Come and see? Well! he could at least do that! He dashed out at the door, and, followed breathlessly by the baboo, cut across the line. As he did so a figure, crouching by the telegraph-office, ran towards the bridge end of the station. In the moonlight he saw the man's face, and recognised him as one of his butcher's gang.
He pulled up short, the consciousness that this was something in which he could be no mere onlooker, but one in which his part must be played as that man's superior officer, coming to him. And as he paused, looking down the narrowing ribbon of steel, he gave a quick gasp of comprehension. All lay silent, peaceful, but against the dark shadow of the pier-tower a darker shadow was rising, and below it that narrowing ribbon of steel ended sharp, square, as if cut off with a knife.
The drawbridge was being raised!
Yet above it the green light of safety, the signal 'Line clear, go ahead' shone bright, and was echoed from the faint moonshine and the deepening dark over the river.
And troops, in a special train, were almost due. At the very moment, indeed, a sudden ringing of an electric bell from the telegraph-office could be heard distinctly in the silence. The sound seemed to finish the baboo; he squatted down on the rails, murmuring, 'Oh, flag-station now! Oh, coming instanter! Oh, please, master, issue orders!'
No! not orders; something beyond orders surely! Who was it--was it he himself in a different life?--who had been through this before, with some one who had said, 'But we don't let 'em. No, sir! Two men, if they was men, 'ud keep that pier a Christian country for a tidy time.'
But he was only one, for that thing at his feet was not a man! The old north-country contempt for the down-country swept through Chris as fiercely as contempt for the east sometimes sweeps through the west; as, no doubt, it sweeps through the east for the west!
'How many were there?' he asked swiftly. 'Of the gang, I mean.'
'Too many,' moaned the baboo; 'oh, sir, too many for one poor man. Therefore vis et armis forced into telling truth on compulsion because, they knowing already of train and troops, little knowledge became dangerous thing causing grievous hurt.'
'How many?' reiterated Chris fiercely; 'don't "men in buckram"!' He could not help the quotation, even then.