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.
