Willis Pule's escape from the train with the box

Willis Pule's escape from the train with the box is a reversal in which a desperate flight becomes a prize-winning theft. Exposed to his pursuers and with no safe route through the carriages, Pule takes a Keeble box from a sleeping passenger and jumps from the moving train. His escape brings him possession of an object whose identity is uncertain: Keeble's boxes look alike, and the emerald box and the homunculus box have already been confused. The episode therefore secures a temporary victory while deepening the story's central uncertainty about what the box contains.

The box and the stakes

The box's ambiguity has a history. Owlesby had withdrawn his interests in the West African Gem Company as a great emerald intended for his son Jack's inheritance. He persuaded William Keeble to build a box for it, almost identical to the lead-lined cube that held the homunculus. From the beginning, the two containers were distinct in purpose but difficult to distinguish by appearance.

That resemblance made the boxes more than convenient containers. Their exchange could shift a fortune, or place the homunculus in new hands. When Captain Powers discovered that the emerald box had disappeared from his chest, he found no clue to its whereabouts in the rain-dark alley. Elsewhere, Pule had found the hidden box and heard a faint voice associated with it, but could not understand it and feared the voice might be inside his own head. His later train escape carries forward that earlier uncertainty: possession does not yet mean knowledge.

Exposure and pursuit aboard the train

Pule initially boards a second-class carriage and hides behind a newspaper, intending to remain concealed until the train is at least halfway to London. His cover fails when he reaches out to pay a scone seller. The seller drops his tray and cries out at the sight of him. In the next compartment, Langdon St. Ives recognizes him; Hasbro rushes toward him as the train pulls away. A frail old woman watches from another compartment, her feet resting on a steamer trunk too heavy to lift onto the rack.

Pule pushes through the train, considering whether to jump as the countryside speeds past. In a third-class carriage, he finds a sleeping man with a Keeble box in his lap. The discovery stops him short: with pursuers close behind, he sees an unexpected chance to take the box. He tears a loose iron bar from beneath the seats and uses it to disable the passenger, who falls forward. Pule catches the box, escapes through the carriage door as it bursts open behind him, and moves through successive cars until he reaches the exterior door. He braces it against the pursuers, buying the brief interval he needs to leave the train.

The leap and the claimed victory

As the train slows on a curve, Pule jumps into the grass beside a pond. He pauses to test whether he can move, then gets up and walks away across the pasture. The escape is not a planned return to Harrogate: he imagines going back to St. Ives's house for another attempt, but recognizes that doing so would be unwise. He resolves not to let revenge, St. Ives, or even Narbondo deprive him of the prize he has just secured.

The box changes the meaning of the failed journey. Pule had entered the train hiding and under pursuit; he leaves it with the object he believes he has won. Yet his certainty is only about possession, not contents. He recognizes it as the same kind of box taken from Bill Kraken the day before and realizes that Keeble's boxes are all alike. He cannot tell whether this one holds a second emerald or the homunculus. His victory is thus materially real but informationally incomplete.

Later clarification

The uncertainty persists until Keeble is roused and confirms that the emerald box and the homunculus box are identical apart from their individual carving and painting. Nell Owlesby acknowledges that, while agitated, she might have mixed them up; she says Birdlip may have the emerald and asks whether the little man could speak. That exchange makes clear why a stolen box cannot be identified simply by its construction, and connects Pule's opportunistic capture to the confusion already surrounding the two objects.

The later image of Dorothy Keeble, recovered and beside Jack, with a tremendous emerald displayed in an open Keeble box, confirms that the emerald is ultimately present in a box, but does not by itself establish the route by which that particular container reached them. The train episode's significance lies in that unresolved passage between ownership and identity. Pule escapes with a box and calls the trip a victory; the story leaves the reader to distinguish the prize he has seized from the prize he thinks it may be.