"'When consciousness returned, and I was able to realise what had happened, I found myself lying on the sloping embankment of the line, where I had been laid by the men who had extricated me from the wrecked carriage. A yard or two away lay stretched the body of my travelling companion, stone dead. A little brandy, administered by I know not whom, revived me wonderfully, and thereupon I woke to the necessity of recovering my missing shorthand notes, which doubtless were somewhere among the débris of the carriage. Feeling still too shaken and bruised to go in search of them myself, I gave a platelayer half-a-crown to find them for me by the aid of his hand-lamp. After a quarter of an hour he returned with a jumble of loose papers, which he said were all that he could find. Without looking at them, I thrust them into my pocket, and it was not I after I reached home, some five or six hours later, and came to examine them, that I found among them the sheets which my dead travelling companion had been reading at the moment of the accident, which the platelayer, in ignorance of their not being my property, had rescued from the wreck together with my own.
"'For the time being I laid them aside, but later in the day, when my own work had been despatched, I sat down to read them; and next day, when I went down by train to attend the inquest to which I had been summoned as a witness, I took the papers with me. And now comes a very singular feature of the affair. The body of my travelling companion was never identified; nor, so far as I am aware, is it known to this day who he was; nor, beyond such information on the point as the railway-ticket found in one of his pockets afforded, whence he had come or for what place other than London--which is a big address--he was bound. He seemed to have been travelling without luggage of any kind; his linen was unmarked, and there was nothing whatever found on him by the aid of which his identity could be established. Under those circumstances, I kept the dead man's papers by me, saying no word about them to anybody. As a matter of course, I took the precaution of looking carefully through them with a view of ascertaining whether they furnished any clue to the personality of the writer, but none such could I find. When I tell you this, Mr. Winslade, you will at once understand in what light I regarded the MS. To me it seemed neither more nor less than a rather clever little magazine story--a piece of pure fiction, in point of fact. As such I read it, and such I should have still believed it to be but for what you have told me this evening.
"'Well, sir, some three or four months after the unknown writer of the MS. had been buried, I said to myself one day, "Why not write it out in my own hand, invent an ending to it, give it a name, and send it to one of the magazines? If it comes back it will only be one failure the more." And failures in that line were things to which I was becoming pretty well used.'
"Here I interrupted Mr. Timmins for the first time.
"'You say "invent an ending to it,"' I remarked. 'Had the MS., then, a different ending from that which it has in the printed story?'
"'I ought, perhaps, to have remarked before that it had no ending of any kind,' replied Timmins, 'but broke off abruptly at the bottom of a page. Whether the writer had never finished it, or whether, if a more thorough search had been made in the carriage, the continuation of it would have been found, I am, of course, unable to say. In any case, as far as I am concerned, unfinished it was; consequently all the latter part of the story, as printed, is from my pen.'
"I at once saw, how important a knowledge of this fact might prove to be, should the Loudwater Case ever come to be reopened. Laying the open periodical before him on the table, I said, 'Will you be good enough, Mr. Timmins, to point out the place where the original MS. left off, and your pen took up the running?'
"After drawing the magazine to him and casting his eye over the columns, he said presently, marking a certain place with his thumb-nail as he did so, 'Here is where the original writer ends and I begin.'
"'May I take it, then, as a fact that up to the point indicated by you the printed story follows exactly on the lines of the MS.?'
"'As nearly so as makes no matter. Here and there a word may have been changed or transposed, or the turn of a sentence altered, but it may be accepted as being to all intents and purposes a faithful copy of the MS.'