half past eight
You may figure to yourself the hum of voices along the road in the gloaming ... . As yet , of course , few people in Woking even knew that the cylinder had opened , though poor Henderson had sent a messenger on a bicycle to the post office with a special wire to an evening paper . As these folks came out by twos and threes upon the open , they found little knots of people talking excitedly and peering at the spinning mirror over the sand-pits , and the newcomers were , no doubt , soon infected by the excitement of the occasion . By half past eight , when the Deputation was destroyed , there may have been a crowd of three hundred people or more at this place , besides those who had left the road to approach the Martians nearer . There were three policemen too , one of whom was mounted , doing their best , under instructions from Stent , to keep the people back and deter them from approaching the cylinder . There was some booing from those more thoughtless and excitable souls to whom a crowd is always an occasion for noise and horse-play . Stent and Ogilvy , anticipating some possibilities of a collision , had telegraphed from Horsell to the barracks as soon as the Martians emerged , for the help of a company of soldiers to protect these strange creatures from violence .