The Black Bag

by Louis Joseph Vance

He decided that it was his duty to remind himself, from time to time, that his main interest must be in the game itself, in the solution of the riddle; whatever should befall, he must look for no reward for his gratuitous and self-appointed part. Indeed he was all but successful in persuading himself that it was the fascination of adventure alone that drew him on.

Whatever the lure, it was inexorable; instead of doing as a sensible person would have done—returning to London for a long rest in his hotel room, ere striving to retrieve his shattered fortunes—Philip Kirkwood turned up the village street, intent only to find the railway station and catch the first available train for Sheerness, were that an early one or a late.

A hapchance native whom he presently encountered, furnished minute directions for reaching the Dockyard Station of the Southeastern and Chatham Rail-way, adding comfortable information to the effect that the next east-bound train would pass through in ten minutes; if Kirkwood would mend his pace he could make it easily, with time to spare.

Kirkwood mended his pace accordingly, but, contrary to the prediction, had no time to spare at all. Even as he stormed the ticket-grating, the train was thundering in at the platform. Therefore a nervous ticket agent passed him out a first-class ticket instead of the third-class he had asked for; and there was no time wherein to have the mistake rectified. Kirkwood planked down the fare, swore, and sprinted for the carriages.

The first compartment whose door he jerked violently open, proved to be occupied, and was, moreover, not a smoking-car. He received a fleeting impression of a woman's startled eyes, staring into his own through a thin mesh of veiling, fell off the running-board, slammed the door, and hurled himself to-wards the next compartment. Here happier fortune attended upon his desire; the box-like section was untenanted, and a notice blown upon the window-glass announced that it was "2nd Class Smoking." Kirkwood promptly tumbled in; and when he turned to shut the door the coaches were moving.

A pipe helped him to bear up while the train was making its two other stops in the Borough of Woolwich: a circumstance so maddening to a man in a hurry, that it set Kirkwood's teeth on edge with sheer impatience, and made him long fervently for the land of his birth, where they do things differently—where the Board of Directors of a railway company doesn't erect three substantial passenger depôts in the course of a mile and a half of overgrown village. It consoled him little that none disputed with him his lonely possession of the compartment, that he had caught the Sheerness train, or that he was really losing no time; a sense of deep dejection had settled down upon his consciousness, with a realization of how completely a fool's errand was this of his. He felt foredoomed to failure; he was never to see Dorothy Calendar again; and his brain seemed numb with disappointment.

Rattling and swaying, the train left the town behind.

Presently he put aside his pipe and stared blankly out at a reeling landscape, the pleasant, homely, smiling countryside of Kent. A deeper melancholy tinted his mind: Dorothy Calendar was for ever lost to him.

The trucks drummed it out persistently—he thought, vindictively: "Lost!... Lost!... For ever lost!..."

And he had made—was then making—a damned fool of himself. The trucks had no need to din that into his thick skull by their ceaseless iteration; he knew it, would not deny it....