It was a week later that Mrs. Viney remarked to Mother how well this
last lot of coal was holding out.

The children hugged themselves and each other in complicated
wriggles of silent laughter as they listened on the stairs. They
had all forgotten by now that there had ever been any doubt in
Peter's mind as to whether coal-mining was wrong.

But there came a dreadful night when the Station Master put on a
pair of old sand shoes that he had worn at the seaside in his summer
holiday, and crept out very quietly to the yard where the Sodom and
Gomorrah heap of coal was, with the whitewashed line round it. He
crept out there, and he waited like a cat by a mousehole. On the
top of the heap something small and dark was scrabbling and rattling
furtively among the coal.

The Station Master concealed himself in the shadow of a brake-van
that had a little tin chimney and was labelled:--

G. N. and S. R.
34576
Return at once to
White Heather Sidings

and in this concealment he lurked till the small thing on the top of
the heap ceased to scrabble and rattle, came to the edge of the
heap, cautiously let itself down, and lifted something after it.
Then the arm of the Station Master was raised, the hand of the
Station Master fell on a collar, and there was Peter firmly held by
the jacket, with an old carpenter's bag full of coal in his