'No. That someone else.'
'Who is it?'
'I don't know.'
'Like me?'
'I don't know. I never saw the face. The left arm is across the face, and the right
arm is waved. Violently waved. This way.'
I followed his action with my eyes, and it was the action of an arm gesticulating
with the utmost passion and vehemence: 'For God's sake clear the way!'
'One moonlight night,' said the man, 'I was sitting here, when I heard a voice cry
"Halloa! Below there!" I started up, looked from that door, and saw this Some one
else standing by the red light near the tunnel, waving as I just now showed you.
The voice seemed hoarse with shouting, and it cried, "Look out! Look out!" And
then again "Halloa! Below there! Look out!" I caught up my lamp, turned it on red,
and ran towards the figure, calling, "What's wrong? What has happened?
Where?" It stood just outside the blackness of the tunnel. I advanced so close
upon it that I wondered at its keeping the sleeve across its eyes. I ran right up at
it, and had my hand stretched out to pull the sleeve away, when it was gone.'
'Into the tunnel,' said I.
'No. I ran on into the tunnel, five hundred yards. I stopped and held my lamp
above my head, and saw the figures of the measured distance, and saw the wet
stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the arch. I ran out again,
faster than I had run in (for I had a mortal abhorrence of the place upon me), and
I looked all round the red light with my own red light, and I went up the iron ladder
to the gallery atop of it, and I came down again, and ran back here. I telegraphed
both ways, "An alarm has been given. Is anything wrong?" The answer came
back, both ways: "All well."'
Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine, I showed him
how that this figure must be a deception of his sense of sight, and how that
figures, originating in disease of the delicate nerves that minister to the functions
of the eye, were known to have often troubled patients, some of whom had
become conscious of the nature of their affliction, and had even proved it by
experiments upon themselves. 'As to an imaginary cry,' said I, 'do but listen for a
moment to the wind in this unnatural valley while we speak so low, and to the wild
harp it makes of the telegraph wires!'
That was all very well, he returned, after we had sat listening for a while, and he
ought to know something of the wind and the wires, he who so often passed long
82