He began to retrace
his steps.
The men on the embankment were walking slowly, bending far over, their
eyes fixed on the ground. Suddenly one of them stood erect and tossed his
arms in the air and shouted loudly. Other men ran to him, and another far
down the track repeated the shout and the gesture to another far in his
rear; this man took it up, and shouted and waved to a fourth man, and so
they passed the signal back to town. There came, almost immediately three
long, loud whistles from a mill near the station, and the embankment grew
black with people pouring out from town, while the searchers came running
from the fields and woods and underbrush on both sides of the railway.
Briscoe paused for the last time; then he began to walk slowly toward the
embankment.
The track lay level and straight, not dimming in the middle distances, the
rails converging to points, both northwest and southeast, in the clean-
washed air, like examples of perspective in a child's drawing-book. About
seventy miles to the west and north lay Rouen; and, in the same direction,
nearly six miles from where the signal was given, the track was crossed by
a road leading directly south to Six-Cross-Roads.
The embankment had been newly ballasted with sand. What had been
discovered was a broad brown stain on the south slope near the top.
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