a juncture with the line, and arranging the points as they had been before.  The sleepers had never been removed, and the rails, fish-plates and rivets were all ready, for we had taken them from a siding on the abandoned portion of the line.  With my small but competent band of workers, we had everything ready long before the special arrived.  When it did arrive, it ran off upon the small side line so easily that the jolting of the points appears to have been entirely unnoticed by the two travellers.

“Our plan had been that Smith, the stoker, should chloroform John Slater, the driver, so that he should vanish with the others.  In this respect, and in this respect only, our plans miscarried—­I except the criminal folly of McPherson in writing home to his wife.  Our stoker did his business so clumsily that Slater in his struggles fell off the engine, and though fortune was with us so far that he broke his neck in the fall, still he remained as a blot upon that which would otherwise have been one of those complete masterpieces which are only to be contemplated in silent admiration.  The criminal expert will find in John Slater the one flaw in all our admirable combinations.  A man who has had as many triumphs as I can afford to be frank, and I therefore lay my finger upon John Slater, and I proclaim him to be a flaw.

“But now I have got our special train upon the small line two kilometres, or rather more than one mile, in length, which leads, or rather used to lead, to the abandoned Heartsease mine, once one of the largest coal mines in England.  You will ask how it is that no one saw the train upon this unused line.  I answer that along its entire length it runs through a deep cutting, and that, unless someone had been on the edge of that cutting, he could not have seen it.  There was someone on the edge of that cutting.  I was there.  And now I will tell you what I saw.

“My assistant had remained at the points in order that he might superintend the switching off of the train.  He had four armed men with him, so that if the train ran off the line—­we thought it probable, because the points were very rusty—­we might still have resources to fall back upon.  Having once seen it safely on the side line, he handed over the responsibility to me.  I was waiting at a point which overlooks the mouth of the mine, and I was also armed, as were my two companions.  Come what might, you see, I was always ready.

“The moment that the train was fairly on the side line, Smith, the stoker, slowed-down the engine, and then, having turned it on to the fullest speed again, he and McPherson, with my English lieutenant, sprang off before it was too late.  It may be that it was this slowing-down which first attracted the attention of the travellers, but the train was running at full speed again before their heads appeared at the open window.  It makes me smile to think how bewildered they must have been.  Picture to