He was heading straight for those gates, and the pantechnicon evidently had business within.  It jolted over the iron guard of the weighing-machine, and this jolt deflected it, so that instead of aiming at the gates it aimed for part of a gate and part of a brick pillar.  Denry ground his teeth together and clung to his seat.  The gate might have been paper, and the brick pillar a cardboard pillar.  The pantechnicon went through them as a sword will go through a ghost, and Denry was still alive.  The remainder of the journey was brief and violent, owing partly to a number of bags of cement, and partly to the propinquity of the canal basin.  The pantechnicon jumped into the canal like a mastodon, and drank.

Denry, clinging to the woodwork, was submerged for a moment, but, by standing on the narrow platform from which sprouted the splintered ends of the shafts, he could get his waist clear of the water.  He was not a swimmer.

All was still and dark, save for the faint stream of starlight on the broad bosom of the canal basin.  The pantechnicon had encountered nobody whatever en route.  Of its strange escapade Denry had been the sole witness.

“Well, I’m dashed!” he murmured aloud.

And a voice replied from the belly of the pantechnicon: 

“Who is there?”

All Denry’s body shook.

“It’s me!” said he.

“Not Mr Machin?” said the voice.

“Yes,” said he.  “I jumped on as it came down the street—­and here we are!”

“Oh!” cried the voice.  “I do wish you could get round to me.”

Ruth Earp’s voice.

He saw the truth in a moment of piercing insight.  Ruth had been playing with him!  She had performed a comedy for him in two acts.  She had meant to do what is called in the Five Towns “a moonlight flit.”  The pantechnicon (doubtless from Birmingham, where her father was) had been brought to her door late in the evening, and was to have been filled and taken away during the night.  The horses had been stabled, probably in Ruth’s own yard, and while the carmen were reposing the pantechnicon had got off, Ruth in it.  She had no money locked in her unlockable desk.  Her reason for not having paid the precious Mr Herbert Calvert was not the reason which she had advanced.

His first staggered thought was: 

“She’s got a nerve!  No mistake!”

Her duplicity, her wickedness, did not shock him.  He admired her tremendous and audacious enterprise; it appealed strongly to every cell in his brain.  He felt that she and he were kindred spirits.

He tried to clamber round the side of the van so as to get to the doors at the back, but a pantechnicon has a wheel-base which forbids leaping from wheel to wheel, especially, when the wheels are under water.  Hence he was obliged to climb on to the roof, and so slide down on to the top of one of the doors, which was swinging loose.  The feat was not simple.  At last he felt the floor of the van under half a yard of water.