Now the engine-driver’s wife was going to the play that night, and he knew it.  She had met him at the station, and told him so, at midday.

But there was nobody to take the train on, if he stepped off the engine; for his fireman was a young hand, and had been learning his trade for less than three weeks.

So when the five minutes were up—­or rather, ten, for the porters were bewildered that night—­this man went on out of the station into the night.  Just beyond the station the theatre was plain to see, above the hill on his left, and the flames were leaping from the roof; and he knew that his wife was there.  But the train was never taken down more steadily, nor did a single passenger guess what manner of man was driving it.

At Drakeport, where his run ended, he stepped off the engine, walked from the railway-sheds to his mother-in-law’s, where he still lodged, and went up-stairs to his bed without alarming a soul.

In the morning, at the usual hour, he was down at the station again, washed and cleanly dressed.  His fireman had the Galloper’s engine polished, fired up, and ready to start.

“Mornin’,” he nodded, and looking into his driver’s eyes, dropped the handful of dirty lint with which he had been polishing.  After shuffling from foot to foot for a minute, he ended by climbing down on the far side of the engine.

“Oldster,” he said, “’tis mutiny p’raps; but s’help me, if I ride a mile longside that new face o’ your’n!”

“Maybe you’re right,” his superior answered wearily.  “You’d best go up to the office, and get somebody sent down i’ my place.  And while you’re there, you might get me a third-class for Lewminster.”

So this man travelled up to Lewminster as passenger, and found his young wife’s body among the two score stretched in a stable-yard behind the smoking theatre, waiting to be claimed.  And the day after the funeral he left the railway company’s service.  He had saved a bit, enough to rent a small cottage two miles from the cemetery where his wife lay.  Here he settled and tilled a small garden beside the high-road.

Nothing seemed to be wrong with the man until the late summer, when he stood before the Lewminster magistrates charged with a violent and curiously wanton assault.

It appeared that one dim evening, late in August, a mild gentleman, with Leghorn hat, spectacles, and a green gauze net, came sauntering by the garden where the ex-engine-driver was pulling a basketful of scarlet runners:  that the prisoner had suddenly dropped his beans, dashed out into the road, and catching the mild gentleman by the throat had wrenched the butterfly net from his hand and belaboured him with the handle till it broke.

There was no defence, nor any attempt at explanation.  The mild gentleman was a stranger to the neighbourhood.  The magistrates marvelled, and gave his assailant two months.

At the end of that time the man came out of gaol and went quietly back to his cottage.