Then it occurred to him that he had not actually seen her either getting the drink or in the act of drinking. He had taken that for granted. As a matter of fact, the woman had just been sort of fumbling around.
And the top layer of discarded cups was curiously dry and unsullied.
Why, Leonidas wondered, would the mousy woman wastefully strew dry cups around? Pique, possibly. Perhaps the mousy woman was wasting the Pullman Company’s cups in a spirit of revenge.
“A mouse,” Leonidas murmured. “A mouse, gnawing at a mountain. M yes.”
But if the woman was being vindictive, why hadn’t she made a clean sweep? There were still plenty of cups left up in the wall container.
The pince-nez described a series of small circles while Leonidas swung them and pondered.
Now that he considered the situation, that gasp had been more in the nature of a guilty start than an exclamation of amazement at his appearance. Perhaps his looking and not his looks had prompted that gasp and that flight.
Leonidas fixed his attention on the top layer of paper cups. When you took the trouble to camouflage the top of anything, you usually wished to hide what was at the bottom. At Meredith’s, he had learned to be suspicious of unduly neat top layers in his weekly inspection of dormitory bureau drawers. A brisk fishing invariably brought to light any number of strange and illicit objects, like those famous stink bombs of Hartley Minor’s.
Leaning forward, Leonidas fished.
With a gleam in his blue eyes, he extricated Miss Chard’s brown paper package.
Obviously, by the feel of it, the package contained neither stolen emeralds nor a handful of secret treaties. But if the contents included what Leonidas guessed they did, then he had erred in his judgments concerning the activities of mousy women who traveled. He had underestimated them, definitely.
Back inside his drawing room, Leonidas discovered that he had guessed correctly. Under the brown paper wrapping there was a gun, a small but sinister-looking revolver. And, in addition to the gun, there was also a pair of sleek and shining handcuffs.
After gazing at them for a critical moment, Leonidas replaced the wrapping, tied up the package, and returned it to its former hiding place at the base of the water cooler. Guns and handcuffs played no part in his life. He had no use for them, nor any desire to become involved in difficult explanations, should anyone in authority demand them and start asking questions.
Besides, he felt there was more chance of his curiosity being satisfied by replacing the package, and waiting to see what would happen next.
For he was positive that the mousy woman would return. From his infinite experience with them, he knew that mousy women made a fetish of Making Sure. He had seen them open pocketbooks twenty times in five minutes to make sure that their tickets were safe. On train platforms, in customs sheds, on wharves, he had watched mousy women constantly unlocking suitcases and pawing through trunks to make sure that their possessions were where they had been put.
Because she had been observed, this mousy woman with the braid would certainly come back and check up on her brown paper package, the minute the coast was clear. She would employ the interval by telling herself reassuringly that the man who looked like Shakespeare had not seen a thing, and that he would have made some other comment if he had. But she would never be able to restrain herself from coming back and making sure. Sooner or later, she would return.
Leonidas wedged his drawing room door open to a thin crack, and sat down to await developments. It exasperated him somewhat to think that at the end of his journey, with only three-quarters of an hour to go, something mildly akin to adventure should at last turn up.
The chatty young man walked rather hurriedly past the door. He was followed by a porter, and a querulous man in magenta pajamas, who was complaining bitterly that he hadn’t slept a wink.
They, however, all came from Car Nine, and the mousy woman ought to be coming the other way, from Car Ten.
The rush and roar of a passing train drowned out all other sounds, and in the flickering slits of light as the cars slatted past, Leonidas nearly missed the flash of gray past his door. For a puzzled moment, he wondered if he had imagined it.
A series of clinks as something metallic dropped on the corridor floor brought him to his feet.
He had known, Leonidas told himself with satisfaction, that she would come back. She was the type.
But in the doorway, he stopped short.
It was not the mousy woman who knelt on her hands and knees on the floor. It was a strikingly beautiful girl in a gray suit who peered up at him, and smiled disarmingly.
“You’ve dropped something?” Leonidas inquired.
“Practically everything,” the girl said. “A cigarette case, and a lighter, and a lipstick, and— Oh, here’s the case. Is that the lipstick in that crack by you?”
Obligingly, Leonidas got down on all fours and hunted in the crack.
“Here’s the lighter,” the girl said. “I’ve found the lighter. Oh, damn, I hate losing that lipstick! It’s my pet lipstick. I suppose it’s rolled around and got stuck under— Oh, porter! Do you see my lipstick anywhere?”
The porter joined their crablike scramble around the narrow corridor, a sight which enchanted the chatty young man when he returned once again to Car Nine.
“Playing leapfrog?” he asked genially. “Can anyone join? Oh, you’ve lost something. I see. Well, if the lady in gray will rise and give me her place, old Hawk-eye will find it. Move over, Shakespeare.”
Another porter co-operated, and so did the train conductor and the Pullman conductor. But it was Leonidas who eventually found the lipstick at the far end of the corridor, imbedded under the linoleum by the entrance door.
“You’re wonderful!” the girl said.
