It was Joshua Beakbane.
I never experienced greater agony than in that waking moment, and until the man spoke, thereby convincing me by the tones of his voice that he was no spirit my mental suffering passes possibility of description in words.
"A fellow-traveller need not surprise you, sir," he said. "I got in at Crewe, and you were sleeping so soundly that I did not wake you. I took the liberty of reading your evening paper, however, and also gave myself a little light."
He was alive, and had quite failed to recognize me. I thanked him in as gruff a voice as I could assume and looked at my watch. We had been gone from Crewe above half an hour, and should be due at Wigan, our next stopping-place, in about twenty minutes.
Joshua Beakbane was a tall, heavily-built man, with a flat, broad face, and a mouth that hardly suggested his great strength of purpose. His heavy moustache was inclined to reddishness, and his restless eyes had also something of red in them. He was clad in a loud tweed, with ulster and hat of the same material. The man had, moreover, aged much since I last saw him about five years ago. Finding me indisposed to talk, he took a portmanteau from the hat-rail above him, unstrapped a railway rug, wound it about his lower limbs, and then fell to arranging such brushes, linen, and garments as the portmanteau contained.
My benumbed senses were incapable of advancing any reason for what I saw. Why had this man seen fit to declare himself dead? What was his business in the North? Was it possible that he could be in league with the runaway clerk? Had I in reality seen him lurking in the house at Petersham?
An explanation to some of these difficulties was almost immediately forthcoming—as villainous and shameful an explanation as ever unfortunate man stumbled upon. My enemy suddenly started violently, and glancing up, I found him staring with amazement and discomfort in his face at a paper that he held. Seeing me looking at him, he smothered his expression of astonishment and laughed.
"An infernal clerk of mine," he said, "has been using my business documents as he does my blotting-paper. He'll pay for this to-morrow."
For a brief moment Joshua Beakbane held the paper to the light, and what had startled him immediately did no less for me: it was a certain pencil portrait of the man himself on the back of a London and North-Western railway share certificate.
Some there are who would have tackled this situation with ease and perhaps come well out of it; but to me, that am a small and shiftless being at my best, the position I now found myself in was quite intolerable. I would have given half my slender annual salary for a stiff glass of brandy-and-water. The recent discovery paralyzed me. I made no question that Joshua Beakbane had at least his share of the plunder with him in the portmanteau; but how to take advantage of the fact I could not imagine. Silence and pretended sleep were the first moves that suggested themselves. A look or word or hint that could suggest to the robber I remotely fathomed his secret, would doubtless mean for me a cut throat and no further interest in "The Flying Scotsman."