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.”
