And from the doorknob of Drawing Room B hung a “Do NOT Disturb” card.
It was utterly foolish of him, Leonidas thought, to jump to the conclusion that the mousy woman and the aunt referred to by the girl should be the same person. He hadn’t a whiff of evidence to suspect that the mousy woman might be drugged, slugged, or otherwise in distress within this drawing room. He was letting himself be carried away by the Oppenheim tradition and by his own elastic imagination.
If he ignored the sign and pounded until he aroused some sleeping passenger, he would feel like an unqualified imbecile. If, on the other hand, he didn’t discover what had become of the mousy woman, she and her braid would haunt him to the end of his days.
Leonidas raised his hand.
The door promptly swung open at his knock, apparently of its own accord. No one was holding it. It swayed back and forth with the motion of the train.
Without entering, Leonidas peered inside.
The shades were drawn. The berths were pulled apart. ‘Hie blankets were heaped in a pile. There was no sign of the mousy woman, or of any luggage, or of anything else.
In short, Drawing Room B of Car Ten was vacant.
Leonidas sighed. Once more the Oppenheim tradition had let him down. No lifeless bodies, no beautiful girl, no intrigue, no emeralds, not even a crumpled paper on the floor.
Keenly disappointed, feeling even a twinge of resentment, Leonidas started to turn away. He grabbed at the door jamb as the train lurched, and while he steadied himself, something rolled across the drawing room floor and hit against his shoe.
Even with the shades down, there was no mistaking the barber-pole stripes of that lipstick! It was the girls’ lipstick, the one they had hunted for.
This was her drawing room, and she had returned to it!
Leonidas stepped inside and snapped on the lights.
He heard the door slam suddenly, and the click of its bolt in the lock. He knew someone was behind him. He knew instinctively that he should duck.
But he couldn’t duck. He couldn’t move. His attention was riveted to the pile of blankets, and the body hidden beneath them. He assumed there was a body. All he could see was a hand.
When he did manage to swing around, it was too late.
The butt of a revolver cracked against the side of his head, and sent him sprawling.
The train lurched as he fell, and a metal seat leg seemed to rise and meet him in mid-air. In the split second before he achieved complete oblivion, Leonidas had one last coherent thought.
He was less dazed by the crack than the fact that the mousy woman was the cracker.
CHAPTER 2
LEONIDAS OPENED his eyes, blinked them, and then closed them firmly.
He had reason to believe that he was conscious. There were certain very definite indications that he had come to. He was aware of a fretful throbbing in his head. He could wiggle his toes. He could hear train sounds and the subdued voices of people talking.
On the other hand, certain points confused him.
There was, for example, no train motion. He was not in the drawing room. He was lolling on a green plush Pullman seat surrounded by a cluster of egglike faces, all wearing interested stares.
Leonidas opened his eyes again and stared back.
There was no mousy woman among them, no beautiful girl, and the only limpid body in the vicinity appeared to be his own.
‘Take it easy, Shakespeare. You’re okay.” The chatty young man in the blue suit leaned over him and spoke in friendly, reassuring tones, as though Leonidas were a small, dull cousin. “You’ll be perfectly all right if you take it easy. It’s nothing serious. You just gave yourself a nasty crack over the head.”
“I did not!” Leonidas told him indignantly.
“What?”
“I said, I did not. I did nothing of the kind! D’you think that I’m responsible for—”
“There, there!” said the young man. “Calm down! You didn’t crack yourself, you sustained a bump, if you like that better. My God, even in this state, you can stickle for unity, emphasis, and coherence! But you’re all right, Shakespeare. The doctor saw you, and he said it was nothing compared to the man—”
A conductor, one of the two who had aided in the lipstick search, edged his way into the circle.
“The ambulance’ll be ready for him in a few minutes, Mr. Dow.”
Leonidas sat up and affixed his pince-nez, which were miraculously unscathed and intact.
“Er—just what ambulance will be ready for whom?”
“The one that Mr. Dow,” the conductor pointed to the chatty young man, “ordered for you. It’ll be here in a couple minutes.”
“If,” Leonidas said, “if, by any stretch of the imagination, you mean that an ambulance has been ordered and is ready for me, please dismiss it promptly. Where is the body?”
“Body?” Mr. Dow and the rest surveyed Leonidas with benign tolerance.
“Body,” Leonidas said. “Where is it?”
“Oh, I get you,” Mr. Dow said. “What a quaint way of putting it! Your body is in the South Station. You’ve been out since before Back Bay, because I saw you start from your drawing room back there, and you just turned up a minute ago.”
“Indeed,” Leonidas said. “Indeed! And what is the consensus concerning the interval?”
“Huh?” said the conductor. “What’s that?”
Leonidas tried again.
“What is popularly assumed to be the reason for my —er—my out?”
Under the circumstances, he thought it wiser to ask than to volunteer his own impressions. The little group surrounding him were realists. They knew he had been knocked out, and they could see the bump which he was beginning to feel on the side of his head. To these people, he was an elderly bearded man who had just come to, a
