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 pocketbook 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 notebook 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 sealskin 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.
