“Well, it happens one day that I was alone at the station, when a quiet, gentlemanly sort of a fellow gets out, smiles, asks me some questions about the place, and chats pleasantly for a bit, says he means to have a ’tanical ramble—as he calls it—and finishes off by giving me arf-crown.
“Now, if I’d been as wide-awake as I should have been, I might have known as there was a screw loose. What should a strange gent give me arf a crown for if there wasn’t? But, bless you, clever and cunning as I thought myself, I was that innercent that I pockets the coin, grins to myself, and took no farther notice till, about arf an hour after, I happens to look along the up line, when I turns sick as could be; for I sees my gentleman walking between the rails, and the up express just within a few minutes of being due.
“Even then he’d so thrown me off my guard that I never thought no Wrong, only that he was looking on the railway banks for rhodum siduses, and plants of that kind.
“So I shouts to him—
“‘Get off that ’ere!’ and waves my hands.
“But he takes no notice; and then, all at once, just as the wind brought the sound of the coming express, if he didn’t go down flat, and lay his neck right on the off up-rail, ready for the engine-wheels to cut it off.
“It was like pouring cold water down my back, but I was man enough to act; and, running as hard as I could, I got up to where he lay—about three hundred yards from the station.
“I makes no more ado, but seizes his legs, and tries to drag him away; but he’d got tight hold of the rail with both hands—for it was where the ballast was dear away from it, to let the rain run off—and I couldn’t move him; ’sides which, he began to kick at me fierce, roaring at me to get away.
“Finding as I couldn’t move him, and the train coming nearer, and being afraid that I should get in danger myself if I got struggling with him, I thought I’d try persuasion.
“‘What are you going to do?’ I says.