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The Man in Lower Ten, by Mary Roberts Rinehart

CONTENTS

I I GO TO PITTSBURG

II A TORN TELEGRAM

III ACROSS THE AISLE

IV NUMBERS SEVEN AND NINE

V THE WOMAN IN THE NEXT CAR

VI THE GIRL IN BLUE

VII A FINE GOLD CHAIN

VIII THE SECOND SECTION

IX THE HALCYON BREAKFAST

X MISS WEST'S REQUEST

XI THE NAME WAS SULLIVAN

XII THE GOLD BAG

XIII FADED ROSES

XIV THE TRAP-DOOR

XV THE CINEMATOGRAPH

XVI THE SHADOW OF A GIRL

XVII AT THE FARM-HOUSE AGAIN

XVIII A NEW WORLD

XIX AT THE TABLE NEXT

XX THE NOTES AND A BARGAIN

XXI MCKNIGHT'S THEORY

XXII AT THE BOARDING-HOUSE

XXIII A NIGHT AT THE LAURELS

XXIV HIS WIFE'S FATHER

XXV AT THE STATION

XXVI ON TO RICHMOND

XXVII THE SEA, THE SAND, THE STARS

XXVIII ALISON'S STORY

XXIX IN THE DINING-ROOM

XXX FINER DETAILS

XXXI AND ONLY ONE ARM

THE MAN IN LOWER TEN

CHAPTER I

I GO TO PITTSBURG

McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business.

I never liked it, and since the strange case of the man in lower ten,

I have been a bit squeamish. Given a case like that, where you can

build up a network of clues that absolutely incriminate three

entirely different people, only one of whom can be guilty, and your

faith in circumstantial evidence dies of overcrowding. I never see

a shivering, white-faced wretch in the prisoners' dock that I do not

hark back with shuddering horror to the strange events on the

Pullman car Ontario, between Washington and Pittsburg, on the night

of September ninth, last.

McKnight could tell the story a great deal better than I, although

he can not spell three consecutive words correctly. But, while he

has imagination and humor, he is lazy.

"It didn't happen to me, anyhow," he protested, when I put it up to

him. "And nobody cares for second-hand thrills. Besides, you want

the unvarnished and ungarnished truth, and I'm no hand for that.

I'm a lawyer."

So am I, although there have been times when my assumption in that

particular has been disputed. I am unmarried, and just old enough

to dance with the grown-up little sisters of the girls I used to

know. I am fond of outdoors, prefer horses to the aforesaid

grown-up little sisters, am without sentiment (am crossed out and

was substituted.-Ed.) and completely ruled and frequently routed by

my housekeeper, an

elderly widow.

In fact, of all the men of my acquaintance, I was probably the most

prosaic, the least adventurous, the one man in a hundred who would

be likely to go without a deviation from the normal through the

orderly procession of the seasons, summer suits to winter flannels,

golf to bridge.

So it was a queer freak of the demons of chance to perch on my

unsusceptible thirty-year-old chest, tie me up with a crime, ticket

me with a love affair, and start me on that sensational and not

always respectable journey that ended so surprisingly less than

three weeks later in the firm's private office. It had been the

most remarkable period of my life. I would neither give it up nor

live it again under any inducement, and yet all that I lost was

some twenty yards off my drive!

It was really McKnight's turn to make the next journey. I had a

tournament at Chevy Chase for Saturday, and a short yacht cruise

planned for Sunday, and when a man has been grinding at statute law

for a week, he needs relaxation. But McKnight begged off. It was

not the first time he had shirked that summer in order to run down

to Richmond, and I was surly about it. But this time he had a new

excuse. "I wouldn't be able to look after the business if I did

go," he said. He has a sort of wide-eyed frankness that makes one

ashamed to doubt him. "I'm always car sick crossing the mountains.

It's a fact, Lollie. See-sawing over the peaks does it. Why,

crossing the Alleghany Mountains has the Gulf Stream to Bermuda

beaten to a frazzle."

So I gave him up finally and went home to pack. He came later in

the evening with his machine, the Cannonball, to take me to the

station, and he brought the forged notes in the Bronson case.

"Guard them with your life," he warned me. "They are more precious

than honor. Sew them in your chest protector, or wherever people

keep valuables. I never keep any. I'll not be happy until I see

Gentleman Andy doing the lockstep."

He sat down on my clean collars, found my cigarettes and struck a

match on the mahogany bed post with one movement.

"Where's the Pirate?" he demanded. The Pirate is my housekeeper,

Mrs Klopton, a very worthy woman, so labeled - and libeled - because

of a ferocious pair of eyes and what McKnight called a bucaneering

nose. I quietly closed the door into the hall.

"Keep your voice down, Richey," I said. "She is looking for the

evening paper to see if it is going to rain. She has my raincoat

and an umbrella waiting in the hall."

The collars being damaged beyond repair, he left them and went to

the window. He stood there for some time, staring at the blackness

that represented the wall of the house next door.

"It's raining now," he said over his shoulder, and closed the window

and the shutters. Something in his voice made me glance up, but he

was watching me, his hands idly in his pockets.

"Who lives next door?" he inquired in a perfunctory tone, after a

pause. I was packing my razor.

"House is empty," I returned absently. "If the landlord would put

it in some sort of shape - "

"Did you put those notes in your pocket?" he broke

"Yes." I was impatient. "Along with my certificates of registration,

baptism and vaccination. Whoever wants them will have to steal my

coat to get them."

"Well, I would move them, if I were you. Somebody in the next house

was confoundedly anxious to see where you put them. Somebody right

at that window opposite."

I scoffed at the idea, but nevertheless I moved the papers, putting

them in my traveling-bag, well down at the bottom. McKnight watched

me uneasily.

"I have a hunch that you are going to have trouble," he said, as I

locked the alligator bag. "Darned if I like starting anything

important on Friday."

"You have a congenital dislike to start anything on any old day," I

retorted, still sore from my lost Saturday. "And if you knew the

owner of that house as I do you would know that if there was any one

at that window he is paying rent for the privilege."

Mrs. Klopton rapped at the door and spoke discreetly from the hall.

"Did Mr. McKnight bring the evening paper?" she inquired.

"Sorry, but I didn't, Mrs. Klopton," McKnight called. "The Cubs

won, three to nothing." He listened, grinning, as she moved away

with little irritated rustles of her black silk gown.

I finished my packing, changed my collar and was ready to go. Then

very cautiously we put out the light and opened the shutters. The

window across was merely a deeper black in the darkness. It was

closed and dirty. And yet, probably owing to Richey's suggestion,

I had an uneasy sensation of eyes staring across at me. The next

moment we were at the door, poised for flight.

"We'll have to run for it," I said in a whisper. "She's down there

with a package of some sort, sandwiches probably. And she's

threatened me with overshoes for a month. Ready now!"

I had a kaleidoscopic view of Mrs. Klopton in the lower hall,

holding out an armful of such traveling impedimenta as she deemed

essential, while beside her, Euphemia, the colored housemaid,

grinned over a white-wrapped box.

"Awfully sorry-no time-back Sunday," I panted over my shoulder.

Then the door closed and the car was moving away.

McKnight bent forward and stared at the facade of the empty house

next door as we passed. It was black, staring, mysterious, as empty

buildings are apt to be.

"I'd like to hold a post-mortem on that corpse of a house," he said

thoughtfully. "By George, I've a notion to get out and take a look."

"Somebody after the brass pipes," I scoffed. "House has been empty

for a year."

With one hand on the steering wheel McKnight held out the other for

my cigarette case. "Perhaps," he said; "but I don't see what she

would want with brass pipe."

"A woman!" I laughed outright. "You have been looking too hard at

the picture in the back of your watch, that's all. There's an

experiment like that: if you stare long enough - "

But McKnight was growing sulky: he sat looking rigidly ahead, and

he did not speak again until he brought the Cannonball to a stop

at the station. Even then it was only a perfunctory remark. He

went through the gate with me, and with five minutes to spare, we

lounged and smoked in the train shed. My mind had slid away from

my surroundings and had wandered to a polo pony that I couldn't

afford and intended to buy anyhow. Then McKnight shook off his

taciturnity.

"For heaven's sake, don't look so martyred," he burst out; "I know

you've done all the traveling this summer. I know you're missing a

game to-morrow. But don't be a patient mother; confound it, I have

to go to Richmond on Sunday. I - I want to see a girl."

"Oh, don't mind me," I observed politely. "Personally, I wouldn't

change places with you. What's her name - North? South?"

"West," he snapped. "Don't try to be funny. And all I have to say,

Blakeley, is that if you ever fall in love I hope you make an

egregious ass of yourself."

In view of what followed, this came rather close to prophecy.

The trip west was without incident. I played bridge with a

furniture dealer from Grand Rapids, a sales agent for a Pittsburg

iron firm and a young professor from an eastern college. I won

three rubbers out of four, finished what cigarettes McKnight had

left me, and went to bed at one o'clock. It was growing cooler,

and the rain had ceased. Once, toward morning, I wakened with a

start, for no apparent reason, and sat bolt upright. I had an

uneasy feeling that some one had been looking at me, the same

sensation I had experienced earlier in the evening at the window.

But I could feel the bag with the notes, between me and the

window, and with my arm thrown over it for security, I lapsed

again into slumber. Later, when I tried to piece together the

fragments of that journey, I remembered that my coat, which had

been folded and placed beyond my restless tossing, had been rescued

in the morning from a heterogeneous jumble of blankets, evening

papers and cravat, had been shaken out with profanity and donned

with wrath. At the time, nothing occurred to me but the necessity

of writing to the Pullman Company and asking them if they ever

traveled in their own cars. I even formulated some of the letter.

"If they are built to scale, why not take a man of ordinary stature

as your unit?" I 'wrote mentally. "I can not fold together like

the traveling cup with which I drink your abominable water."

I was more cheerful after I had had a cup of coffee in the Union

Station. It was too early to attend to business, and I lounged in

the restaurant and hid behind the morning papers. As I had expected,

they had got hold of my visit and its object. On the first page was

a staring announcement that the forged papers in the Bronson case

had been brought to Pittsburg. Underneath, a telegram from

Washington stated that Lawrence Blakeley, of Blakeley and McKnight,

had left for Pittsburg the night before, and that, owing to the

approaching trial of the Bronson case and the illness of John

Gilmore, the Pittsburg millionaire, who was the chief witness for

the prosecution, it was supposed that the visit was intimately

concerned with the trial.

I looked around apprehensively. There were no reporters yet in

sight, and thankful to have escaped notice I paid for my breakfast

and left. At the cab-stand I chose the least dilapidated hansom

I could find, and giving the driver the address of the Gilmore

residence, in the East end, I got in.

I was just in time. As the cab turned and rolled off, a slim young

man in a straw hat separated himself from a little group of men and

hurried toward us.

"Hey! Wait a minute there!" he called, breaking into a trot.

But the cabby did not hear, or perhaps did not care to. We jogged

comfortably along, to my relief, leaving the young man far behind.

I avoid reporters on principle, having learned long ago that I am

an easy mark for a clever interviewer.

It was perhaps nine o'clock when I left the station. Our way was

along the boulevard which hugged the side of one of the city's great

hills. Far below, to the left, lay the railroad tracks and the

seventy times seven looming stacks of the mills. The white mist of

the river, the grays and blacks of the smoke blended into a

half-revealing haze, dotted here and there with fire. It was

unlovely, tremendous. Whistler might have painted it with its

pathos, its majesty, but he would have missed what made it

infinitely suggestive - the rattle and roar of iron on iron, the

rumble of wheels, the throbbing beat, against the ears, of fire

and heat and brawn welding prosperity.

Something of this I voiced to the grim old millionaire who was

responsible for at least part of it. He was propped up in bed

in his East end home, listening to the market reports read by a

nurse, and he smiled a little at my enthusiasm.

"I can't see much beauty in it myself," he said. "But it's our

badge of prosperity. The full dinner pail here means a nose that

looks like a flue. Pittsburg without smoke wouldn't be Pittsburg,

any more than New York prohibition would be New York. Sit down for

a few minutes, Mr. Blakeley. Now, Miss Gardner, Westinghouse

Electric."

The nurse resumed her reading in a monotonous voice. She read

literally and without understanding, using initials and

abbreviations as they came. But the shrewd old man followed her

easily. Once, however, he stopped her.

"D-o is ditto," he said gently, "not do."

As the nurse droned along, I found myself looking curiously at a

photograph in a silver frame on the bed-side table. It was the

picture of a girl in white, with her hands clasped loosely before

her. Against the dark background her figure stood out slim and

young. Perhaps it was the rather grim environment, possibly it was

my mood, but although as a general thing photographs of young girls

make no appeal to me, this one did. I found my eyes straying back

to it. By a little finesse I even made out the name written across

the corner, "Alison."

Mr. Gilmore lay back among his pillows and listened to the nurse's

listless voice. But he was watching me from under his heavy eyebrows,

for when the reading was over, and we were alone, he indicated the

picture with a gesture.

"I keep it there to remind myself that I am an old man," he said.

"That is my granddaughter, Alison West."

I expressed the customary polite surprise, at which, finding me

responsive, he told me his age with a chuckle of pride. More

surprise, this time genuine. From that we went to what he ate for

breakfast and did not eat for luncheon, and then to his reserve

power, which at sixty-five becomes a matter for thought. And so,

in a wide circle, back to where we started, the picture.

"Father was a rascal," John Gilmore said, picking up the frame.

"The happiest day of my life was when I knew he was safely dead in

bed and not hanged. If the child had looked like him, I - well, she

doesn't. She's a Gilmore, every inch. Supposed to look like me."

"Very noticeably," I agreed soberly.

I had produced the notes by that time, and replacing the picture Mr.

Gilmore gathered his spectacles from beside it. He went over the

four notes methodically, examining each carefully and putting it

down before he picked up the next. Then he leaned back and took off

his glasses.

"They're not so bad," he said thoughtfully. "Not so bad. But I

never saw them before. That's my unofficial signature. I am

inclined to think - " he was speaking partly to himself - "to think

that he has got hold of a letter of mine, probably to Alison.

Bronson was a friend of her rapscallion of a father."

I took Mr. Gilmore's deposition and put it into my traveling-bag

with the forged notes. When I saw them again, almost three weeks

later, they were unrecognizable, a mass of charred paper on a copper

ashtray. In the interval other and bigger things had happened: the

Bronson forgery case had shrunk beside the greater and more imminent

mystery of the man in lower ten. And Alison West had come into the

story and into my life.

CHAPTER II

A TORN TELEGRAM

I lunched alone at the Gilmore house, and went back to the city at

once. The sun had lifted the mists, and a fresh summer wind had

cleared away the smoke pall. The boulevard was full of cars flying

countryward for the Saturday half-holiday, toward golf and tennis,

green fields and babbling girls. I gritted my teeth and thought of

McKnight at Richmond, visiting the lady with the geographical name.

And then, for the first time, I associated John Gilmore's granddaughter

with the "West" that McKnight had irritably flung at me.

I still carried my traveling-bag, for McKnight's vision at the window

of the empty house had not been without effect. I did not transfer

the notes to my pocket, and, if I had, it would not have altered the

situation later. Only the other day McKnight put this very thing up

to me.

"I warned you," he reminded me. "I told you there were queer things

coming, and to be on your guard. You ought to have taken your

revolver."

"It would have been of exactly as much use as a bucket of snow in

Africa," I retorted. "If I had never closed my eyes, or if I had

kept my finger on the trigger of a six-shooter (which is novelesque

for revolver), the result would have been the same. And the next

time you want a little excitement with every variety of thrill

thrown in, I can put you by way of it. You begin by getting the

wrong berth in a Pullman car, and end - "

"Oh, I know how it ends," he finished shortly. "Don't you suppose

the whole thing's written on my spinal marrow?"

But I am wandering again. That is the difficulty with the

unprofessional story-teller: he yaws back and forth and can't keep

in the wind; he drops his characters overboard when he hasn't any

further use for them and drowns them; he forgets the coffee-pot and

the frying-pan and all the other small essentials, and, if he carries

a love affair, he mutters a fervent "Allah be praised" when he lands

them, drenched with adventures, at the matrimonial dock at the end

of the final chapter.

I put in a thoroughly unsatisfactory afternoon. Time dragged

eternally. I dropped in at a summer vaudeville, and bought some

ties at a haberdasher's. I was bored but unexpectant; I had no

premonition of what was to come. Nothing unusual had ever happened

to me; friends of mine had sometimes sailed the high seas of

adventure or skirted the coasts of chance, but all of the shipwrecks

had occurred after a woman passenger had been taken on. "Ergo," I

had always said "no women!" I repeated it to myself that evening

almost savagely, when I found my thoughts straying back to the

picture of John Gilmore's granddaughter. I even argued as I ate my

solitary dinner at a downtown restaurant.

"Haven't you troubles enough," I reflected, "without looking for

more? Hasn't Bad News gone lame, with a matinee race booked for

next week? Otherwise aren't you comfortable? Isn't your house in

order? Do you want to sell a pony in order to have the library

done over in mission or the drawing-room in gold? Do you want

somebody to count the empty cigarette boxes lying around every

morning?"

Lay it to the long idle afternoon, to the new environment, to

anything you like, but I began to think that perhaps I did. I

was confoundedly lonely. For the first time in my life its even

course began to waver: the needle registered warning marks on the

matrimonial seismograph, lines vague enough, but lines.

My alligator bag lay at my feet, still locked. While I waited for

my coffee I leaned back and surveyed the people incuriously. There

were the usual couples intent on each other: my new state of mind

made me regard them with tolerance. But at the next table, where

a man and woman dined together, a different atmosphere prevailed.

My attention was first caught by the woman's face. She had been

speaking earnestly across the table, her profile turned to me. I

had noticed casually her earnest manner, her somber clothes, and the

great mass of odd, bronze-colored hair on her neck. But suddenly

she glanced toward me and the utter hopelessness - almost tragedy

• of her expression struck me with a shock. She half closed her

eyes and drew a long breath, then she turned again to the man across

the table.

Neither one was eating. He sat low in his chair, his chin on his

chest, ugly folds of thick flesh protruding over his collar. He

was probably fifty, bald, grotesque, sullen, and yet not without

a suggestion of power. But he had been drinking; as I looked, he

raised an unsteady hand and summoned a waiter with a wine list.

The young woman bent across the table and spoke again quickly. She

had unconsciously raised her voice. Not beautiful, in her

earnestness and stress she rather interested me. I had an idle

inclination to advise the waiter to remove the bottled temptation

from the table. I wonder what would have happened if I had? Suppose

Harrington had not been intoxicated when he entered the Pullman car

Ontario that night!

For they were about to make a journey, I gathered, and the young

woman wished to go alone. I drank three cups of coffee, which

accounted for my wakefulness later, and shamelessly watched the

tableau before me. The woman's protest evidently went for nothing:

across the table the man grunted monosyllabic replies and grew more

and more lowering and sullen. Once, during a brief unexpected

pianissimo in the music, her voice came to me sharply:

"If I could only see him in time!" she was saying. "Oh, it's

terrible!"

In spite of my interest I would have forgotten the whole incident

at once, erased it from my mind as one does the inessentials and

clutterings of memory, had I not met them again, later that evening,

in the Pennsylvania station. The situation between them had not

visibly altered: the same dogged determination showed in the man's

face, but the young woman - daughter or wife? I wondered - had

drawn down her veil and I could only suspect what white misery lay

beneath.

I bought my berth after waiting in a line of some eight or ten

people. When, step by step, I had almost reached the window, a

tall woman whom I had not noticed before spoke to me from my elbow.

She had a ticket and money in her hand.

"Will you try to get me a lower when you buy yours?" she asked. "I

have traveled for three nights in uppers."

I consented, of course; beyond that I hardly noticed the woman. I

had a vague impression of height and a certain amount of stateliness,

but the crowd was pushing behind me, and some one was standing on

my foot. I got two lowers easily, and, turning with the change and

berths, held out the tickets.

"Which will you have?" I asked. "Lower eleven or lower ten?"

"It makes no difference," she said. "Thank you very much indeed."

At random I gave her lower eleven, and called a porter to help her

with her luggage. I followed them leisurely to the train shed, and

ten minutes more saw us under way.

I looked into my car, but it presented the peculiarly unattractive

appearance common to sleepers. The berths were made up; the center

aisle was a path between walls of dingy, breeze-repelling curtains,

while the two seats at each end of the car were piled high with

suitcases and umbrellas. The perspiring porter was trying to be six

places at once: somebody has said that Pullman porters are black so

they won't show the dirt, but they certainly show the heat.

Nine-fifteen was an outrageous hour to go to bed, especially since

I sleep little or not at all on the train, so I made my way to the

smoker and passed the time until nearly eleven with cigarettes and

a magazine. The car was very close. It was a warm night, and

before turning in I stood a short time in the vestibule. The train

had been stopping at frequent intervals, and, finding the brakeman

there, I asked the trouble.

It seemed that there was a hot-box on the next car, and that not

only were we late, but we were delaying the second section, just

behind. I was beginning to feel pleasantly drowsy, and the air was

growing cooler as we got into the mountains. I said good night to

the brakeman and went back to my berth. To my surprise, lower ten

was already occupied - a suit-case projected from beneath, a pair

of shoes stood on the floor, and from behind the curtains came the

heavy, unmistakable breathing of deep sleep. I hunted out the

porter and together we investigated.

"Are you asleep, sir?" asked the porter, leaning over deferentially.

No answer forthcoming, he opened the curtains and looked in. Yes,

the intruder was asleep - very much asleep - and an overwhelming

odor of whisky proclaimed that he would probably remain asleep

until morning. I was irritated. The car was full, and I was not

disposed to take an upper in order to allow this drunken interloper

to sleep comfortably in my berth.

"You'll have to get out of this," I said, shaking him angrily. But

he merely grunted and turned over. As he did so, I saw his features

for the first time. It was the quarrelsome man of the restaurant.

I was less disposed than ever to relinquish my claim, but the porter,

after a little quiet investigation, offered a solution of the

difficulty. "There's no one in lower nine," he suggested, pulling

open the curtains just across. "It's likely nine's his berth, and

he's made a mistake, owing to his condition. You'd better take nine,

sir."

I did, with a firm resolution that if nine's rightful owner turned

up later I should be just as unwakable as the man opposite. I

undressed leisurely, making sure of the safety of the forged notes,

and placing my grip as before between myself and the window.

Being a man of systematic habits, I arranged my clothes carefully,

putting my shoes out for the porter to polish, and stowing my collar

and scarf in the little hammock swung for the purpose.

At last, with my pillows so arranged that I could see out comfortably,

and with the unhygienic-looking blanket turned back - I have always

a distrust of those much-used affairs - I prepared to wait gradually

for sleep.

But sleep did not visit me. The train came to frequent, grating

stops, and I surmised the hot box again. I am not a nervous man,

but there was something chilling in the thought of the second section

pounding along behind us. Once, as I was dozing, our locomotive

whistled a shrill warning - "You keep back where you belong," it

screamed to my drowsy ears, and from somewhere behind came a

chastened "All-right-I-will."

I grew more and more wide-awake. At Cresson I got up on my elbow

and blinked out at the station lights. Some passengers boarded the

train there and I heard a woman's low tones, a southern voice, rich

and full. Then quiet again. Every nerve was tense: time passed,

perhaps ten minutes, possibly half an hour. Then, without the

slightest warning, as the train rounded a curve, a heavy body was

thrown into my berth. The incident, trivial as it seemed, was

startling in its suddenness, for although my ears were painfully

strained and awake, I had heard no step outside. The next instant

the curtain hung limp again; still without a sound, my disturber

had slipped away into the gloom and darkness. In a frenzy of

wakefulness, I sat up, drew on a pair of slippers and fumbled for

my bath-robe.

>From a berth across, probably lower ten, came that particular

aggravating snore which begins lightly, delicately, faintly soprano,

goes down the scale a note with every breath, and, after keeping the

listener tense with expectation, ends with an explosion that tears

the very air. I was more and more irritable: I sat on the edge

of the berth and hoped the snorer would choke to death. He had

considerable vitality, however; he withstood one shock after another

and survived to start again with new vigor. In desperation I found

some cigarettes and one match, piled my blankets over my grip, and

drawing the curtains together as though the berth were still occupied,

I made my way to the vestibule of the car.

I was not clad for dress parade. Is it because the male is so

restricted to gloom in his every-day attire that he blossoms into

gaudy colors in his pajamas and dressing-gowns? It would take a Turk

to feel at home before an audience in my red and yellow bathrobe, a

Christmas remembrance from Mrs. Klopton, with slippers to match.

So, naturally, when I saw a feminine figure on the platform, my

first instinct was to dodge. The woman, however, was quicker than

I; she gave me a startled glance, wheeled and disappeared, with a

flash of two bronze-colored braids, into the next car.

Cigarette box in one hand, match in the other, I leaned against the

uncertain frame of the door and gazed after her vanished figure.

The mountain air flapped my bath-robe around my bare ankles, my one

match burned to the end and went out, and still I stared. For I

had seen on her expressive face a haunting look that was horror,

nothing less. Heaven knows, I am not psychological. Emotions have

to be written large before I can read them. But a woman in trouble

always appeals to me, and this woman was more than that. She was

in deadly fear.

If I had not been afraid of being ridiculous, I would have followed

her. But I fancied that the apparition of a man in a red and yellow

bath-robe, with an unkempt thatch of hair, walking up to her and

assuring her that he would protect her would probably put her into

hysterics. I had done that once before, when burglars had tried to

break into the house, and had startled the parlor maid into bed for

a week. So I tried to assure myself that I had imagined the lady's

distress - or caused it, perhaps - and to dismiss her from my mind.

Perhaps she was merely anxious about the unpleasant gentleman of the

restaurant. I thought smugly that I could have told her all about

him: that he was sleeping the sleep of the just and the intoxicated

in a berth that ought, by all that was fair and right, to have been

mine, and that if I were tied to a man who snored like that I should

have him anesthetized and his soft palate put where it would never

again flap like a loose sail in the wind.

We passed Harrisburg as I stood there. It was starlight, and the

great crests of the Alleghanies had given way to low hills. At

intervals we passed smudges of gray white, no doubt in daytime

comfortable farms, which McKnight says is a good way of putting it,

the farms being a lot more comfortable than the people on them.

I was growing drowsy: the woman with the bronze hair and the

horrified face was fading in retrospect. It was colder, too, and

I turned with a shiver to go in. As I did so a bit of paper

fluttered into the air and settled on my sleeve, like a butterfly

on a gorgeous red and yellow blossom. I picked it up curiously

and glanced at it. It was part of a telegram that had been torn

into bits.

There were only parts of four words on the scrap, but it left me

puzzled and thoughtful. It read, "-ower ten, car seve-."

"Lower ten, car seven," was my berth-the one I had bought and found

preempted.

CHAPTER III

ACROSS THE AISLE

No solution offering itself, I went back to my berth. The snorer

across had apparently strangled, or turned over, and so after a

time I dropped asleep, to be awakened by the morning sunlight across

my face.

I felt for my watch, yawning prodigiously. I reached under the

pillow and failed to find it, but something scratched the back of

my hand. I sat up irritably and nursed the wound, which was bleeding

a little. Still drowsy, I felt more cautiously for what I supposed

had been my scarf pin, but there was nothing there. Wide awake now,

I reached for my traveling-bag, on the chance that I had put my watch

in there. I had drawn the satchel to me and had my hand on the lock

before I realized that it was not my own!

Mine was of alligator hide. I had killed the beast in Florida, after

the expenditure of enough money to have bought a house and enough

energy to have built one. The bag I held in my hand was a black one,

sealskin, I think. The staggering thought of what the loss of my bag

meant to me put my finger on the bell and kept it there until the

porter came.

"Did you ring, sir?" he asked, poking his head through the curtains

obsequiously. McKnight objects that nobody can poke his head through

a curtain and be obsequious. But Pullman porters can and do.

"No," I snapped. "It rang itself. What in thunder do you mean by

exchanging my valise for this one? You'll have to find it if you

waken the entire car to do it. There are important papers in that

grip."

"Porter," called a feminine voice from an upper berth near-by.

"Porter, am I to dangle here all day?"

"Let her dangle," I said savagely. "You find that bag of mine.

The porter frowned. Then he looked at me with injured dignity.

"I brought in your overcoat, sir. You carried your own valise."

The fellow was right! In an excess of caution I had refused to

relinquish my alligator bag, and had turned over my other traps

to the porter. It was clear enough then. I was simply a victim

of the usual sleeping-car robbery. I was in a lather of

perspiration by that time: the lady down the car was still

dangling and talking about it: still nearer a feminine voice was

giving quick orders in French, presumably to a maid. The porter

was on his knees, looking under the berth.

"Not there, sir," he said, dusting his knees. He was visibly more

cheerful, having been absolved of responsibility. "Reckon it was

taken while you was wanderin' around the car last night."

"I'll give you fifty dollars if you find it," I said. "A hundred.

Reach up my shoes and I'll - "

I stopped abruptly. My eyes were fixed in stupefied amazement on

a coat that hung from a hook at the foot of my berth. From the

coat they traveled, dazed, to the soft-bosomed shirt beside it, and

from there to the collar and cravat in the net hammock across the

windows.

"A hundred!" the porter repeated, showing his teeth. But I caught

him by the arm and pointed to the foot of the berth.

"What - what color's that coat?" I asked unsteadily.

"Gray, sir." His tone was one of gentle reproof.

"And - the trousers?"

He reached over and held up one creased leg. "Gray, too," he

grinned.

"Gray!" I could not believe even his corroboration of my own eyes.

"But my clothes were blue!" The porter was amused: he dived under

the curtains and brought up a pair of shoes. "Your shoes, sir," he

said with a flourish. "Reckon you've been dreaming, sir.

Now, there are two things I always avoid in my dress - possibly an

idiosyncrasy of my bachelor existence. These tabooed articles are

red neckties and tan shoes. And not only were the shoes the porter

lifted from the floor of a gorgeous shade of yellow, but the scarf

which was run through the turned over collar was a gaudy red. It

took a full minute for the real import of things to penetrate my

dazed intelligence. Then I gave a vindictive kick at the offending

ensemble.

"They're not mine, any of them," I snarled. "They are some other

fellow's. I'll sit here until I take root before I put them on."

"They're nice lookin' clothes," the porter put in, eying the red

tie with appreciation. "Ain't everybody would have left you

anything."

"Call the conductor," I said shortly. Then a possible explanation

occurred to me. "Oh, porter - what's the number of this berth?"

"Seven, sir. If you cain't wear those shoes - "

"Seven!" In my relief I almost shouted it. "Why, then, it's

simple enough. I'm in the wrong berth, that's all. My berth is

nine. Only - where the deuce is the man who belongs here?"

"Likely in nine, sir." The darky was enjoying himself. "You and

the other gentleman just got mixed in the night. That's all, sir."

It was clear that he thought I had been drinking.

I drew a long breath. Of course, that was the explanation. This

was number seven's berth, that was his soft hat, this his umbrella,

his coat, his bag. My rage turned to irritation at myself.

The porter went to the next berth and I could hear his softly

insinuating voice. "Time to get up, sir. Are you awake? Time

to get up."

There was no response from number nine. I guessed that he had

opened the curtains and was looking in. Then he came back.

"Number nine's empty," he said.

"Empty! Do you mean my clothes aren't there?" I demanded. "My

valise? Why don't you answer me?"

"You doan' give me time," he retorted. "There ain't nothin' there.

But it's been slept in."

The disappointment was the greater for my few moments of hope. I

sat up in a white fury and put on the clothes that had been left me.

Then, still raging, I sat on the edge of the berth and put on the

obnoxious tan shoes. The porter, called to his duties, made little

excursions back to me, to offer assistance and to chuckle at my

discomfiture. He stood by, outwardly decorous, but with little

irritating grins of amusement around his mouth, when I finally

emerged with the red tie in my hand.

"Bet the owner of those clothes didn't become them any more than

you do," he said, as he plied the ubiquitous whisk broom.

"When I get the owner of these clothes," I retorted grimly, "he

will need a shroud. Where's the conductor?"

The conductor was coming, he assured me; also that there was no bag

answering the description of mine on the car. I slammed my way to

the dressing-room, washed, choked my fifteen and a half neck into a

fifteen collar, and was back again in less than five minutes. The

car, as well as its occupants, was gradually taking on a daylight

appearance. I hobbled in, for one of the shoes was abominably tight,

and found myself facing a young woman in blue with an unforgettable

face. ("Three women already." McKnight says: "That's going some,

even if you don't count the Gilmore nurse.") She stood, half-turned

toward me, one hand idly drooping, the other steadying her as she

gazed out at the flying landscape. I had an instant impression that

I had met her somewhere, under different circumstances, more cheerful

ones, I thought, for the girl's dejection now was evident. Beside

her, sitting down, a small dark woman, considerably older, was

talking in a rapid undertone. The girl nodded indifferently now and

then. I fancied, although I was not sure, that my appearance brought

a startled look into the young woman's face. I sat down and, hands

thrust deep into the other man's pockets, stared ruefully at the

other man's shoes.

The stage was set. In a moment the curtain was going up on the

first act of the play. And for a while we would all say our little

speeches and sing our little songs, and I, the villain, would hold

center stage while the gallery hissed.

The porter was standing beside lower ten. He had reached in and

was knocking valiantly. But his efforts met with no response. He

winked at me over his shoulder; then he unfastened the curtains and

bent forward. Behind him, I saw him stiffen, heard his muttered

exclamation, saw the bluish pallor that spread over his face and

neck. As he retreated a step the interior of lower ten lay open to

the day.

The man in it was on his back, the early morning sun striking full

on his upturned face. But the light did not disturb him. A small

stain of red dyed the front of his night clothes and trailed across

the sheet; his half-open eyes were fixed, without seeing, on the

shining wood above.

I grasped the porter's shaking shoulders and stared down to where

the train imparted to the body a grisly suggestion of motion. "Good

Lord," I gasped. "The man's been murdered!"

CHAPTER IV

NUMBERS SEVEN AND NINE

Afterwards, when I tried to recall our discovery of the body in

lower ten, I found that my most vivid impression was not that made

by the revelation of the opened curtain. I had an instantaneous

picture of a slender blue-gowned girl who seemed to sense my words

rather than hear them, of two small hands that clutched desperately

at the seat beside them. The girl in the aisle stood, bent toward

us, perplexity and alarm fighting in her face.

With twitching hands the porter attempted to draw the curtains

together. Then in a paralysis of shock, he collapsed on the edge

of my berth and sat there swaying. In my excitement I shook him.

"For Heaven's sake, keep your nerve, man," I said bruskly. "You'll

have every woman in the car in hysterics. And if you do, you'll

wish you could change places with the man in there." He rolled his

eyes.

A man near, who had been reading last night's paper, dropped it

quickly and tiptoed toward us. He peered between the partly open

curtains, closed them quietly and went back, ostentatiously solemn,

to his seat. The very crackle with which he opened his paper added

to the bursting curiosity of the car. For the passengers knew that

something was amiss: I was conscious of a sudden tension.

With the curtains closed the porter was more himself; he wiped his

lips with a handkerchief and stood erect.

"It's my last trip in this car," he remarked heavily. "There's

something wrong with that berth. Last trip the woman in it took an

overdose of some sleeping stuff, and we found her, jes' like that,

dead! And it ain't more'n three months now since there was twins

born in that very spot. No, sir, it ain't natural."

At that moment a thin man with prominent eyes and a spare grayish

goatee creaked up the aisle and paused beside me.

"Porter sick?" he inquired, taking in with a professional eye the

porter's horror-struck face, my own excitement and the slightly

gaping curtains of lower ten. He reached for the darky's pulse and

pulled out an old-fashioned gold watch.

"Hm! Only fifty! What's the matter? Had a shock?" he asked

shrewdly.

"Yes," I answered for the porter. "We've both had one. If you are

a doctor, I wish you would look at the man in the berth across,

lower ten. I'm afraid it's too late, but I'm not experienced in

such matters."

Together we opened the curtains, and the doctor, bending down, gave

a comprehensive glance that took in the rolling head, the relaxed

jaw, the ugly stain on the sheet. The examination needed only a

moment. Death was written in the clear white of the nostrils, the

colorless lips, the smoothing away of the sinister lines of the

night before. With its new dignity the face was not unhandsome: the

gray hair was still plentiful, the features strong and well cut.

The doctor straightened himself and turned to me. "Dead for some

time," he said, running a professional finger over the stains.

"These are dry and darkened, you see, and rigor mortis is well

established. A friend of yours?"

"I don't know him at all," I replied. "Never saw him but once

before."

"Then you don't know if he is traveling alone?"

"No, he was not - that is, I don't know anything about him," I

corrected myself. It was my first blunder: the doctor glanced up

at me quickly and then turned his attention again to the body.

Like a flash there had come to me the vision of the woman with

the bronze hair and the tragic face, whom I had surprised in the

vestibule between the cars, somewhere in the small hours of the

morning. I had acted on my first impulse - the masculine one of

shielding a woman.

The doctor had unfastened the coat of the striped pajamas and

exposed the dead man's chest. On the left side was a small

punctured wound of insignificant size.

"Very neatly done," the doctor said with appreciation. "Couldn't

have done it better myself. Right through the intercostal space:

no time even to grunt."

"Isn't the heart around there somewhere?" I asked. The medical

man turned toward me and smiled austerely.

"That's where it belongs, just under that puncture, when it isn't

gadding around in a man's throat or his boots."

I had a new respect for the doctor, for any one indeed who could

crack even a feeble joke under such circumstances, or who could

run an impersonal finger over that wound and those stains. Odd

how a healthy, normal man holds the medical profession in half

contemptuous regard until he gets sick, or an emergency like this

arises, and then turns meekly to the man who knows the ins and outs

of his mortal tenement, takes his pills or his patronage, ties to

him like a rudderless. ship in a gale.

"Suicide, is it, doctor?" I asked.

He stood erect, after drawing the bed-clothing over the face, and,

taking off his glasses, he wiped them slowly.

"No, it is not suicide," he announced decisively. "It is murder."

Of course, I had expected that, but the word itself brought a shiver.

I was just a bit dizzy. Curious faces through the car were turned

toward us, and I could hear the porter behind me breathing audibly.

A stout woman in negligee came down the aisle and querulously

confronted the porter. She wore a pink dressing-jacket and carried

portions of her clothing.

"Porter," she began, in the voice of the lady who had "dangled,"

"is there a rule of this company that will allow a woman to occupy

the dressing-room for one hour and curl her hair with an alcohol

lamp while respectable people haven't a place where they can hook

their - "

She stopped suddenly and stared into lower ten. Her shining pink

cheeks grew pasty, her jaw fell. I remember trying to think of

something to say, and of saying nothing at all. Then - she had

buried her eyes in the nondescript garments that hung from her arm

and tottered back the way she had come. Slowly a little knot of

men gathered around us, silent for the most part. The doctor was

making a search of the berth when the conductor elbowed his way

through, followed by the inquisitive man, who had evidently summoned

him. I had lost sight, for a time, of the girl in blue.

"Do it himself?" the conductor queried, after a businesslike glance

at the body.

"No, he didn't," the doctor asserted. "There's no weapon here, and

the window is closed. He couldn't have thrown it out, and he didn't

swallow it. What on earth are you looking for, man?"

Some one was on the floor at our feet, face down, head peering under

the berth. Now he got up without apology, revealing the man who

had summoned the conductor. He was dusty, alert, cheerful, and he

dragged up with him the dead man's suit-case. The sight of it

brought back to me at once my own predicament.

"I don't know whether there's any connection or not, conductor," I

said, "but I am a victim, too, in less degree; I've been robbed of

everything I possess, except a red and yellow bath-robe. I happened

to be wearing the bath-robe, which was probably the reason the thief

overlooked it."

There was a fresh murmur in the crowd. Some body laughed nervously.

The conductor was irritated.

"I can't bother with that now," he snarled. "The railroad company

is responsible for transportation, not for clothes, jewelry and

morals. If people want to be stabbed and robbed in the company's

cars, it's their affair. Why didn't you sleep in your clothes?

I do."

I took an angry step forward. Then somebody touched my arm, and I

unclenched my fist. I could understand the conductor's position,

and beside, in the law, I had been guilty myself of contributory

negligence.

"I'm not trying to make you responsible," I protested as amiably

as I could, "and I believe the clothes the thief left are as good

as my own. They are certainly newer. But my valise contained

valuable papers and it is to your interest as well as mine to find

the man who stole it."

"Why, of course," the conductor said shrewdly. "Find the man who

skipped out with this gentleman's clothes, and you've probably got

the murderer."

"I went to bed in lower nine," I said, my mind full again of my lost

papers, "and I wakened in number seven. I was up in the night

prowling around, as I was unable to sleep, and I must have gone back

to the wrong berth. Anyhow, until the porter wakened me this morning

I knew nothing of my mistake. In the interval the thief - murderer,

too, perhaps - must have come back, discovered my error, and taken

advantage of it to further his escape."

The inquisitive man looked at me from between narrowed eyelids,

ferret-like.

"Did any one on the train suspect you of having valuable papers?"

he inquired. The crowd was listening intently.

"No one," I answered promptly and positively. The doctor was

investigating the murdered man's effects. The pockets of his

trousers contained the usual miscellany of keys and small change,

while in his hip pocket was found a small pearl-handled revolver

of the type women usually keep around. A gold watch with a Masonic

charm had slid down between the mattress and the window, while a

showy diamond stud was still fastened in the bosom of his shirt.

Taken as a whole, the personal belongings were those of a man of

some means, but without any particular degree of breeding. The

doctor heaped them together.

"Either robbery was not the motive," he reflected, "or the thief

overlooked these things in his hurry."

The latter hypothesis seemed the more tenable, when, after a

thorough search, we found no pocketbook and less than a dollar in

small change.

The suit-case gave no clue. It contained one empty leather-covered

flask and a pint bottle, also empty, a change of linen and some

collars with the laundry mark, S. H. In the leather tag on the

handle was a card with the name Simon Harrington, Pittsburg. The

conductor sat down on my unmade berth, across, and made an entry of

the name and address. Then, on an old envelope, he wrote a few

words and gave it to the porter, who disappeared.

"I guess that's all I can do," he said. "I've had enough trouble

this trip to last for a year. They don't need a conductor on these

trains any more; what they ought to have is a sheriff and a posse."

The porter from the next car came in and whispered to him. The

conductor rose unhappily.

"Next car's caught the disease," he grumbled. "Doctor, a woman back

there has got mumps or bubonic plague, or something. Will you come

back?"

The strange porter stood aside.

"Lady about the middle of the car," he said, "in black, sir, with

queer-looking hair - sort of copper color, I think, sir."

CHAPTER V

THE WOMAN IN THE NEXT CAR

With the departure of the conductor and the doctor, the group around

lower ten broke up, to re-form in smaller knots through the car.

The porter remained on guard. With something of relief I sank into

a seat. I wanted to think, to try to remember the details of the

previous night. But my inquisitive acquaintance had other

intentions. He came up and sat down beside me. Like the conductor,

he had taken notes of the dead man's belongings, his name, address,

clothing and the general circumstances of the crime. Now with his

little note-book open before him, he prepared to enjoy the minor

sensation of the robbery.

"And now for the second victim," he began cheerfully. "What is your

name and address, please?" I eyed him with suspicion.

"I have lost everything but my name and address," I parried. "What

do you want them for? Publication?"

"Oh, no; dear, no!" he said, shocked at my misapprehension. "Merely

for my own enlightenment. I like to gather data of this kind and

draw my own conclusions. Most interesting and engrossing. Once

or twice I have forestalled the results of police investigation - but

entirely for my own amusement."

I nodded tolerantly. Most of us have hobbies; I knew a man once who

carried his handkerchief up his sleeve and had a mania for old

colored prints cut out of Godey's Lady's Book.

"I use that inductive method originated by Poe and followed since

with such success by Conan Doyle. Have you ever read Gaboriau?

Ah, you have missed a treat, indeed. And now, to get down to

business, what is the name of our escaped thief and probable

murderer?"

"How on earth do I know?" I demanded impatiently. "He didn't write

it in blood anywhere, did he?"

The little man looked hurt and disappointed.

"Do you mean to say," he asked, "that the pockets of those clothes

are entirely empty?" The pockets! In the excitement I had forgotten

entirely the sealskin grip which the porter now sat at my feet, and

I had not investigated the pockets at all. With the inquisitive

man's pencil taking note of everything that I found, I emptied them

on the opposite seat.

Upper left-hand waist-coat, two lead pencils and a fountain pen;

lower right waist-coat, match-box and a small stamp book; right-hand

pocket coat, pair of gray suede gloves, new, size seven and a half;

left-hand pocket, gun-metal cigarette case studded with pearls,

half-full of Egyptian cigarettes. The trousers pockets contained a

gold penknife, a small amount of money in bills and change, and a

handkerchief with the initial "S" on it.

Further search through the coat discovered a card-case with cards

bearing the name Henry Pinckney Sullivan, and a leather flask with

gold mountings, filled with what seemed to be very fair whisky, and

monogrammed H. P. S.

"His name evidently is Henry Pinckney Sullivan," said the cheerful

follower of Poe, as he wrote it down. "Address as yet unknown.

Blond, probably. Have you noticed that it is almost always the

blond men who affect a very light gray, with a touch of red in the

scarf? Fact, I assure you. I kept a record once of the summer

attire of men, and ninety per cent, followed my rule. Dark men like

you affect navy blue, or brown."

In spite of myself I was amused at the man's shrewdness.

"Yes; the suit he took was dark - a blue," I said. He rubbed his

hands and smiled at me delightedly. "Then you wore black shoes, not

tan," he said, with a glance at the aggressive yellow ones I wore.

"Right again," I acknowledged. "Black low shoes and black

embroidered hose. If you keep on you'll have a motive for the

crime, and the murderer's present place of hiding. And if you come

back to the smoker with me, I'll give you an opportunity to judge

if he knew good whisky from bad."

I put the articles from the pockets back again and got up. "I

wonder if there is a diner on?" I said. "I need something sustaining

after all this."

I was conscious then of some one at my elbow. I turned to see the

young woman whose face was so vaguely familiar. In the very act of

speaking she drew back suddenly and colored.

"Oh, - I beg your pardon," she said hurriedly, "I - thought you

were - some one else." She was looking in a puzzled fashion at my

coat. I felt all the cringing guilt of a man who has accidentally

picked up the wrong umbrella: my borrowed collar sat tight on my

neck.

"I'm sorry," I said idiotically. "I'm sorry, but - I'm not." I

have learned since that she has bright brown hair, with a loose

wave in it that drops over her ears, and dark blue eyes with black

lashes and - but what does it matter? One enjoys a picture as a

whole: not as the sum of its parts.

She saw the flask then, and her errand came back to her. "One of

the ladies at the end of car has fainted," she explained. "I

thought perhaps a stimulant - "

I picked up the flask at once and followed my guide down the aisle.

Two or three women were working over the woman who had fainted.

They had opened her collar and taken out her hairpins, whatever

good that might do. The stout woman was vigorously rubbing her

wrists, with the idea, no doubt, of working up her pulse! The

unconscious woman was the one for whom I had secured lower eleven

at the station.

I poured a little liquor in a bungling masculine fashion between

her lips as she leaned back, with closed eyes. She choked, coughed,

and rallied somewhat.

"Poor thing," said the stout lady. "As she lies back that way I

could almost think it was my mother; she used to faint so much."

"It would make anybody faint," chimed in another. "Murder and

robbery in one night and on one car. I'm thankful I always wear

my rings in a bag around my neck - even if they do get under me

and keep me awake."

The girl in blue was looking at us with wide, startled eyes. I saw

her pale a little, saw the quick, apprehensive glance which she

threw at her traveling companion, the small woman I had noticed

before. There was an exchange - almost a clash - of glances. The

small woman frowned. That was all. I turned my attention again

to my patient.

She had revived somewhat, and now she asked to have the window

opened. The train had stopped again and the car was oppressively

hot. People around were looking at their watches and grumbling over

the delay. The doctor bustled in with a remark about its being his

busy day. The amateur detective and the porter together mounted

guard over lower ten. Outside the heat rose in shimmering waves

from the tracks: the very wood of the car was hot to touch. A

Camberwell Beauty darted through the open door and made its way,

in erratic plunges, great wings waving, down the sunny aisle. All

around lay the peace of harvested fields, the quiet of the country.

CHAPTER VI

THE GIRL IN BLUE

I was growing more and more irritable. The thought of what the loss

of the notes meant was fast crowding the murder to the back of my

mind. The forced inaction was intolerable.

The porter had reported no bag answering the description of mine

on the train, but I was disposed to make my own investigation. I

made a tour of the cars, scrutinizing every variety of hand luggage,

ranging from luxurious English bags with gold mountings to the

wicker nondescripts of the day coach at the rear. I was not alone

in my quest, for the girl in blue was just ahead of me. Car by car

she preceded me through the train, unconscious that I was behind her,

looking at each passenger as she passed. I fancied the proceeding

was distasteful, but that she had determined on a course and was

carrying it through. We reached the end of the train almost

together - empty-handed, both of us.

The girl went out to the platform. When she saw me she moved aside,

and I stepped out beside her. Behind us the track curved sharply;

the early sunshine threw the train, in long black shadow, over the

hot earth. Forward somewhere they were hammering. The girl said

nothing, but her profile was strained and anxious.

"I - if you have lost anything," I began, "I wish you would let me

try to help. Not that my own success is anything to boast of."

She hardly glanced at me. It was not flattering. "I have not been

robbed, if that is what you mean," she replied quietly. "I am

• perplexed. That is all."

There was nothing to say to that. I lifted my hat - the other

fellow's hat - and turned to go back to my car. Two or three members

of the train crew, including the conductor, were standing in the

shadow talking. And at that moment, from a farm-house near came the

swift clang of the breakfast bell, calling in the hands from barn

and pasture. I turned back to the girl.

"We may be here for an hour," I said, "and there is no buffet car

on. If I remember my youth, that bell means ham and eggs and

country butter and coffee. If you care to run the risk - "

"I am not hungry," she said, "but perhaps a cup of coffee - dear me,

I believe I am hungry," she finished. "Only - " She glanced back

of her.

"I can bring your companion," I suggested, without enthusiasm. But

the young woman shook her head.

"She is not hungry," she objected, "and she is very - well, I know

she wouldn't come. Do you suppose we could make it if we run?"

"I haven't any idea," I said cheerfully. "Any old train would be

better than this one, if it does leave us behind."

"Yes. Any train would be better than this one," she repeated

gravely. I found myself watching her changing expression. I had

spoken two dozen words to her and already I felt that I knew the

lights and shades in her voice, - I, who had always known how a

woman rode to hounds, and who never could have told the color of

her hair.

I stepped down on the ties and turned to assist her, and together

we walked back to where the conductor and the porter from our car

were in close conversation. Instinctively my hand went to my

cigarette pocket and came out empty. She saw the gesture.

"If you want to smoke, you may," she said. "I have a big cousin

who smokes all the time. He says I am 'kippered.'"

I drew out the gun-metal cigarette case and opened it. But this

most commonplace action had an extraordinary result: the girl

beside me stopped dead still and stood staring at it with fascinated

eyes.

"Is - where did you get that?" she demanded, with a catch in her

voice; her gaze still fixed on the cigarette case.

"Then you haven't heard the rest of the tragedy?" I asked, holding

out the case. "It's frightfully bad luck for me, but it makes a

good story. You see - "

At that moment the conductor and porter ceased their colloquy. The

conductor came directly toward me, tugging as he came at his

bristling gray mustache.

"I would like to talk to you in the car," he said to me, with a

curious glance at the young lady.

"Can't it wait?" I objected. "We are on our way to a cup of coffee

and a slice of bacon. Be merciful, as you are powerful."

"I'm afraid the breakfast will have to wait," he replied. "I won't

keep you long." There was a note of authority in his voice which

I resented; but, after all, the circumstances were unusual.

"We'll have to defer that cup of coffee for a while," I said to the

girl; "but don't despair; there's breakfast somewhere."

As we entered the car, she stood aside, but I felt rather than saw

that she followed us. I was surprised to see a half dozen men

gathered around the berth in which I had wakened, number seven. It

had not yet been made up.

As we passed along the aisle, I was conscious of a new expression

on the faces of the passengers. The tall woman who had fainted was

searching my face with narrowed eyes, while the stout woman of the

kindly heart avoided my gaze, and pretended to look out the window.

As we pushed our way through the group, I fancied that it closed

around me ominously. The conductor said nothing, but led the way

without ceremony to the side of the berth.

"What's the matter?" I inquired. I was puzzled, but not

apprehensive. "Have you some of my things? I'd be thankful even

for my shoes; these are confoundedly tight."

Nobody spoke, and I fell silent, too. For one of the pillows had

been turned over, and the under side of the white case was streaked

with brownish stains. I think it was a perceptible time before I

realized that the stains were blood, and that the faces around were

filled with suspicion and distrust.

"Why, it - that looks like blood," I said vacuously. There was an

incessant pounding in my ears, and the conductor's voice came from

far off.

"It is blood," he asserted grimly.

I looked around with a dizzy attempt at nonchalance. "Even if it

is," I remonstrated, "surely you don't suppose for a moment that

I know anything about it!"

The amateur detective elbowed his way in. He had a scrap of

transparent paper in his hand, and a pencil.

"I would like permission to trace the stains," he began eagerly.

"Also" - to me - "if you will kindly jab your finger with a

pin - needle - anything - "

"If you don't keep out of this," the conductor said savagely, "I

will do some jabbing myself. As for you, sir - " he turned to me.

I was absolutely innocent, but I knew that I presented a typical

picture of guilt; I was covered with cold sweat, and the pounding

in my ears kept up dizzily. "As for you, sir - "

The irrepressible amateur detective made a quick pounce at the

pillow and pushed back the cover. Before our incredulous eyes he

drew out a narrow steel dirk which had been buried to the small

cross that served as a head.

There was a chorus of voices around, a quick surging forward of the

crowd. So that was what had scratched my hand! I buried the wound

in my coat pocket.

"Well," I said, trying to speak naturally, "doesn't that prove what

I have been telling you? The man who committed the murder belonged

to this berth, and made an exchange in some way after the crime.

How do you know he didn't change the tags so I would come back to

this berth?" This was an inspiration; I was pleased with it. "That's

what he did, he changed the tags," I reiterated.

There was a murmur of assent around. The doctor, who was standing

beside me, put his hand on my arm. "If this gentleman committed

this crime, and I for one feel sure he did not, then who is the

fellow who got away? And why did he go?"

"We have only one man's word for that," the conductor snarled.

"I've traveled some in these cars myself, and no one ever changed

berths with me."

Somebody on the edge of the group asserted that hereafter he would

travel by daylight. I glanced up and caught the eye of the girl in

blue.

"They are all mad," she said. Her tone was low, but I heard her

distinctly. "Don't take them seriously enough to defend yourself."

"I am glad you think I didn't do it," I observed meekly, over the

crowd. "Nothing else is of any importance.

The conductor had pulled out his note-book again. "Your name,

please," he said gruffly.

"Lawrence Blakeley, Washington."

"Your occupation?"

"Attorney. A member of the firm of Blakeley and McKnight."

"Mr. Blakeley, you say you have occupied the wrong berth and have

been robbed. Do you know anything of the man who did it?"

"Only from what he left behind," I answered. "These clothes - "

"They fit you," he said with quick suspicion. "Isn't that rather

a coincidence? You are a large man."

"Good Heavens," I retorted, stung into fury, "do I look like a man

who would wear this kind of a necktie? Do you suppose I carry

purple and green barred silk handkerchiefs? Would any man in his

senses wear a pair of shoes a full size too small?"

The conductor was inclined to hedge. "You will have to grant that

I am in a peculiar position," he said. "I have only your word as

to the exchange of berths, and you understand I am merely doing

my duty. Are there any clues in the pockets?"

For the second time I emptied them of their contents, which he noted.

"Is that all?" he finished. "There was nothing else?"

"Nothing."

"That's not all, sir," broke in the porter, stepping forward.

"There was a small black satchel."

"That's so," I exclaimed. "I forgot the bag. I don't even know

where it is."

The easily swayed crowd looked suspicious again. I've grown so

accustomed to reading the faces of a jury, seeing them swing from

doubt to belief, and back again to doubt, that I instinctively

watch expressions. I saw that my forgetfulness had done me harm

• that suspicion was roused again.

The bag was found a couple of seats away, under somebody's raincoat

• another dubious circumstance. Was I hiding it? It was brought

to the berth and placed beside the conductor, who opened it at once.

It contained the usual traveling impedimenta - change of linen, collars,

handkerchiefs, a bronze-green scarf, and a safety razor. But the

attention of the crowd riveted itself on a flat, Russia leather

wallet, around which a heavy gum band was wrapped, and which bore in

gilt letters the name "Simon Harrington."

CHAPTER VII

A FINE GOLD CHAIN

The conductor held it out to me, his face sternly accusing.

"Is this another coincidence?" he asked. "Did the man who left you

his clothes and the barred silk handkerchief and the tight shoes

leave you the spoil of the murder?"

The men standing around had drawn off a little, and I saw the

absolute futility of any remonstrance. Have you ever seen a fly,

who, in these hygienic days, finding no cobwebs to entangle him, is

caught in a sheet of fly paper, finds himself more and more mired,

and is finally quiet with the sticky stillness of despair?

Well, I was the fly. I had seen too much of circumstantial evidence

to have any belief that the establishing of my identity would weigh

much against the other incriminating details. It meant imprisonment

and trial, probably, with all the notoriety and loss of practice

they would entail. A man thinks quickly at a time like that. All

the probable consequences of the finding of that pocket-book flashed

through my mind as I extended my hand to take it. Then I drew my

arm back.

"I don't want it," I said. "Look inside. Maybe the other man took

the money and left the wallet."

The conductor opened it, and again there was a curious surging

forward of the crowd. To my intense disappointment the money was

still there.

I stood blankly miserable while it was counted out - five

one-hundred-dollar bills, six twenties, and some fives and ones that

brought the total to six hundred and fifty dollars.

The little man with the note-book insisted on taking the numbers of

the notes, to the conductor's annoyance. It was immaterial to me:

small things had lost their power to irritate. I was seeing myself

in the prisoner's box, going through all the nerve-racking routine

of a trial for murder - the challenging of the jury, the endless

cross-examinations, the alternate hope and fear. I believe I said

before that I had no nerves, but for a few minutes that morning I

was as near as a man ever comes to hysteria.

I folded my arms and gave myself a mental shake. I seemed to be

the center of a hundred eyes, expressing every shade of doubt and

distrust, but I tried not to flinch. Then some one created a

diversion.

The amateur detective was busy again with the seal-skin bag,

investigating the make of the safety razor and the manufacturer's

name on the bronze-green tie. Now, however, he paused and frowned,

as though some pet theory had been upset.

Then from a corner of the bag he drew out and held up for our

inspection some three inches of fine gold chain, one end of which

was blackened and stained with blood!

The conductor held out his hand for it, but the little man was not

ready to give it up. He turned to me.

"You say no watch was left you? Was there a piece of chain like

that?"

"No chain at all," I said sulkily. "No jewelry of any kind, except

plain gold buttons in the shirt I am wearing."

"Where are your glasses?" he threw at me suddenly: instinctively my

hand went to my eyes. My glasses had been gone all morning, and I

had not even noticed their absence. The little man smiled cynically

and held out the chain.

"I must ask you to examine this," he insisted. "Isn't it a part of

the fine gold chain you wear over your ear?"

I didn't want to touch the thing: the stain at the end made me

shudder. But with a baker's dozen of suspicious eyes - well, we'll

say fourteen: there were no one-eyed men - I took the fragment in

the tips of my fingers and looked at it helplessly.

"Very fine chains are much alike," I managed to say. "For all I

know, this may be mine, but I don't know how it got into that

sealskin bag. I never saw the bag until this morning after daylight."

"He admits that he had the bag," somebody said behind me. "How did

you guess that he wore glasses, anyhow?" to the amateur sleuth.

That gentleman cleared his throat. "There were two reasons," he

said, "for suspecting it. When you see a man with the lines of his

face drooping, a healthy individual with a pensive eye, - suspect

astigmatism. Besides, this gentleman has a pronounced line across

the bridge of his nose and a mark on his ear from the chain."

After this remarkable exhibition of the theoretical as combined with

the practical, he sank into a seat near-by, and still holding the

chain, sat with closed eyes and pursed lips. It was evident to all

the car that the solution of the mystery was a question of moments.

Once he bent forward eagerly and putting the chain on the window-sill,

proceeded to go over it with a pocket magnifying glass, only to shake

his head in disappointment. All the people around shook their heads

too, although they had not the slightest idea what it was about.

The pounding in my ears began again. The group around me seemed to

be suddenly motionless in the very act of moving, as if a hypnotist

had called "Rigid!" The girl in blue was looking at me, and above

the din I thought she said she must speak to me - something vital.

The pounding grew louder and merged into a scream. With a grinding

and splintering the car rose under my feet. Then it fell away into

darkness.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SECOND SECTION

Have you ever been picked up out of your three-meals-a-day life,

whirled around in a tornado of events, and landed in a situation

so grotesque and yet so horrible that you laugh even while you

are groaning, and straining at its hopelessness? McKnight says that

is hysteria, and that no man worthy of the name ever admits to it.

Also, as McKnight says, it sounds like a tank drama. Just as the

revolving saw is about to cut the hero into stove lengths. the

second villain blows up the sawmill. The hero goes up through the

roof and alights on the bank of a stream at the feet of his lady

love, who is making daisy chains.

Nevertheless, when I was safely home again, with Mrs. Klopton

brewing strange drinks that came in paper packets from the pharmacy,

and that smelled to heaven, I remember staggering to the door and

closing it, and then going back to bed and howling out the absurdity

and the madness of the whole thing. And while I laughed my very

soul was sick, for the girl was gone by that time, and I knew by all

the loyalty that answers between men for honor that I would have to

put her out of my mind.

And yet, all the night that followed, filled as it was with the

shrieking demons of pain, I saw her as I had seen her last, in the

queer hat with green ribbons. I told the doctor this, guardedly,

the next morning, and he said it was the morphia, and that I was

lucky not to have seen a row of devils with green tails.

I don't know anything about the wreck of September ninth last. You

who swallowed the details with your coffee and digested the horrors

with your chop, probably know a great deal more than I do. I

remember very distinctly that the jumping and throbbing in my arm

brought me back to a world that at first was nothing but sky, a

heap of clouds that I thought hazily were the meringue on a blue

charlotte russe. As the sense of hearing was slowly added to vision,

I heard a woman near me sobbing that she had lost her hat pin, and

she couldn't keep her hat on.

I think I dropped back into unconsciousness again, for the next

thing I remember was of my blue patch of sky clouded with smoke, of

a strange roaring and crackling, of a rain of fiery sparks on my

face and of somebody beating at me with feeble hands. I opened my

eyes and closed them again: the girl in blue was bending over me.

With that imperviousness to big things and keenness to small that

is the first effect of shock, I tried to be facetious, when a spark

stung my cheek.

"You will have to rouse yourself!" the girl was repeating

desperately. "You've been on fire twice already." A piece of

striped ticking floated slowly over my head. As the wind caught it

its charring edges leaped into flame.

"Looks like a kite, doesn't it?" I remarked cheerfully. And then,

as my arm gave an excruciating throb - "Jove, how my arm hurts!"

The girl bent over and spoke slowly, distinctly, as one might speak

to a deaf person or a child.

"Listen, Mr. Blakeley," she said earnestly. "You must rouse

yourself. There has been a terrible accident. The second section

ran into us. The wreck is burning now, and if we don't move, we

will catch fire. Do you hear?"

Her voice and my arm were bringing me to my senses. "I hear," I

said. "I - I'll sit up in a second. Are you hurt?"

"No, only bruised. Do you think you can walk?"

I drew up one foot after another, gingerly.

"They seem to move all right," I remarked dubiously. "Would you

mind telling me where the back of my head has gone? I can't help

thinking it isn't there."

She made a quick examination. "It's pretty badly bumped," she said.

"You must have fallen on it."

I had got up on my uninjured elbow by that time, but the pain threw

me back. "Don't look at the wreck," I entreated her. "It's no

sight for a woman. If - if there is any way to tie up this arm, I

might be able to do something. There may be people under those cars!"

"Then it is too late to help," she replied solemnly. A little shower

of feathers, each carrying its fiery lamp, blew over us from some

burning pillow. A part the wreck collapsed with a crash. In a

resolute to play a man's part in the tragedy going on around, I got

to my knees. Then I realized what had not noticed before: the hand

and wrist of the broken left arm were jammed through the handle of

the sealskin grip. I gasped and sat down suddenly.

"You must not do that," the girl insisted. I noticed now that she

kept her back to the wreck, her eyes averted. "The weight of the

traveling-bag must be agony. Let me support the valise until we get

back a few yards. Then you must lie down until we can get it cut

off."

"Will it have to be cut off?" I asked as calmly as possible. There

were red-hot stabs of agony clear to my neck, but we were moving

slowly away from the track.

"Yes," she replied, with dumfounding coolness. "If I had a knife I

could do it myself. You might sit here and lean against this fence."

By that time my returning faculties had realized that she was going

to cut off the satchel, not the arm. The dizziness was leaving and

I was gradually becoming myself.

"If you pull, it might come," I suggested. "And with that weight

gone, I think I will cease to be five feet eleven inches of baby."

She tried gently to loosen the handle, but it would not move, and

at last, with great drops of cold perspiration over me, I had to

give up.

"I'm afraid I can't stand it," I said. "But there's a knife

somewhere around these clothes, and if I can find it, perhaps you

can cut the leather."

As I gave her the knife she turned it over, examining it with a

peculiar expression, bewilderment rather than surprise. But she

said nothing. She set to work deftly, and in a few minutes the bag

dropped free.

"That's better," I declared, sitting up. "Now, if you can pin my

sleeve to my coat, it will support the arm so we can get away from

here."

"The pin might give," she objected, "and the jerk would be terrible."

She looked around, puzzled; then she got up, coming back in a minute

with a draggled, partly scorched sheet. This she tore into a large

square, and after she had folded it, she slipped it under the broken

arm and tied it securely at the back of my neck.

The relief was immediate, and, picking up the sealskin bag, I walked

slowly beside her, away from the track.

The first act was over: the curtain fallen. The scene was "struck."

CHAPTER IX

THE HALCYON BREAKFAST

We were still dazed, I think, for we wandered like two troubled

children, our one idea at first to get as far away as we could

from the horror behind us. We were both bareheaded, grimy, pallid

through the grit. Now and then we met little groups of country

folk hurrying to the track: they stared at us curiously, and some

wished to question us. But we hurried past them; we had put the

wreck behind us. That way lay madness.

Only once the girl turned and looked behind her. The wreck was

hidden, but the smoke cloud hung heavy and dense. For the first

time I remembered that my companion had not been alone on the train.

"It is quiet here," I suggested. "If you will sit down on the bank

I will go back and make some inquiries. I've been criminally

thoughtless. Your traveling companion - "

She interrupted me, and something of her splendid poise was gone.

"Please don't go back," she said. "I am afraid it would be of no

use. And I don't want to be left alone."

Heaven knows I did not want her to be alone. I was more than

content to walk along beside her aimlessly, for any length of time.

Gradually, as she lost the exaltation of the moment, I was gaining

my normal condition of mind. I was beginning to realize that I had

lacked the morning grace of a shave, that I looked like some lost

hope of yesterday, and that my left shoe pinched outrageously. A

man does not rise triumphant above such handicaps. The girl, for

all her disordered hair and the crumpled linen of her waist, in

spite of her missing hat and the small gold bag that hung forlornly

from a broken chain, looked exceedingly lovely.

"Then I won't leave you alone," I said manfully, and we stumbled on

together. Thus far we had seen nobody from the wreck, but well up

the lane we came across the tall dark woman who had occupied lower

eleven. She was half crouching beside the road, her black hair

about her shoulders, and an ugly bruise over her eye. She did not

seem to know us, and refused to accompany us. We left her there at

last, babbling incoherently and rolling in her hands a dozen pebbles

she had gathered in the road.

The girl shuddered as we went on. Once she turned and glanced at

my bandage. "Does it hurt very much?" she asked.

"It's growing rather numb. But it might be worse," I answered

mendaciously. If anything in this world could be worse, I had never

experienced it.

And so we trudged on bareheaded under the summer sun, growing parched

and dusty and weary, doggedly leaving behind us the pillar of smoke.

I thought I knew of a trolley line somewhere in the direction we were

going, or perhaps we could find a horse and trap to take us into

Baltimore. The girl smiled when I suggested it.

"We will create a sensation, won't we?" she asked. "Isn't it queer

• or perhaps it's my state of mind - but I keep wishing for a pair

of gloves, when I haven't even a hat!"

When we reached the main road we sat down for a moment, and her

hair, which had been coming loose for some time, fell over her

shoulders in little waves that were most alluring. It seemed a

pity to twist it up again, but when I suggested this, cautiously,

she said it was troublesome and got in her eyes when it was loose.

So she gathered it up, while I held a row of little shell combs

and pins, and when it was done it was vastly becoming, too. Funny

about hair: a man never knows he has it until he begins to lose it,

but it's different with a girl. Something of the unconventional

situation began to dawn on her as she put in the last hair-pin and

patted some stray locks to place.

"I have not told you my name," she said abruptly. "I forgot that

because I know who you are, you know nothing about me. I am Alison

West, and my home is in Richmond."

So that was it! This was the girl of the photograph on John

Gilmore's bedside table. The girl McKnight expected to see in

Richmond the next day, Sunday! She was on her way back to meet him!

Well, what difference did it make, anyhow? We had been thrown

together by the merest chance. In an hour or two at the most we

would be back in civilization and she would recall me, if she

remembered me at all, as an unshaven creature in a red cravat and

tan shoes, with a soiled Pullman sheet tied around my neck. I drew

a deep breath.

"Just a twinge," I said, when she glanced up quickly. "It's very

good of you to let me know, Miss West. I have been hearing

delightful things about you for three months."

"From Richey McKnight?" She was frankly curious.

"Yes. From Richey McKnight," I assented. Was it any wonder

McKnight was crazy about her? I dug my heels into the dust.

"I have been visiting near Cresson, in the mountains," Miss West

was saying. "The person you mentioned, Mrs. Curtis, was my hostess.

We - we were on our way to Washington together." She spoke slowly,

as if she wished to give the minimum of explanation. Across her

face had come again the baffling expression of perplexity and

trouble I had seen before.

"You were on your way home, I suppose? Richey spoke about seeing

you," I floundered, finding it necessary to say something. She

looked at me with level, direct eyes.

"No," she returned quietly. "I did not intend to go home. I - well,

it doesn't matter; I am going home now."

A woman in a calico dress, with two children, each an exact duplicate

of the other, had come quickly down the road. She took in the

situation at a glance, and was explosively hospitable.

"You poor things," she said. "If you'll take the first road to the

left over there, and turn in at the second pigsty, you will find

breakfast on the table and a coffee-pot on the stove. And there's

plenty of soap and water, too. Don't say one word. There isn't a

soul there to see you."

We accepted the invitation and she hurried on toward the excitement

and the railroad. I got up carefully and helped Miss West to her

feet.

"At the second pigsty to the left," I repeated, "we will find the

breakfast I promised you seven eternities ago. Forward to the

pigsty!"

We said very little for the remainder of that walk. I had almost

reached the limit of endurance: with every step the broken ends of

the bone grated together. We found the farm-house without

difficulty, and I remember wondering if I could hold out to the end

of the old stone walk that led between hedges to the door.

"Allah be praised," I said with all the voice I could muster.

"Behold the coffee-pot!" And then I put down the grip and folded

up like a jack-knife on the porch floor.

When I came around something hot was trickling down my neck, and a

despairing voice was saying, "Oh, I don't seem to be able to pour

it into your mouth. Please open your eyes."

"But I don't want it in my eyes," I replied dreamily. "I haven't

any idea what came over me. It was the shoes, I think: the left

one is a red-hot torture." I was sitting by that time and looking

across into her face.

Never before or since have I fainted, but I would do it joyfully,

a dozen times a day, if I could waken again to the blissful touch

of soft fingers on my face, the hot ecstasy of coffee spilled by

those fingers down my neck. There was a thrill in every tone of

her voice that morning. Before long my loyalty to McKnight would

step between me and the girl he loved: life would develop new

complexities. In those early hours after the wreck, full of pain

as they were, there was nothing of the suspicion and distrust that

came later. Shorn of our gauds and baubles, we were primitive man

and woman, together: our world for the hour was the deserted

farm-house, the slope of wheat-field that led to the road, the

woodland lot, the pasture.

We breakfasted together across the homely table. Our cheerfulness,

at first sheer reaction, became less forced as we ate great slices

of bread from the granny oven back of the house, and drank hot

fluid that smelled like coffee and tasted like nothing that I have

ever swallowed. We found cream in stone jars, sunk deep in the

chill water of the spring house. And there were eggs, great

yellow-brown ones, - a basket of them.

So, like two children awakened from a nightmare, we chattered over

our food: we hunted mutual friends, we laughed together at my feeble

witticisms, but we put the horror behind us resolutely. After all,

it was the hat with the green ribbons that brought back the

strangeness of the situation.

All along I had had the impression that Alison West was deliberately

putting out of her mind something that obtruded now and then. It

brought with it a return of the puzzled expression that I had

surprised early in the day, before the wreck. I caught it once,

when, breakfast over, she was tightening the sling that held the

broken arm. I had prolonged the morning meal as much as I could,

but when the wooden clock with the pink roses on the dial pointed

to half after ten, and the mother with the duplicate youngsters had

not come back, Miss West made the move I had dreaded.

"If we are to get into Baltimore at all we must start," she said,

rising. "You ought to see a doctor as soon as possible."

"Hush," I said warningly. "Don't mention the arm, please; it is

asleep now. You may rouse it."

"If I only had a hat," she reflected. "It wouldn't need to be much

of one, but - " She gave a little cry and darted to the corner.

"Look," she said triumphantly, "the very thing. With the green

streamers tied up in a bow, like this - do you suppose the child

would mind? I can put five dollars or so here - that would buy a

dozen of them."

It was a queer affair of straw, that hat, with a round crown and

a rim that flopped dismally. With a single movement she had turned

it up at one side and fitted it to her head. Grotesque by itself,

when she wore it it was a thing of joy.

Evidently the lack of head covering had troubled her, for she was

elated at her find. She left me, scrawling a note of thanks and

pinning it with a bill to the table-cloth, and ran up-stairs to the

mirror and the promised soap and water.

I did not see her when she came down. I had discovered a bench

with a tin basin outside the kitchen door, and was washing, in a

helpless, one-sided way. I felt rather than saw that she was

standing in the door-way, and I made a final plunge into the basin.

"How is it possible for a man with only a right hand to wash his

left ear?" I asked from the roller towel. I was distinctly

uncomfortable: men are more rigidly creatures of convention than

women, whether they admit it or not. "There is so much soap on me

still that if I laugh I will blow bubbles. Washing with rain-water

and home-made soap is like motoring on a slippery road. I only

struck the high places."

Then, having achieved a brilliant polish with the towel, I looked

at the girl.

She was leaning against the frame of the door, her face perfectly

colorless, her breath coming in slow, difficult respirations. The

erratic hat was pinned to place, but it had slid rakishly to one

side. When I realized that she was staring, not at me, but past me

to the road along which we had come, I turned and followed her gaze.

There was no one in sight: the lane stretched dust white in the

sun, - no moving figure on it, no sign of life.

CHAPTER X

MISS WEST'S REQUEST

The surprising change in her held me speechless. All the animation

of the breakfast table was gone: there was no hint of the response

with which, before, she had met my nonsensical sallies. She stood

there, white-lipped, unsmiling, staring down the dusty road. One

hand was clenched tight over some small object. Her eyes dropped

to it from the distant road, and then closed, with a quick, indrawn

breath. Her color came back slowly. Whatever had caused the change,

she said nothing. She was anxious to leave at once, almost

impatient over my deliberate masculine way of getting my things

together. Afterward I recalled that I had wanted to explore the

barn for a horse and some sort of a vehicle to take us to the

trolley, and that she had refused to allow me to look. I remembered

many things later that might have helped me, and did not. At the

time, I was only completely bewildered. Save the wreck, the

responsibility for which lay between Providence and the engineer of

the second section, all the events of that strange morning were

logically connected; they came from one cause, and tended unerringly

to one end. But the cause was buried, the end not yet in view.

Not until we had left the house well behind did the girl's face

relax its tense lines. I was watching her more closely than I had

realized, for when we had gone a little way along the road she turned

to me almost petulantly. "Please don't stare so at me," she said,

to my sudden confusion. "I know the hat is dreadful. Green always

makes me look ghastly."

"Perhaps it was the green." I was unaccountably relieved. "Do you

know, a few minutes ago, you looked almost pallid to me!"

She glanced at me quickly, but I was gazing ahead. We were out of

sight of the house, now, and with every step away from it the girl

was obviously relieved. Whatever she held in her hand, she never

glanced at it. But she was conscious of it every second. She

seemed to come to a decision about it while we were still in sight

of the gate, for she murmured something and turned back alone, going

swiftly, her feet stirring up small puffs of dust at every step.

She fastened something to the gate-post, - I could see the nervous

haste with which she worked. When she joined me again it was

without explanation. But the clenched fingers were free now, and

while she looked tired and worn, the strain had visibly relaxed.

We walked along slowly in the general direction of the suburban

trolley line. Once a man with an empty wagon offered us a lift,

but after a glance at the springless vehicle I declined.

"The ends of the bone think they are castanets as it is," I

explained. "But the lady - "

The young lady, however, declined and we went on together. Once,

when the trolley line was in sight, she got a pebble in her low

shoe, and we sat down under a tree until she found the cause of

the trouble.

"I - I don't know what I should have done without you," I blundered.

"Moral support and - and all that. Do you know, my first conscious

thought after the wreck was of relief that you had not been hurt?"

She was sitting beside me, where a big chestnut tree shaded the road,

and I surprised a look of misery on her face that certainly my words

had not been meant to produce.

"And my first thought," she said slowly, "was regret that I - that

I hadn't been obliterated, blown out like a candle. Please don't

look like that! I am only talking."

But her lips were trembling, and because the little shams of society

are forgotten at times like this, I leaned over and patted her hand

lightly, where it rested on the grass beside me.

"You must not say those things," I expostulated. "Perhaps, after

all, your friends - "

"I had no friends on the train." Her voice was hard again, her tone

final. She drew her hand from under mine, not quickly, but

decisively. A car was in sight, coming toward us. The steel finger

of civilization, of propriety, of visiting cards and formal

introductions was beckoning us in. Miss West put on her shoe.

We said little on the car. The few passengers stared at us frankly,

and discussed the wreck, emphasizing its horrors. The girl did not

seem to hear. Once she turned to me with the quick, unexpected

movement that was one of her charms.

"I do not wish my mother to know I was in the accident:," she said.

"Will you please not tell Richey about having met me?"

I gave my promise, of course. Again, when we were almost into

Baltimore, she asked to examine the gun-metal cigarette case, and

sat silent with it in her hands, while I told of the early morning's

events on the Ontario.

"So you see," I finished, "this grip, everything I have on, belongs

to a fellow named Sullivan. He probably left the train before the

wreck, - perhaps just after the murder."

"And so - you think he committed the - the crime?" Her eyes; were

on the cigarette case.

"Naturally," I said. "A man doesn't jump off a Pullman car in the

middle of the night in another man's clothes, unless he is trying

to get away from something. Besides the dirk, there were the stains

that you, saw. Why, I have the murdered man's pocket-book in this

valise at my feet. What does that look like?"

I colored when I saw the ghost of a smile hovering around the

corners of her mouth. "That is," I finished, "if you care to believe

that I am innocent."

The sustaining chain of her small gold bag gave way just then. She

did not notice it. I picked it up and slid the trinket into my

pocket for safekeeping, where I promptly forgot it. Afterwards I

wished I had let it lie unnoticed on the floor of that dirty little

suburban car, and even now, when I see a woman carelessly dangling

a similar feminine trinket, I shudder involuntarily: there comes

back to me the memory of a girl's puzzled eyes under the brim of a

flopping hat, the haunting suspicion of the sleepless nights that

followed.

Just then I was determined that my companion should not stray back

to the wreck, and to that end I was determinedly facetious.

"Do you know that it is Sunday?" she asked suddenly, "and that we

are actually ragged?"

"Never mind that," I retorted. "All Baltimore is divided on Sunday

into three parts, those who rise up and go to church, those who

rise up and read the newspapers, and those who don't rise up. The

first are somewhere between the creed and the sermon, and we need

not worry about the others."

"You treat me like a child," she said almost pettishly. "Don't try

so hard to be cheerful. It - it is almost ghastly."

After that I subsided like a pricked balloon, and the remainder of

the ride was made in silence. The information that she would go to

friends in the city was a shock: it meant an earlier separation

than I had planned for. But my arm was beginning again. In putting

her into a cab I struck it and gritted my teeth with the pain. It

was probably for that reason that I forgot the gold bag.

She leaned forward and held out her hand. "I may not have another

chance to thank you," she said, "and I think I would better not try,

anyhow. I cannot tell you how grateful I am." I muttered something

about the gratitude being mine: owing to the knock I was seeing two

cabs, and two girls were holding out two hands.

"Remember," they were both saying, "you have never met me, Mr.

Blakeley. And - if you ever hear anything about me - that is not

• pleasant, I want you to think the best you can of me. Will you?"

The two girls were one now, with little flashes of white light

playing all around. "I - I'm afraid that I shall think too well

for my own good," I said unsteadily. And the cab drove on.

CHAPTER XI

THE NAME WAS SULLIVAN

I had my arm done up temporarily in Baltimore and took the next

train home. I was pretty far gone when I stumbled out of a cab

almost into the scandalized arms of Mrs. Klopton. In fifteen

minutes I was in bed, with that good woman piling on blankets

and blistering me in unprotected places with hot-water bottles.

And in an hour I had a whiff of chloroform and Doctor

Williams had set the broken bone.

I dropped asleep then, waking in the late twilight to a realization

that I was at home again, without the papers that meant conviction

for Andy Bronson, with a charge of murder hanging over my head, and

with something more than an impression of the girl my best friend

was in love with, a girl moreover who was almost as great an enigma

as the crime itself.

"And I'm no hand at guessing riddles," I groaned half aloud. Mrs.

Klopton came over promptly and put a cold cloth on my forehead.

"Euphemia," she said to some one outside the door, "telephone the

doctor that he is still rambling, but that he has switched from

green ribbons to riddles."

"There's nothing the matter with me, Mrs. Klopton," I rebelled.

"I was only thinking out loud. Confound that cloth: it's trickling

all over me!" I gave it a fling, and heard it land with a soggy

thud on the floor.

"Thinking out loud is delirium," Mrs. Klopton said imperturbably.

"A fresh doth, Euphemia."

This time she held it on with a firm pressure that I was too weak

to resist. I expostulated feebly that I was drowning, which she

also laid to my mental exaltation, and then I finally dropped into

a damp sleep. It was probably midnight when I roused again. I had

been dreaming of the wreck, and it was inexpressibly comforting to

feel the stability of my bed, and to realize the equal stability of

Mrs. Klopton, who sat, fully attired, by the night light, reading

Science and Health.

"Does that book say anything about opening the windows on a hot

night?" I suggested, when I had got my bearings.

She put it down immediately and came over to me. If there is one

time when Mrs. Klopton is chastened - and it is the only time - it

is when she reads Science and Health. "I don't like to open the

shutters, Mr. Lawrence," she explained. "Not since the night you

went away."

But, pressed further, she refused to explain. "The doctor said you

were not to be excited," she persisted. "Here's your beef tea."

"Not a drop until you tell me," I said firmly. "Besides, you know

very well there's nothing the matter with me. This arm of mine is

only a false belief." I sat up gingerly. "Now - why don't you open

that window?"

Mrs. Klopton succumbed. "Because there are queer goings-on in that

house next door," she said. "If you will take the beef tea, Mr.

Lawrence, I will tell you."

The queer goings-on, however, proved to be slightly disappointing.

It seemed that after I left on Friday night, a light was seen

flitting fitfully through the empty house next door. Euphemia had

seen it first and called Mrs. Klopton. Together they had watched

it breathlessly until it disappeared on the lower floor.

"You should have been a writer of ghost stories," I said, giving my

pillows a thump. "And so it was fitting flitfully!"

"That's what it was doing," she reiterated. "Fitting flitfully - I

mean flitting fitfully - how you do throw me out, Mr. Lawrence! And

what's more, it came again!"

"Oh, come now, Mrs. Klopton," I objected, "ghosts are like lightning;

they never strike twice in the same night. That is only worth half

a cup of beef tea."

"You may ask Euphemia," she retorted with dignity. "Not more than

an hour after, there was a light there again. We saw it through

the chinks of the shutters. Only - this time it began at the lower

floor and climbed!"

"You oughtn't to tell ghost stories at night," came McKnight's voice

from the doorway. "Really, Mrs. Klopton, I'm amazed at you. You

old duffer! I've got you to thank for the worst day of my life."

Mrs. Klopton gulped. Then realizing that the "old duffer" was meant

for me, she took her empty cup and went out muttering.

"The Pirate's crazy about me, isn't she?" McKnight said to the

closing door. Then he swung around and held out his hand.

"By Jove," he said, "I've been laying you out all day, lilies on

the door-bell, black gloves, everything. If you had had the sense

of a mosquito in a snow-storm, you would have telephoned me."

"I never even thought of it." I was filled with remorse. "Upon my

word, Rich, I hadn't an idea beyond getting away from that place.

If you had seen what I saw - "

McKnight stopped me. "Seen it! Why, you lunatic, I've been digging

for you all day in the ruins! I've lunched and dined on horrors.

Give me something to rinse them down, Lollie."

He had fished the key of the cellarette from its hiding-place in my

shoe bag and was mixing himself what he called a Bernard Shaw - a

foundation of brandy and soda, with a little of everything else in

sight to give it snap. Now that I saw him clearly, he looked weary

and grimy. I hated to tell him what I knew he was waiting to hear,

but there was no use wading in by inches. I ducked and got it over.

"The notes are gone, Rich," I said, as quietly as I could. In

spite of himself his face fell.

"I - of course I expected it," he said. "But - Mrs. Klopton said

over the telephone that you had brought home a grip and I hoped

• well, Lord knows we ought not to complain. You're here, damaged,

but here." He lifted his glass. "Happy days, old man!"

"If you will give me that black bottle and a teaspoon, I'll drink

that in arnica, or whatever the stuff is; Rich, - the notes were

gone before the wreck!"

He wheeled and stared at me, the bottle in his hand. "Lost, strayed

or stolen?" he queried with forced lightness.

"Stolen, although I believe the theft was incidental to something

else."

Mrs. Klopton came in at that moment, with an eggnog in her hand.

She glanced at the clock, and, without addressing any one in

particular, she intimated that it was time for self-respecting folks

to be at home in bed. McKnight, who could never resist a fling at

her back, spoke to me in a st