The Chief, as usual, looked like nothing on earth. His trousers did not match his top-coat, and they were both of a winter weight — it almost made you faint with heat sickness to look at them. In York, people were jumping into the river off Lendal Bridge to get cool, but the Chief didn’t give tuppence about the weather. He’d been in the Sudan, where 95 degrees was counted a rather chilly spell, and he’d worn a thick red coat throughout that show, which was perhaps why he wore his winter coat now. His bowler was greasy and dinted, and stray lengths of orange hair came out from underneath it so that a stranger might have been fascinated to lift the hat off his head and see the way things stood with the rest of the Chief’s hair. A man who’d served in the colours ought to have been smarter, I always thought.

But you knew the Chief had been a soldier by other signs.

In the greenhouse heat of the station, he was moving towards the man with the gun. I watched the Chief make his advance — and then a noise made me turn around. The great mix-up of lines and signals beyond the south end wavered in the heat, and a train was there in the hot, shimmering air. Here’s trouble, I thought.

The train bent like a flame or a fever vision as it came on and, as I watched, it slid to the right with a high whine, so that it was heading for our platform.

The Chief, still advancing on the gunman, was making great windmilling movements with his right arm. He meant to wave the train through, as if it was a horse and trap approaching a partial blockage in a country lane (and the Chief did walk with a farmer’s plod).

The engine driver could see that something was up, and he hung off the side of his cab to get a better look — one tiny scrap of humanity clinging onto thirty tons of roaring machine. The train seemed to frighten the gunman, for he yelled, ‘I’ll shoot, I’ll shoot!’ The Chief was roaring too, and waving as the train came rolling alongside us. I imagined the riot among the passengers on board. Their train was giving the go-by to York, principal junction of the north!