E. W. Hornung

“ But I could still smile grimly to myself. After all, I had ample evidences of a decent identity upon my person; but there might well be an unpleasant scene ere I could establish it, and I hate and dread unpleasant scenes. They invariably make me tremble, and I was beginning even now to tremble while I smiled.
I recalled the little I had already seen of the man behind the other newspaper. He had got in after me, and my casual impression was of an elderly man, bearded to the waist like a missionary, but still abominably active and robust. ”

“ The middle-aged men who come home merely bleached and bearded from the tropics, as a rule, come hard home. And my missionary (for so I labelled him from the start) had the makings of a sufficiently formidable antagonist.
Could one keep the same newspaper before one's face from Euston to Crewe? Could one not go to sleep behind one's newspaper with perfect propriety at dead of night? To be sure, and pull one's cap over one's eyes and one's collar about one's ears! I was proceeding to do both when my companion addressed me, lowering his guard, as my ears assured me. ”

“ He foresees his own course of escape. His heed is for the day and for his own skin. His mind's eye will not stay behind upon his gruesome handiwork. Yet here Rowland Chandler was notably above the average of his inhuman kind. It was the body in the train that he most probably saw most clearly of all: the evidence of his own revolver, his own clothes, his own linen, at the inquest which should establish the murderer's death and remove him from the minds of men. ”

“ He was stronger than I. He bore me down; I slid from the seat; he fell upon me with both knees, striking me in the face with his free hand, and all without a syllable, but with wolf's eyes and ferret's teeth. And all this time I kept that smoking pistol out of harm's way, and when he got another hand to the butt, I got another to the barrel. ”

“ Suicide of Rowland Chandler, the alleged murderer, in the Scotch Express!”
His diabolical eyes could not stay my abnormal power of following clearly, of seeing even further than he saw; my own doom served but to stimulate my brain. Yes, it was the clever and audacious plot of a sufficiently clever and audacious criminal. Yet was I criminologist enough even then to see the weak point in both. It is the poorest type of criminal who makes your ready murderer.
He invariably lacks imagination. ”

“ They must hang some one; that's their gime.” He had worked himself into a white fury, standing over me with his pistol, but he shuddered through his bluster, and the narrow brow glistened under the lamp. “They don't hang me!” he screamed. “I know too much; they don't get the chance!”
He withdrew, covering me—not to the far end of the carriage, but half-way—and sat down muttering on his old side. His hand so trembled that I thought I should be a dead man before he had the revolver safely cocked. But it was the tremor still of brute rage.
“Now,” said he, “you start tikin' off those clothes!” ”