three o'clock
By two o'clock even he might still have removed himself out of the district by getting aboard a train , but after two that became impossible . Every passenger train along the lines on a great parallelogram between Southampton , Manchester , Brighton and Horsham , travelled with locked doors , and the goods traffic was almost entirely suspended . And in a great circle of twenty miles round Port Burdock , men armed with guns and bludgeons were presently setting out in groups of three and four , with dogs , to beat the roads and fields . Mounted policemen rode along the country lanes , stopping at every cottage and warning the people to lock up their houses , and keep indoors unless they were armed , and all the elementary schools had broken up by three o'clock , and the children , scared and keeping together in groups , were hurrying home . Kemp 's proclamation -- signed indeed by Adye -- was posted over almost the whole district by four or five o'clock in the afternoon . It gave briefly but clearly all the conditions of the struggle , the necessity of keeping the Invisible Man from food and sleep , the necessity for incessant watchfulness and for a prompt attention to any evidence of his movements . And so swift and decided was the action of the authorities , so prompt and universal was the belief in this strange being , that before nightfall an area of several hundred square miles was in a stringent state of siege .