For the first time in his life Kemp discovered that the hill-road was indescribably vast and desolate, and that the beginnings of the town far below at the hill foot were strangely remote.  Never had there been a slower or more painful method of progression than running.  All the gaunt villas, sleeping in the afternoon sun, looked locked and barred; no doubt they were locked and barred—­by his own orders.  But at any rate they might have kept a lookout for an eventuality like this!  The town was rising up now, the sea had dropped out of sight behind it, and people down below were stirring.  A tram was just arriving at the hill foot.  Beyond that was the police station.  Was that footsteps he heard behind him?  Spurt.

The people below were staring at him, one or two were running, and his breath was beginning to saw in his throat.  The tram was quite near now, and the “Jolly Cricketers” was noisily barring its doors.  Beyond the tram were posts and heaps of gravel—­the drainage works.  He had a transitory idea of jumping into the tram and slamming the doors, and then he resolved to go for the police station.  In another moment he had passed the door of the “Jolly Cricketers,” and was in the blistering fag end of the street, with human beings about him.  The tram driver and his helper—­arrested by the sight of his furious haste—­stood staring with the tram horses unhitched.  Further on the astonished features of navvies appeared above the mounds of gravel.

His pace broke a little, and then he heard the swift pad of his pursuer, and leapt forward again.  “The Invisible Man!” he cried to the navvies, with a vague indicative gesture, and by an inspiration leapt the excavation and placed a burly group between him and the chase.  Then abandoning the idea of the police station he turned into a little side street, rushed by a greengrocer’s cart, hesitated for the tenth of a second at the door of a sweetstuff shop, and then made for the mouth of an alley that ran back into the main Hill Street again.  Two or three little children were playing here, and shrieked and scattered at his apparition, and forthwith doors and windows opened and excited mothers revealed their hearts.  Out he shot into Hill Street again, three hundred yards from the tram-line end, and immediately he became aware of a tumultuous vociferation and running people.

He glanced up the street towards the hill.  Hardly a dozen yards off ran a huge navvy, cursing in fragments and slashing viciously with a spade, and hard behind him came the tram conductor with his fists clenched.  Up the street others followed these two, striking and shouting.  Down towards the town, men and women were running, and he noticed clearly one man coming out of a shop-door with a stick in his hand.  “Spread out!  Spread out!” cried some one.  Kemp suddenly grasped the altered condition of the chase.  He stopped, and looked round, panting.  “He’s close here!” he cried.  “Form a line across—­”