The Murder in Number Four
Further Adventures of Bencolin and Sir John Landervorne
DURING the night run between Dieppe and Paris, on a haunted train called The Blue Arrow, there was murder done. Six passengers in the first-class carriage saw the ghost; one other passenger and the train guard failed to see it, which was why they decided the thing was a ghost. And the dead man lay between the seats of an empty compartment, his head propped up against the opposite door and his face shining goggle-eyed in the dull blue light. He had been strangled.
This Blue Arrow has an evil name. At twelve o’clock the channel boat leaves New Haven. With good weather, it arrives at Dieppe about three A. M. On a wintry night of sleet and dull-foamed waves it is the atmosphere for ghosts. The great echoing customs shed, hollow with steam and the bumping of trunks, the bleary lamps, the bedraggled passengers filing silently up the gangplank, set an imagination running to things weird. Sickness, loss of sleep, the bobbing eerie boat floundering in against the pier, had made a wan crew of these eight people on the night of December 18th. Thus, after a six-hour crossing on which the vessel several times lost the Dieppe light and staggered helpless in the gale, they boarded The Blue Arrow for Paris.
Superstitious porters have many tales about this train. Its engine is misshapen, and sometimes there rides in the cab a blind driver named Death. Along the moon-lit waste people have been ground under the wheels, with no sound save a faint cry and a hiss of blood on the firebox. On this run, too, there was once a fearful wreck; they say that on some nights, when you pass the place, you can see the dead men peering over the
