Jonathan said, “I am not in the habit of delegating to others either my responsibilities, or my authority, Mr. Boniface.”
Boniface was too dignified to slam the door, but his coat tails were eloquent as he stepped into the corridor and gently but firmly closed the door behind him.
Jonathan looked at me, and said, “Nice going, Wennick. But you should have kept Boniface from knowing.”
“I couldn’t,” I said. “They went to Boniface with their own story, and he called me to his room. The thing started breaking all over the carpet. What the hell could I do?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “But don’t let it happen again. Incidentally, Miss Devers has something for you. You’ll find her waiting in your office.”
I didn’t have any dignity to uphold, so I slammed the door as I walked out.
Mae Devers, looking as trim as an airplane stewardess, was perched on a corner of my desk, one shapely leg kicking gently back and forth.
“What ho, Counselor!” she said. “Why the frown?”
I said, “The frown becomes a grin. E.B. said you had something for me.”
“I have,” she said, and pushed out a tinted oblong of paper. “A check in your favor for a couple of thousand dollars drawn on E.B.’s private account. Naturally, he doesn’t want Boniface to know he’s giving you a bonus.”
I pushed the check to one side and said, “He told me you had something for me.”
She laughed and tried to duck.
“You wouldn’t want to make E.B. Jonathan a liar, would you?” I asked.
“You win,” she told me, and gave me her lips.
Flight Into Disaster
Only once before had the woman in the club car ever known panic — not merely fear but the real panic which paralyzes the senses.
That had been in the mountains when she had tried to take a short cut to camp. When she realized she was lost there was a sudden overpowering desire to run. What was left of her sanity warned her, but panic made her feel that only by flight could she escape the menace of the unknown. The silent mountains, the somber woods, had suddenly become enemies, leering in hostility. Only by running did she feel she could escape — by running — the very worst thing she could have done.
Now, surrounded by the luxury of a crack transcontinental train, she again experienced that same panic. Once more there was that overpowering desire to run. Someone had searched her compartment while she had been at dinner. She knew it was a man. He had tried to leave things just as he had found them, but there were little things that a woman would have noticed that the man didn’t even see. Her plaid coat, which had been hung in the little steel closet so that the back was to the door, had been turned so the buttons were toward the door. A little thing, but a significant thing which had been the first to catch her attention, leaving her, for the moment, cold and numb. Now, seated in the club car, she strove to maintain an attitude of outward calm by critically inspecting her hands. Actually she was taking stock of the men who were in the car.
Her problem was complicated by the fact that she was a compactly formed young woman, with smooth lines, clear eyes, a complete quota of curves, and under ordinary circumstances, a latent smile always quivering at the corners of her mouth. It was, therefore, only natural that every male animal in the club car sat up and took notice.
The fat man across the aisle who held a magazine in his pudgy hands was not reading. He sat like a Buddha, motionless, his half-closed, lazy-lidded eyes fixed upon some imaginary horizon far beyond the confines of the car — yet she felt those eyes were taking a surreptitious interest in everything she did. There was something sinister about him, from the big diamond on the middle finger of his right hand to the rather ornate twenty-five-dollar cravat which begged for attention above the bulging expanse of his vest.
Then there was the man in the chair on her right. He hadn’t spoken to her but she knew that he was going to, waiting only for an opportunity to make his remark sound like the casual comment of a fellow passenger.
He was in his late twenties, bronzed by exposure, steely-blue of eye. His mouth held the firmness of a man who has learned to command first himself and then others. The train lurched. The man’s hand reached for the glass on the little stand between them. He glanced apprehensively at her skirt.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It didn’t spill,” she replied almost automatically.
“I’ll lower the danger point,” he said, raising the glass to his lips. “Going all the way through? I’m getting off at six o’clock in a cold Wyoming morning.”
For a moment her panic-numbed brain failed to appreciate the full significance of his remark, then she experienced a sudden surge of relief. Here, then, was one man whom she could trust. She knew that the man who had searched her baggage hadn’t found what he wanted because she had it with her, neatly folded, fastened to the bottom of her left foot by strong adhesive tape. Therefore the enemy would stay on the train as long as she was on it, waiting, watching, growing more and more desperate, until at last, perhaps in the dead of night, he would... She knew only too well that he would stop at nothing. One murder had already been committed.
But now she had found one person whom she could trust, a man who had no interest in the thing she was hiding, a man who might well be a possible protector.
He seemed mildly surprised at her sudden friendliness.
“I didn’t know this train stopped anywhere at that ungodly hour,” she ventured, smiling.
“A flag stop,” he explained. Across the aisle the fat man had not moved a muscle, yet she felt absolutely certain that those glittering eyes were concentrating on her and that he was listening as well as watching.
“You live in Wyoming?” she asked.
“I did as a boy. Now I’m going back. I lived and worked on my uncle’s cattle ranch. He died and left it to me. At first I thought I’d sell it. It would bring a small fortune. But now I’m tired of the big cities, I’m going back to live on the ranch.”
“Won’t it be frightfully lonely?”
“At times.”
She wanted to cling to him now, dreading the time when she would have to go back to her compartment.
She felt the trainmen must have a master key which could open even a bolted door — in the event of sickness, or if a passenger rang for help. There must be a master key which would manipulate even a bolted door. And if trainmen had such a key, the man who had searched her compartment would have one.
Frank Hardwick, before he died, had warned her. “Remember,” he had said, “they’re everywhere. They’re watching you when you don’t know you’re being watched. When you think you’re running away and into safety, you’ll simply be rushing into a carefully laid trap.”
She hoped there was no trace of the inner tension within her as she smiled at the man on her right. “Do tell me about the cattle business,” she said...
All night she had crouched in her compartment, watching the door, waiting for that first flicker of telltale motion which would show the doorknob was being turned. Then she would scream, pound on the walls of the compartment, make sufficient commotion to spread an alarm.
Nothing had happened. Probably that was the way “they” had planned it. They’d let her spend one sleepless night, then when fatigue had numbed her senses...
The train abruptly slowed. She glanced at her wristwatch, saw that it was 5:55, and knew the train was stopping for the man who had inherited the cattle ranch. Howard Kane was the name he had given her after she had encouraged him to tell her all about himself. Howard Kane, twenty-eight, unmarried, presumably wealthy, his mind scarred by battle experiences, seeking the healing quality of the big, silent places, the one man on the train whom she knew she could trust.