"You had better hurry, sir," said the clerk, "if you want to catch the 4:5."
I hurried off, followed by a porter.
"Any luggage, sir?"
"No."
"What class, sir?"
"First."
"Not that way, sir," said the porter; "the train goes from this platform."
He showed me to the carriage and thanked me for the tip. I had barely time to take my seat before the train started.
Being the only passenger in the carriage I could, without fear of interruption, deliver myself up wholly to my reflections. Needless to say, they were of the most melancholy nature. The incidents in my life which were in some way connected with my present position, rose to my memory with fatal clearness, and formed a chain of events which might have been forged by a spiritual agency bent upon my destruction. An inexorable fatality had attended all my actions, and used them as weapons against myself. In every instance the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming; my own bare, valueless word was the only testimony of my innocence. Additional support of this fatalistic theory was supplied in the course of my reflections. Taking out the watch I picked up on the stairs, I discovered that it was not my own. There was an inscription on the case: "To Louis from his Loving Mother." In the struggle Louis' watch had been torn from his pocket as well as my own, and it was now in my possession.
I argued out my position to a possible and logical point. As thus: The body of a murdered man having been found in the house an hour or so after my departure, the attention of the police was immediately directed to the early morning trains for London. At four o'clock, a gentleman, looking flurried and anxious, had presented himself at the ticket-office and paid a first-class fare to Euston. He was so agitated that it was with difficulty he gathered his change. He wore a long gray ulster coat and had no luggage—not even a bag, a most unusual circumstance. He betrayed his ignorance of the platform from which the London train started by proceeding in a wrong direction, and was set right by the porter; presumably, therefore, he was a stranger in Liverpool. Telegrams were at once dispatched to the stations en route, and to Euston, to detain the passenger unless he could give a satisfactory account of himself. His explanation affording grounds for suspicion, he was searched, and there was found upon him a watch with the inscription: "To Louis, from his Loving Mother." By his own previous admission, his name was not Louis. Questioned as to how he came into possession of the watch, he gave no answer. There was also found upon his person a leather sheath, into which a gold-digger's knife with which the fatal wound had been inflicted exactly fitted.