The dispatcher and his nephew instantly caught the girl’s frantic anxiety, but they were able to proceed with more sense. The lid was closed with a series of metal latches, and they opened them one after another. Apparently it never occurred to either man, in the heat of the moment, that this coffin had more latches than any three others. And certainly the process of opening was more prolonged as the poor girl, in her agony, somehow impeded their efforts with her own.
In a few moments, the men were at a fever pitch of intensity. And all the while, the girl cried, “Oh, Richard— dear God, make haste, he’s alive— please, dear God, he lives, praise God…” And all the while, the bell rang from the rocking of the coffin.
The commotion drew a crowd of some size, which stood a few paces back on the platform, taking in the bizarre spectacle.
“Oh, hurry, hurry, lest we are too late,” the girl cried, and the men worked frantically at the latches. Indeed, only when they were at the final two latches did the dispatcher hear the girl cry, “Oh, I knew it was not cholera, he was a quack to say it. Oh, I knew…”
The dispatcher froze, his hand on the latch. “Cholera?” he said.
“Oh, hurry, hurry,” the girl cried. “It is five days now I have waited to hear the bell….”
“You say cholera?” the dispatcher repeated. “Five days?”
But the nephew, who had not stopped throwing off the latches, now flung the coffin lid wide.
“Thank God!” cried the girl, and threw herself down upon the body inside, as if to hug her brother. But she halted in mid-gesture, which was perfectly understandable. With the raising of the lid, a most hideous, fetid, foul stench rolled forth in a near palpable wave, and its source was not hard to determine; the body lying within, dressed in his best Sunday clothes, hands folded across the chest, was already in a state of obvious decomposition.
The exposed flesh at the face and hands was bloated and puffed, a repellent gray-green color. The lips were black, and so was the partially protruding tongue. The dispatcher and his nephew hardly saw more of that horrific spectacle before the feverish girl, with a final scream of heart-wrenching agony, swooned on the spot. The nephew instantly leapt to attend her, and the dispatcher, with no less alacrity, closed the lid and began shutting the latches wit onsiderably more haste than he had displayed in opening them.
The watching crowd, when it heard that the man had died of cholera, dissipated with the same swiftness. In a moment, the station platform was nearly deserted.
Soon the servant girl recovered from her swoon, but she remained in a state of profound distress. She kept asking softly, “How can it be? I heard the bell. Did you not hear the bell? I heard it plain, did you not? The bell rang.”
McPherson did his best to comfort her, saying that it must have been some earth tremor or sudden gust of wind that had caused the bell to ring.
The station dispatcher, seeing that his nephew was occupied with the poor child, took it upon himself to supervise the loading of luggage into the van of the Folkestone train. He did this with as much diligence as he could muster after such a distressing experience. Two well-dressed ladies had large trunks and, despite their haughty protests, he insisted that both be unlocked an opened for his inspection. There was only one further incident, when a portly gentleman placed a parrot— or some such multicolored bird— on the van, and then demanded that his manservant be permitted to ride with the bird and look after its needs. The dispatcher refused, explaining the new rules of the railway. The gentleman became abusive, and then offered the dispatcher “a sensible gratuity,” but the dispatcher— who viewed the proffered ten shillings with somewhat more interest than he cared to admit, even to himself— was aware that he was being watched by Burgess, the same guard whom he had admonished the day before. Thus the dispatcher was forced to turn down the bribe, to his own displeasure and also that of the gentleman, who stomped off muttering a litany, of stinging profanity.