the line to which
your telegrams were forwarded, and where the fugitives will have been
surrounded. Stand back there!"

The three of them--the station-master, the police inspector, and the
trembling manager of the sugar factory--stood on the platform and
watched the train as it ran through the station at moderate speed; and
then, thinking nothing more of it, waited for that other one, the smoke
from the engine of which was already visible in the distance. Nor need
we describe how the inspector--determined upon a capture, confident,
indeed, that his telegrams had produced that result, and already
bursting with triumph and rehearsing the terrible things that he would
do to his captives--pounced upon the train, ran from carriage to
carriage, and eagerly interrogated the officials. Imagine his rage,
his mortification, his disappointment, when he was informed that no
such people as the three whose description he had sent could be found
upon the train going westward.

"Not search the train completely!" shouted an official whom he had
questioned, and who, being of sufficient rank himself and of equal
importance with the inspector, was not to be easily frightened. "How
then? Is a police inspector the only individual capable of searching
for spies and discovering them? Is everyone on the line a fool, then,
unless he be a policeman? You'll tell us soon that we don't know our
own business; as if, indeed, it were possible to miss three such people
as you described, or even one of them, particularly when one knows that
there were few passengers on the train in question."

It was of no use shouting back at the man; it was of no use engaging in
a wordy quarrel with him; and of little service to take note of the
covert smiles of the station-master and the sidelong winks he directed
at the manager of the sugar factory--a manager now wonderfully
transformed--the worthy Herr Winterborgen, who was even smiling.
Slowly, little by little, arrogance oozed out of every pore of that
perspiring police inspector, and presently he took himself off to his
car and drove furiously away, wishing that he had never had this case
to investigate, and that, wherever the escaping prisoners were, someone
would shoot them.

Meanwhile, let us glance into one of the carriages of that train--that
special which had bustled through the station while the inspector was
waiting. In one of the compartments sat an aged man, with a Homberg
hat of ridiculous