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.
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