“O.K., sergeant,” the older of the two detectives said.
“Get ready,” Sergeant Ackley warned. “Here she comes.”
A station bell clanged a strident warning. The big yellow headlight of the thundering locomotive loomed up out of the darkness. Passengers for the limited swirled into little excited groups, exchanging last farewells as travelers picked up their baggage.
The big limited train rumbled into the station. While Sergeant Ackley and Beaver hid in the waiting room, the two detectives spotted Lester Leith’s stateroom, flashed a go-ahead signal, and the officers dashed aboard. The brass-throated bells clanged their warning, and the long line of Pullmans creaked into motion.
In Drawing Room A in Car D57, Lester Leith merely glanced at his wrist watch, then took a cigarette from the hammered silver case in his pocket, tapped it on his thumbnail, and snapped a match into flame.
On the opposite seat, Evelyn Rae, her back bolstered up with pillows, her mind absorbed in the picture magazine, slid around to draw up her knees to furnish a prop for the magazine. Absent-mindedly, she slipped the gum from her mouth, pressed it against the under side of the table, and groped with her fingers until she found a fresh package. Without taking her eyes off the article she was reading, she tore off the wrappers and fed sticks of gum into her mouth.
The train, having cleared the more congested district of the city, rumbled into constantly increasing speed.
Belting Junction at eight ten and Robbinsdale at eight thirty were passed without incident. At five minutes past nine, Lester Leith said:
“I think I’ll take a stroll on the platform when we get to Beacon City.”
Evelyn Rae might not have heard him. She was reading an absorbing article on one of her favorite motion-picture stars. The article told of the gameness, courage, the moral stamina of the star, and Evelyn Rae occasionally blinked back tears of sympathy as she traced the star’s unfortunate search for love and understanding through the tangled skein of Hollywood’s romance.
Lester Leith picked up his shoes, dropped one of them, and bent over to retrieve it.
Looking up at the under side of the table, he saw wad after wad of moist gum pressed against the wood.
Slipping two of the imitation emeralds from his pocket, he pushed them up into the soft gum. Wetting the tips of his fingers, he kneaded the sticky substance over the imitation gems.
The train slowed for Beacon City, and Evelyn Rae was not even conscious that it was slowing. Busily absorbed in reading the adventures of an extra girl who came to Hollywood and attracted the romantic interest of one of the more popular stars, she barely looked up as Lester Leith slipped out of the door and into the corridor.
As the junction point, Beacon City represented an important stop in the journey of the limited. Here two passenger coaches were transferred from one line and two Pullmans added from another. The station rated a fifteen-minute stop.
Lester Leith picked up a porter and hurried to the baggage room.
“I’m on the limited,” he told the man in charge of the baggage counter. “I have a suitcase I want to pick up. I haven’t the check for it, but I can describe the contents. It came down on the night of the thirteenth on the limited, and was put off here to wait for me. The whole thing was a mistake. I got in touch with the claim office, and they located—”
“Yes, I know all about it,” the baggageman said. “You’ve got to put up a bond.”
“A what?”
“A cash bond.”
“That’s an outrage,” Leith said. “I can describe the contents. There’s absolutely no possibility that you can get into any trouble by delivering that suitcase to me, and what’s more—”
“No bond, no suitcase,” the man said. “I’m sorry, but that’s orders from headquarters. They came from the claim department.”
“How much bond?” Lester Leith asked.
“Fifty dollars.”
The two detectives who had followed Leith into the baggage room were busy checking articles of hand baggage. Apparently, they paid no attention to the conversation which was going on.
Leith opened his wallet, took out ten five-dollar bills, and said:
“This is an outrage.”
“O.K.,” the baggageman said. “You can get this money back later on. You’ll have to take it up with the claim department. This is just the nature of a bond to indemnify the railroad company. Now, what’s in the suitcase?”
At this point the detectives seemed suddenly to become absent-minded. They lost interest in their baggage and moved surreptitiously closer.
Leith said, without hesitating. “It’s part of a masquerade costume joke that was played on some friends. There’s a costume in there by which a thin man can make it appear he’s enormously fat.”
“You win,” the baggageman said. “I’d been wondering what the devil those pneumatic gadgets were for. Regular rubber clothes. I couldn’t figure it. I guess you pump them up with a bicycle pump, and that’s all there is to it, eh?”
“Not a bicycle pump,” Leith said, smiling. “It’s quicker to stand at the nozzle of a pressure hose at a service station. All right, make me out a receipt for the fifty dollars, and I’ll be on my way. I have to catch this train.”
He turned to the porter, handed him a dollar, and said:
“All right, redcap, rush this aboard the train, put it in Drawing Room A in Car D57. There’s a young woman in there. So knock on the door and explain to her that I had the suitcase put aboard. She’s my secretary.”
“Yassah, yassah,” the grinning boy said. “Right away, suh.”
The detectives took no chances. One of them followed the suitcase aboard the train. The other waited for Leith to get his receipt.
“All aboard. All aboard for the limited,” the brakeman cried.
The station bell clanged into sharp summons.
The baggageman looked up from the receipt he was writing. “You’ve got a minute and a half after that,” he said.
“All aboard. All aboard,” cried the conductor.
The baggageman scribbled a hasty receipt. The bell of the locomotive clanged into action. The baggageman thrust the receipt into Leith’s hand.
“O.K.,” he said, “you’d better hustle.”
Leith sprinted across the platform. Porters were banging vestibule doors. The long train creaked into motion.
A porter saw Leith coming, opened the vestibule door, and hustled Leith aboard. The detective caught the next car down.
The minute the detective had vanished into the vestibule, Leith suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, I forgot my wallet!”
“You can’t get off now, boss,” the porter said.
“The hell I can’t!” Leith told him, jerked open the vestibule door, and stepped down to the stairs. He swung out to the platform with the easy grace of a man who has reduced the hopping of trains to a fine art.
The engineer, knowing he had a straight, uninterrupted run during which he must smoothly clip off the miles, slid the throttle open, and the powerful engine, snaking the long string of Pullmans behind it, roared into rocking speed as Lester Leith, left behind on the station, saw the red lights on the rear of the train draw closer together and then vanish into the darkness.
In the stateroom of Car D56, Sergeant Ackley sat hunched over a table, his elbows spread far apart, his chin resting in his hands, chewing nervously at a soggy cigar. His eyes, glittering with excitement, stared across at Beaver, the undercover man. The two detectives made their report.