Chapter Three
THE CONSTABLE, for the moment, had utterly lost his nerve. He stood there in the great flaring roar of the gas mains with a dazed expression that was pitiful.
“Can you tell us anything about it?” Lord Barcombe asked.
“I was in Piccadilly,” was the reply. “Everything was perfectly quiet. and so far as I could see not a soul was in sight. Then I heard a funny rushing sound, just like the tear of an express train through a big, empty station. Yes, it was for all the world like a ghostly express train that you could hear and not see. It came nearer and nearer; the whole earth trembled just as if the train had gone mad in Piccadilly. It rushed past me down St. James’s Street, and after that there was an awful smash and a bang, and I was lying on my back in the middle of the roa
