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Updated: May 17, 2025
But no one answered. The signal-box stood quiet as an empty nursery, and the handrail of its steps was hot to the hands of the children as they climbed softly up. They peeped in at the open door. The signalman was sitting on a chair tilted back against the wall. His head leaned sideways, and his mouth was open. He was fast asleep. "My hat!" cried Peter; "wake up!"
An engine puffed and snorted into the station, leaving its pennant of white smoke in the air. Through the glass walls of the signal-box above the bridge Drake could see the men in a blaze of light working at the levers, and from the Surrey end there came to him a clink, and at that distance a quite musical clink, of truck against truck as some freight-train was shunted across the rails.
Manila has an up-to-date American fire department, but even there, with water mains and a signal-box system for alarms, a fire once started in a nipa district in the dry season can seldom be checked until the neighborhood is clean swept. In the provinces, where there is not so much as a bucket brigade, the first alarm sends everybody's heart into his mouth.
He was gazing disconsolately at his trunk, which had taken upon itself a human loneliness in the emptiness of the place, when a railway porter stepped out of the solitary signal-box, where he had evidently been performing a double function, and lounged with exasperating deliberation towards him.
Never before had they passed close enough to a signal-box to be able to notice the wires, and to hear the mysterious 'ping, ping, followed by the strong, firm clicking of machinery. The very sleepers on which the rails lay were a delightful path to travel by just far enough apart to serve as the stepping-stones in a game of foaming torrents hastily organised by Bobbie.
Shovelin went to a corner of the room, which might be called his signal-box, having a little row of port-holes like a toy frigate or accordion, and there he made sounds which brought steps very promptly, one clerk carrying a mighty ledger, and the other a small strong-box. "No plate," Major Hockin whispered to me, shaking his gray crest with sorrow; "but there may be diamonds, you know, Erema.
A group of loafers lay sleeping on their stomachs in the shade. A slow-moving vehicle drove past and disappeared round the corner. A dog came stepping up lazily and went and lay under the sunflowers near the signal-box, blinking his eyes. There was nothing more that moved.
I was so intent on looking for the telegraphic signal-box, that I had quite forgotten the intended explosion, until I heard a cry of "Run, run!" from those outside, who had lighted the train. I was at that moment on the wall of the fort, nearly thirty feet high, but sloping.
It is the idea that some things are not poetical which is literary, which is a mere product of words. The word "signal-box" is unpoetical. But the thing signal-box is not unpoetical; it is a place where men, in an agony of vigilance, light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death.
The road took me round to the other side of the town, and just when I was beginning to think I had a fair chance I saw before me the lights of a signal-box and a little to the left of it the lights of the station. In half an hour's time the Edinburgh train would be leaving, but I had made that impossible.
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