"'Here's something to keep you quiet, my friend,' he said derisively.
"Those were the last words I heard. There followed the sickly smell of chloroform, the insufferable sense of suffocation, and then a blank unconsciousness, drifting into weird and wonderful dreams. At last—after how long a period I cannot say—consciousness and recollection stole back to me together. I grasped the meaning of the incessant rattling and jolting which had been with me in my dreams, and still continued now that all my faculties were once more awakened.
"'The fiends!' I ejaculated, as the awful truth came home to me. The Third Section had kidnapped me and locked me in the coffin, for the purpose of conveying me back to Russia, where, without doubt, the hangman's rope awaited me. They had forged the death certificate in order to be able to pass the coffin, without question or investigation, through the various custom-houses. It was a better fate than being buried alive, as I had expected; but only because it gave the chapter of accidents an opening.
"'Let me out! I have no business here. I am Jean Antoine Stromboli Kosnapulski.'
"But no answer came. If any sound had issued from my narrow prison, the rumbling of the train had drowned it. If I were ever to get out of it, I must find the way myself, by my own strength and ingenuity.
"By luck my hands were not so securely fastened as they might have been. Confident in the strength of the coffin itself, my captors had evidently been guilty of carelessness in this respect. I was able to get my hands to my mouth, and, after half an hour's patient work, to undo the knot with my teeth.
"'Now let me see if they have left me any sort of tool,' I said to myself.
"So I first rescued my feet from their bonds and then fumbled in my pockets. The fools had not taken the trouble to empty them, thinking, no doubt, that it would be time enough to do this when I reached my destination; but they contained little enough, all the same. A few coins, a few notes of the Geneva Bank, a box of matches, some letters, a key, a small pocket-knife, and a cigar-case—such was the full list of the implements that I had to work with.
"'First for the cigar-case,' I mused. 'If only I knew whether that was the bomb cigar-case!'
"For I knew that, in one of my cigar-cases, I had packed one of my noisy but harmless bombs; though whether it was in the one that I had in my pocket, or in the one that I had left upon the mantelpiece, I could not recollect. In the former event my course was clear. I had only to wait until the train stopped and then fire it. The terrific din would doubtless break the drums of both my ears; the flame might even scorch my face. But at least the train would be searched after the explosion, and when smoke was seen issuing from the coffin, through the breathing-holes that had been bored for me, it would be opened.