Who and what was this Tom Bob? he did not rightly know. Two or three times at most he had heard his friend Juve speak of the man. Juve, this much was certain, admired the American—albeit they were not personally known to one another—as a clever, capable officer, full of modern ideas. Fandor pictured Tom Bob as being in fact a sort of Juve of the New World—with this difference, that the one seemed as fond of self-advertisement and popular applause as the other was an admirer of modesty and reticence. Summing up the situation Fandor told himself: “It is impossible, at the present moment, to show myself at the headquarters of the Criminal Department; in their stupid way they would simply arrest me without listening to my story, or even arrest me after they had heard it, if only by way of throwing a sop to public opinion. Juve himself is in gaol; the unfortunate man can do nothing to help me. Rather is it for me to save him, and to have the power I must be free. It may be Tom Bob will not be sorry to have me as a discreet and anonymous fellow-worker. Let us go find Tom Bob!” This decision taken, the question was to carry it into effect. Now Fandor, at eight o’clock in the evening, had still less money in his possession than at four o’clock of the afternoon. But the journalist, having noted the time of the last train that would take him to Hâvre before the arrival of the American packet, viz., the nine forty-five slow train, had thought to himself that, if it was impossible for him to travel without a ticket, it was perhaps easy enough to jump the train as it went by, and so be carried to his destination—on condition, of course, of not attracting attention by entering a compartment, but instead riding unobtrusively on a step, or on some buffer or other, or else lying at full length on the roof of a carriage. He had explored the neighbourhood of the station and made out that by way of the Rue de Rome and utilizing a scaffolding erected by the workmen engaged in enlarging the tunnel, he could easily in the evening dusk climb down the scaffold poles on to the line. But on second thought Fandor had conceived a much simpler plan. At nine twenty for four sous he purchased a ticket for Batignolles and made his way on to the platform, then seizing his opportunity when nobody was looking, he stepped on to the permanent way and so, keeping along the confining walls, reached the entrance of the tunnel and waited there for the passing of the Hâvre train. He had set his watch by the station clock, and the train being due to start at forty-three minutes past the hour, he was at his post in the tunnel at half a minute before that time. He arched his back against the wall, and in spite of the blinding smoke, watched the line of vehicles as they moved slowly past him. “Engine, luggage van, another van, several third class coaches, a corridor carriage, a first, a second ... now’s my time!”