Was it joy or sorrow that I felt at the thought of that man buried somewhere in the shapeless mass of wood and iron?  It certainly was not unmixed sorrow.  On the contrary, I had a distinct feeling of elation at the thought that I was probably rid forever of this haunter of my peace, this menacing and mysterious existence which (if instinctive foreboding was to be trusted) had been about to cross and thwart and blast my own.

The men hammered and heaved and chopped and sawed, and while they were in the midst of the work some one took me by the sleeve and asked me to go and attend to the engine-driver and stoker, who were being carried into a waiting-room at the station.  It is symptomatic of the extraordinary confusion which reigns in these affairs that till that moment the question of the fate of the men in charge of the train had not even entered my mind, though I had of course noticed that the engine was overturned.  In the waiting-room it was discovered that two local doctors had already arrived.  I preferred to leave the engine-driver to them.  He was unconscious as he lay on a table.  The stoker, by his side, kept murmuring in a sort of delirium: 

“Bill, ’e was all dazed like—­’e was all dazed like.  I told him the signal wasn’t off.  I shouted to him.  But ’e was all dazed like.”

I returned to the train full of a horrible desire to see with my own eyes a certain corpse.  Bit by bit the breakdown gang had removed the whole of the centre part of the shattered carriage.  I thrust myself into the group, and—­we all looked at each other.  Nobody, alive or dead, was to be found.

“He, too, must have got out at Sittingbourne,” I said at length.

“Ay!” said the guard.

My heard swam, dizzy with dark imaginings and unspeakable suspicions.  “He has escaped; he is alive!” I muttered savagely, hopelessly.  It was as if a doom had closed inevitably over me.  But if my thoughts had been legible and I had been asked to explain this attitude of mine towards a person who had never spoken to me, whom I had seen but thrice, and whose identity was utterly unknown, I could not have done so.  I had no reasons.  It was intuition.

Abruptly I straightened myself, and surveying the men and the background of ruin lighted by the fitful gleams of lanterns and the pale glitter of a moon half-hidden by flying clouds, I shouted out: 

“I want a cab.  I have to catch the Calais boat.  Will somebody please direct me!”

No one appeared even to hear me.  The mental phenomena which accompany a railway accident, even a minor one such as this, are of the most singular description.  I felt that I was growing angry again.  I had a grievance because not a soul there seemed to care whether I caught the Calais boat or not.  That, under the unusual circumstances, the steamer would probably wait did not occur to me.  Nor did I perceive that there was no real necessity for me to catch the steamer.  I might just as well have spent the night at the Lord Warden, and proceeded on my journey in the morning.  But no!  I must hurry away instantly!