“The Great Buchonian. There was a man in court watching the case on behalf of the Company. I gave him my name in a quiet corner before I bought my hat, and—come to dinner now; I’ll show you the results afterwards.” The telling of his wrongs had worked Wilton Sargent into a very fine temper, and I do not think that my conversation soothed him. In the course of the dinner, prompted by a devil of pure mischief, I dwelt with loving insistence on certain smells and sounds of New York which go straight to the heart of the native in foreign parts; and Wilton began to ask many questions about his associates aforetime—men of the New York Yacht Club, Storm King, or the Restigouche, owners of rivers, ranches, and shipping in their playtime, lords of railways, kerosene, wheat, and cattle in their offices. When the green mint came, I gave him a peculiarly oily and atrocious cigar, of the brand they sell in the tessellated, electric-lighted, with expensive-pictures-of-the-nude-adorned bar of the Pandemonium, and Wilton chewed the end for several minutes ere he lit it. The butler left us alone, and the chimney of the oak-panelled dining-room began to smoke. “That’s another!” said he, poking the fire savagely, and I knew what he meant. One cannot put steam-heat in houses where Queen Elizabeth slept. The steady beat of a night-mail, whirling down the valley, recalled me to business. “What about the Great Buchonian?” I said. “Come into my study. That’s all—as yet.” It was a pile of Seidlitz-powders-coloured correspondence, perhaps nine inches high, and it looked very businesslike. “You can go through it,” said Wilton. “Now I could take a chair and a red flag and go into Hyde Park and say the most atrocious things about your Queen, and preach anarchy and all that, y’ know, till I was hoarse, and no one would take any notice. The Police—damn ’em!—would protect me if I got into trouble. But for a little thing like flagging a dirty little sawed-off train,—running through my own grounds, too,—I get the whole British Constitution down on me as if I sold bombs. I don’t understand it.” “No more does the Great Buchonian—apparently.” I was turning over the letters. “Here’s the traffic superintendent writing that it’s utterly incomprehensible that any man should... Good heavens, Wilton, you _have_ done it!” I giggled, as I read on. “What’s funny now?” said my host. “It seems that you, or Howard for you, stopped the three-forty Northern down.” “I ought to know that! They all had their knife into me, from the engine-driver up.” “But it’s _the_ three-forty—the Induna—surely you’ve heard of the Great Buchonian’s Induna!” “How the deuce am I to know one train from another? They come along about every two minutes.” “Quite so. But this happens to be the Induna—the one train of the whole line. She’s timed for fifty-seven miles an hour. She was put on early in the Sixties, and she has never been stopped—”