"Twelve minutes ago, it was. I took the time then. He hit the grass bank and rolled. Shouldn't wonder if he's all right. Probably alive, anyhow."
"Why didn't you pull the communication cord?" asked the station-master, pompously stern.
Now Dick had forgotten the communication cord. But it would have been impossible for him to forget a few things he had once learned about railways.
He glanced at the guard, and found uneasiness in his eye.
"It's a slip carriage," he said, smiling, tolerantly superior. "Was the connection made?" he asked, looking hard in the guard's face.
The man flushed an awkward red. "No," he said. "'Tain't worth the trouble for the little bit of a journey before we slip her."
"Just so," said Dick, simultaneously. "So perhaps it'd be just as well for me not to have thought of the communication cord, eh?"
The station-master said nothing. But the guard looked as if there were gratitude in him somewhere.
"If the poor beggar's alive, he'll have gained by our not stopping, because he'll get a doctor and a stretcher all the quicker," Dick went on. "Now, I advise you to hold the fellow in this compartment here for your local police. Look at him. He's sat there like that ever since we ran in here. You can see he was in no hurry to give information concerning what had happened to his friend."
"No. But I heard a door bang. I looked out, but I heard nothing. The gentleman's quite right, though, about the two chaps scrambling in as we pulled out of Harthborough."
The station-master turned to Dick with a face diffidently serious.
"I'm afraid you ought to wait here, sir," he said.
"I know I ought not. Duty's duty, and you can't keep me, my good fellow," replied Dick, dredging the breast pocket of his coat and producing and opening his cigarette-case. "Here's my card. The address will always find me."
The station-master looked at the card, hesitating still, and turning it about in his fingers.
"I can uncouple the through carriage," he said.
"And I can move my party to another," Dick blandly retorted. "And you'll only inconvenience everybody up the line that meant to use it. See here, man; I'm witness of what was possibly an accident. I give you the information, and add my private opinion that it was something worse than an accident. That's all. It's up to you to put your police on the job, not to disturb a traveller that wasn't even in the man's compartment. Ask this fellow here, who _was_ in it. Most likely he's got no ticket, running it fine as they did at Harthborough. That'll give you reason enough to make him miss the train while one of your men's fetching a constable. And the constable won't let him out of sight till you've found the other man, alive or dead. But he won't object to waiting, unless he wants to rouse suspicion. Now I do object." And here Dick laughed. "Why," he went on, "with your way of doing things, they'd have to arrest a hundred witnesses every time a lorry ran into a lamp-post."