ow. 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 winter nights there, alone and watching. But he
would beg t
|