e done without danger of attracting attention, and now it
was merely a case of completing a juncture with the line, and arranging
the points as they had been before. The sleepers had never been
removed, and the rails, fish-plates and rivets were all ready, for we
had taken them from a siding on the abandoned portion of the line.
With my small but competent band of workers, we had everything ready
long before the special arrived. When it did arrive, it ran off upon
the small side line so easily that the jolting of the points appears to
have been entirely unnoticed by the two travellers.

"Our plan had been that Smith, the stoker, should chloroform John
Slater, the driver, so that he should vanish with the others. In this
respect, and in this respect only, our plans miscarried--I except the
criminal folly of McPherson in writing home to his wife. Our stoker did
his business so clumsily that Slater in his struggles fell off the
engine, and though fortune was with us so far that he broke his neck in
the fall, still he remained as a blot upon that which would otherwise
have been one of those complete masterpieces which are only to be
contemplated in silent admiration. The criminal expert will find in
John Slater the one flaw in all our admirable combinations. A man who
has had as many triumphs as I can afford to be frank, and I therefore
lay my finger upon John Slater, and I proclaim him to be a flaw.

"But now I have got our special train upon the small line two
kilometres, or rather more than one mile, in length, which leads, or
rather used to lead, to the abandoned Heartsease mine, once one of the
largest coal mines in England. You will ask how it is that no one saw
the train upon this unused line. I answer that along its entire length
it runs through a deep cutting, and that, unless someone had been on
the edge of that cutting, he could not have seen it. There WAS someone
on the edge of that cutting. I was there. And now I will tell you
what I saw.

"My assistant had remained at the points in order that he might
superintend the switching off of the train. He had four armed men with
him, so that if the train ran off the line--we thought it probable,
because the points were very rusty--we might still have resources to
fall back upon. Having once seen it safely on the side line, he handed
over the responsibility to me. I was waiting at a point which
overlooks the mouth of the mine, and I was also armed, as wer