'

'The ”Rapide”?' he interrupted, his blue eyes starting like flowers from the earth.

'Quicker far than that. I've got----'

They stared so hard and so expectantly, it was almost like an interruption. The bird paused in its rus.h.i.+ng song to listen too.

'----a Starlight Express,' he finished, caught now in the full tide of fairyland. 'It came here several nights ago. It's being loaded up as full as ever it can carry. I'm to drive it back again when once it's ready.'

'Where is it now?'

'Who's loading it?'

'How fast does it go? Are there accidents and collisions?'

'How do you find the way?'

'May I drive it with you?'

'Tell us exactly everything in the world about it--at once!'

Questions poured in a flood about him, and his imagination leaped to their answering. Above them the curtain of the Night shook out her million stars while they lay there talking with bated breath together.

On every single point he satisfied them, and himself as well. He told them all--his visit to the Manor House, the sprites he found there still alive and waiting as he had made them in his boyhood, their songs and characters, the Dustman, Sweep, and Lamplighter, the Laugher, and the Woman of the Haystack, the blue-eyed Guard----