Long before she finished her speech of thanks, the group was glowing with pleasure and good fellowship, and the feeling that they had all been of tremendous service in an undertaking of major importance.
All, that is, except Leonidas.
Although he glowed outwardly with the rest, he found himself wishing that the girl wouldn’t lay it on so thickly with her trowel. To be sure, none of the others noticed. Whether it was the girl’s voice that charmed them, or her face, or her figure, or her soft red curls, the fact remained that the group was charmed. Not even the chatty young man thought to ask how that lipstick possibly could have imbedded itself in such a way that the blades of two pocketknives were necessary to pry it out.
Leonidas’s admiration for the girl mounted. By sheer force of personal magnetism, she had made two porters, two conductors, and the chatty young man feel that a lipstick so imbedded was an ordinary, commonplace occurrence. Any one of them would have been shocked at the suggestion that the lipstick was planted. They would probably challenge to a duel anyone who told them they had been bamboozled.
Really, Leonidas thought, the girl apparently lacked only one qualification of an E. Phillips Oppenheim heroine. She had no accent.
For, while the men were scrambling on the floor, the girl had removed the brown paper package from the base of the water cooler.
Calmly and unhurriedly, with her back toward the cooler, she had fished out the package and popped it into her smart black suede pocketbook. And, throughout the operation, she had maintained a delightful and diverting conversation. She spurred the men on to greater efforts. She described the barber-pole striping of the lipstick’s case. She told how much she paid for it. She told them the flavor.
No one but Leonidas had noticed what went on as she chatted. There was no reason why they should have noticed. The idea of hunting a lipstick had been firmly planted in their minds, and they hunted a lipstick to the exclusion of everything else. A brown paper package containing a gun and a pair of handcuffs had never been suggested to them, while Leonidas had the advantage of knowing about it.
“Simply marvelous, all of you,” the girl concluded. “And—oh, while I think of it, conductor, here are the checks. You won’t disturb my aunt, will you? I left a notice on the door. She wants to sleep as late as the law allows. Thanks, loads. Now,” she went on briskly, “I must get along and find the rest of my family. Car Five’s to the rear, isn’t it? Good-by, everybody, and thank you again, Shakespeare!”
Her parting smile to Leonidas made him wonder if she knew that-he knew. He was sure that she guessed.
He wanted to follow the girl. He yearned to follow her and get to the root of this tantalizing little episode. He had every opportunity to follow her, for the other men, including the chatty young man, had gone their respective ways. But something held him there in the doorway of his drawing room, and after a minute or two he went inside and closed the door firmly behind him.
Tantalizing or not, he told himself, it was none of his business, and this was no time for him to indulge any quixotic impulses. He was twenty-one minutes from the South Station, an hour and twenty-one minutes from the new house. If this had only happened earlier, he would have plunged with enthusiasm into the solution of a puzzle that cried for a solution. But right now, he was going home.
It disturbed him, as he gathered his things together, to find that he couldn’t keep the mousy woman out of his thoughts. But he kept seeing that gray braid and hearing that gasp.
The facts were so simple. A package was put somewhere, and then taken out. But if the mousy woman were the girl’s aunt, she was wide awake enough when he saw her. Why should she now wish to sleep as long as the law allowed? If the aunt and the girl were together, why should the aunt hide the package, and the girl retrieve it?
That line of thought reduced everything to an absurdity, so Leonidas started in from another angle.
How on earth had the girl known that the package was there? And why had she laid such elaborate plans to get it? First she had planted that lipstick, and then she had deliberately dropped things from her pocket-book. The sound of them falling was negligible in comparison with all the train noises, but it would be sufficient to lure anyone who might be lurking around and listening. Had no one appeared, she could have taken the package and departed, secure in the knowledge that she hadn’t been observed. If anyone turned up, she had the stage set to instigate the lipstick hunt. During that bit of manufactured distraction, she could get her package anyway.
It was the old magician’s trick. Plant something in the left hand to catch the audience’s eye, and let the right hand do what it would. It had worked out beautifully. It had been beautifully planned. There was a professional gloss to the whole incident that had been entirely lacking in the episode of the mousy woman.
Where was that woman? Why hadn’t she returned? Where had she gone? What happened to her?
Leonidas locked a pigskin case, pushed it aside, and got up.
He could sit till doomsday and improvise on the theme of the mousy woman, but a two-minute investigation would probably solve everything.
Rapidly, he walked through to Car Ten.
He was far too preoccupied and in far too much of a hurry to notice that the chatty young man suddenly cut short his conversation with a porter in the aisle of Car Nine, and sauntered slowly after him.
Inside Car Ten, Leonidas paused. The girl had pointed
