The Duke of Paddington lay stunned and unconscious beneath the wreck of the first-class carriage.
There had been the period of waiting outside Paddington Station—his own great-grandfather had sold the ground on which it stood to the company—in the black fog of the winter's night.
Then there had come the lengthening roar of the approaching train, the shouts, the horrid crash of impact, the long tearing, ripping, grinding noise—and oblivion.
How long he had been unconscious the duke did not in the least know. He came back to life with that curious growing, widening sensation that a diver has when he is once more springing up through the water towards the surface, air, and light.
Then quite suddenly full consciousness returned—rather, he arrived at full consciousness. Everything was dark, pitch dark. His ears were full of a horrid clamour. A heavy, suffocating weight was pressing upon him.
He lay perfectly still for some moments endeavouring to recollect where he was and what had happened. Finally he remembered and realised that he was actually—he himself—a victim of one of those terrible railway accidents of which he had read so often in the newspapers with a careless word of pity, or perhaps, no emotion at all.
Another train had crashed into the Oxford express in the fog.
The duke moved his right arm, and found he could do so freely, except above his body, where the heavy something which was lying upon him prevented its passage. He strove to dislodge the weight, but was utterly unable to do so. He was, in fact, pinned beneath a mass of woodwork, which, while not pressing on him with more than a little of its weight, nevertheless kept him rigid upon his back without possibility of movement. His left arm he could not move at all. Curiously enough, the sensation of fear was entirely absent.
"I am in a deuce of a tight place," he thought of himself, and thought about himself in a strangely detached fashion as if he was thinking of another person.
"I am in a deuce of a tight place. What is to be done?"