“Is that C—?” I asked of a fellow-traveller.
“It is so! You should have gone in the back of the train if you wanted to stop there.”
Missed again! I grew desperate. The train was crawling along at a foot’s pace; my fellow-traveller was not a formidable one. I opened the door and jumped out on to the line.
I was uninjured, and C— was not a mile away. If I ran I might still be there to meet the back of the train and Michael McCrane.
But as I began to run a grating sound behind me warned me that the train had suddenly pulled up, and a shout proclaimed that I was being pursued.
Half a dozen passengers and the guard—none of them pressed for time—joined in the hue and cry.
What it was all about I cannot imagine; all I know is that that evening, in the meadows near C—, a wretched Cockney, in a battered chimney-pot hat, and carrying an umbrella, was wantonly run to earth by a handful of natives, and that an hour later the same unhappy person was clapped in the village lock-up for the night as a suspicious character! It had all been tending to this. Fate had marked me for her own, and run me down at last. Perhaps I was a criminal after all, and did not know it. At any rate, I was too fatigued to care much what happened. I “reserved my defence,” as they say in the police courts, and resigned myself to spend the night as comfortably as possible in the comparative seclusion of a small apartment which, whatever may have been its defects, compared most favourably with the cabin in which I had lain the night before.
It was about ten o’clock next morning before I had an opportunity of talking my case over with the inspector, and suggesting to him he had better let me go. He, good fellow, at once fell in with my wishes, after hearing my statement, and in his anxiety to efface any unpleasant impressions, I suppose, proposed an adjournment to the “Hotel” to drink “siccess to the ould counthree.”
The proposed toast was not sufficiently relevant to the business I had on hand to allure me, so I made my excuses and hastened to the telegraph office to ascertain whether they had any message for me there.
They had. It was from my manager, as I expected; but the contents were astounding—