nine minutes past one o'clock in the
morning
The little man seemed rarely complacent , and impudently greeted Kirkwood 's scowling visage , as the latter peered through the window in the coach-door , with a smirk and a waggish wave of his hand . The American by main strength of will-power mastered an impulse to enter and wring his neck , and returned to the girl , more disturbed than he cared to let her know . There resulted from his review of the case but one plan for outwitting Mr. Hobbs , and that lay in trusting to his confidence that Kirkwood and Dorothy Calendar would proceed as far toward Ostend as the train would take them -- namely , to the limit of the run , Bruges . Thus inspired , Kirkwood took counsel with the girl , and when the train paused at Ghent , they made an unostentatious exit from their coach , finding themselves , when the express had rolled on into the west , upon a station platform in a foreign city at nine minutes past one o'clock in the morning -- but at length without their shadow . Mr. Hobbs had gone on to Bruges . Kirkwood sped his journeyings with an unspoken malediction , and collected himself to cope with a situation which was to prove hardly more happy for them than the espionage they had just eluded . The primal flush of triumph which had saturated the American 's humor on this signal success , proved but fictive and transitory when inquiry of the station attendants educed the information that the two earliest trains to be obtained were the 5:09 for Dunkerque and the 5:37 for Ostend .