Now that Taye went to the farm daily with his father and returned late in the evening, he had little or no time to mess around. However, he made it a habit to write a note to Daria everyday before he left the house for the farm. Kehinde was his messenger and she functioned effectively to the pleasure of his twin brother because she always made sure that the reply of the note was waiting for Taye by the time he returned from farm. Kehinde made it a point of duty to keep the flame of their love aglow despite the fact that Taye had confided in her that he strongly felt within himself that one day he would hear from Bose and they would resolve their differences. Kehinde persuaded her brother to keep on writing to Daria because if Taye suddenly cut her off, it would injure the girl's feelings and jeopardise the friendship between Daira and Kehinde.
The week ran rather fast in Taye's estimation because when the weekend came it amazed him as the news came at last with the Sunday papers that the school certificate result was out at last.
In the report, the percentage of failures had risen sharply over that of previous year, with the percentage credit pass in Mathematics below thirty but over seventy percent passed with the credit grade in English Language.
Taye prayed silently to be one of the lucky seventy plus who made it in English. As for Kehinde she had lost appetite for food when she heard about the release of WASCE result.
Arrangement was made for Taye to travel down South immediately because Christmas was only twelve days away so that he would meet the principal and the non-teaching staff at his school. Taye packed his bag as usual, but one thing dear to him which he remembered to put in the bag is the newspaper in which he saw Bose in a pose with the victorious Under Seventeen Nigerian soccer team - the Golden Eaglets.
Taye slept fitfully that night and was up before five in the morning. The train from Kano to Lagos would be due at the Kaduna junction station at 13.15 hours and he left for the station by noon. Mama and the kids were the only ones left in the house. Kehinde had left in the company of their father to check her own result. Taye had thought they would return before he would leave home but when he waited till mid-day he gave up and left for the station.
Mama and Idowu saw him off at the Kaduna North Railway Station near their house where he was just in time to board the twelve fifteen metro train.
The trains ran at an interval of fifteen minutes during the day. Taye sat by the window near the place his mother and kid brothers stood at the end of the rail track, all of them waving frantically to each other until the metro train left the station.
The Lagos-bound train arrived on schedule at the Kaduna Junction Station. The early arrival of the train was a surprise to Taye who had experienced a record ten hours delay previously. The train wasted little time before it hurried out of the station. The journey to the South of Nigeria had begun.
Although Taye had collected second-class ticket money from his old man, he bought third-class ticket to Okuku where he planned to change line and travel East on the new electric trains. The rail line from Kaduna was constructed on a ground higher than the surroundings. This vantage position offered people in the moving train a world of scenic view. The grassland made it easy to see objects in the far distance. A few metres from the Kaduna Station, both sides of the railway were dotted with giant industries which included, the United Nigeria Textile Mills, the Nigeria Breweries, the Defence industries-where ammunition is manufactured, and the Peugeot Automobile Nigeria, the assembly plant on whose large parking lot hundreds of different models of newly assembled Peugeot cars seemed abandoned. They were painfully uncared for. If they had been parked where passerby could reach them, graffiti like "please wash me" would have been written on many of them. Taye longed for one. Any colour, but he would prepare a Peugeot 607 Automatic, with all the accessories. He soon realized he was day-dreaming when a hot breeze pungent with a foul odour blew across his face.
Taye just sat there gazing out of the window, the wind blowing in his face, He felt tried and the gentle sway of the moving train was even a bother to him. Taye wished for a nap but the noise of the engine and the cacophony of the wheels on the rail line made it impossible for him to even doze. To relieve his boredom Taye began a mind-game. Each time the train approached a level crossing or minor station, it hooted and Taye would say to himself as soon as he heard the hoot.
"If the hooting is repeated three times, I have made all my papers, but if the hooting was once I have failed".
For more than two hours, Taye kept watching and monitoring how many times the train hooted and related each occasion to what he would meet on getting to school. In the end, he could not decide which way because the train was not hooting two times. More often the hootings were as many as five times. Then he abandoned the silly idea of trying to use unrelated variable to divine something already decided. Nonetheless, his heart remained heavy. The train had chugged along only a few more kilometers when Taye brought out a coin from his pocket and tossed it up. He caught it in his tight palm and covered it with the left palm without looking at it. Then he looked straight in his front and said.
"Head, I pass; tail, no show". He then opened his palm to look at the coin just then the passenger sitting next to him shook him as the man turned to look at something of interest outside and the coin dropped from Taye's hand. The coin fell to the floor of the coach and rolled away. Attempts by all in the seats beside and opposite Taye's to retrieve the ten kobo coin filled. The coin was lost forever. Taye urged those helping him to forget it. He thanked them for their concern.
The lost coin introduced a new dimension to his thinking and suddenly he began to tremble and then started to hic-cup repeatedly. An Elderly woman sitting close to Taye offered him a cup of water which he accepted. It was not the lost coin that was bothering Taye but what he though the lost coin meant. He interrupted it to mean that his result might have been withheld.
"Why, why, me, why is all this happening to me", he said to himself quietly. Something told him from within that his result was not heth-held, because he reasoned that he had never heard that the result of his school had ever been with-held by the West African Examination Council.
Then the train hooted just once and slowed down. Taye's thoughts came around and he became conscious of his immediate environment. He looked round and saw that the train was filled to capacity. Last July, Taye had thought that the school vacation was responsible for the huge crowd on the train. "But what could have been the reason this time around?" he asked himself. The reason was not far-fetched as his active mind soon found the answer. It was the season of the year when Nigerian usually traveled to their villages to visit their kith and kin. Taye noticed also that there were some three youngsters, about his age, and a girl who appeared to be traveling down south. They were probably going to check their results too, he guessed. The four youths occupied two double seaths opposite each and from the way they were discussing freely, Taye reckoned they were traveling together. They occupied the extreme end of the compartment. The train sped on and Taye got fed up with the conversation of the people around him.