“Third return, Crinnock,” he said, loudly, tossing a shining new florin on to the counter.

At the sound of it the booking clerk half hesitated in stamping the ticket he held in his hand, glanced sharply at the florin, and hurriedly picking it up, scanned it closely.

“Bad ’un,” he said, shortly, handing it back to Bob.  “Ninepence, please.”  Then, seeing the look of blank dismay on Bob’s face, he added, “Been had?”

Bob’s cheeks were white, and his hand shaking, as he dived in his pocket for the other two florins,—­the only money he possessed in the world.  He saw himself tricked, cheated out of a day’s pleasure, made to look small in everyone’s eyes.

He turned out the two other florins upon the counter, and at the first ring of them on the wood he knew the truth, and his passion blazed out fiercely against the man who had fooled him under cover of the darkness.

“I’ll have the law of him!” he stammered, almost speechless with anger.  “I know where he is, or pretty near, and I’ll set the p’lice on him, I will.  Why—­why—­I might have been had up myself for trying to pass bad money!  Oh I’ll make him sorry he ever tried his games on me, I will!”

Back through the waiting crowd Bob elbowed his way, in search of a policeman.  His disappointment about the football match was swallowed up in his longing for revenge.

“Look here, bobby,” he said, going up to the constable who was standing on the platform to see the crowd off peacefully.  “Look at this!” thrusting the coins under his very nose.  “Bad money, that’s what ’tis,—­passed off on me last night!  But I know who done it, and where he is,—­leastways where he was last night, and he can’t have got so very far.  He’s Tom Smith, the hawker, and he’d got his van in a field nigh ’pon the top of Woodend Lane last night—­put it there without a with-your-leave or a by-your-leave!  Trespassing, that’s what he was, and that’s another thing you can have him up for.  He was there to kidnap a child and a dog what he said was his; but I’ll bet they wasn’t—­and that’s another thing against him.  Of course he’d move on as soon as he’d got the kid, but he can’t have got so very far with that old horse of his—­he looked as if he’d drop dead if he was made to go another mile.”

The policeman stayed to see the train depart with the crowd safely packed inside it, then turned away with Bob.  He was as anxious as Bob himself to follow up the case.  Policemen did not get much chance in little country places, and promotion came slowly.  “What was he giving you six shillings for?” he asked, as Bob and he trudged up the hill from the station.

Bob looked foolish.  “Oh—­for—­for showing him the way,” he stammered.

The policeman looked at him sharply.  “What way?” he asked.

“To—­to Woodend Lane,” he answered, shortly, wondering distractedly how he could avoid giving true explanations; but the policeman, to his relief, did not press the matter further, and whatever his thoughts were, he kept them to himself.