“What is it?” Major Wright said.
“Somebody who handled this liquor drilled a hole in the bottom of the bottle and extracted the good liquor. Then he refilled the bottle with his own deadly concoction, and sealed the hole with molten glass.”
The S.P. man, who was young and eager, said: “I’ve seen that done, too. You can change the liquor without opening the bottle and breaking the seal. It’s a quick way to make money. If you don’t care what happens to the people that drink the cheap stuff.”
“Murder is a quick way to make money,” the conductor said solemnly. “This is technical homicide.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“The salesman who sells poison liquor is legally responsible for its effects. That’s probably the Missouri law the same as it is where I come from. But it’s going to be an awful job finding the liquor store where this bottle came from.”
My certainty that someone on the train had poisoned the bottle was dissolving and trickling away. I had a hard time trying to think clearly.
“Does this mean it couldn’t have been poisoned on the train?”
“It sure looks like it,” the S.P. man said. “You don’t get equipment on a train for melting glass and drilling bottles. It’s this consarned liquor shortage that does it. These fly-by-night sharks know that the boys will drink anything if it’s all they can get, and they take advantage of it. We get more trouble from bad liquor than from everything else put together.”
“Damn it!” I exploded. “I didn’t walk under the train by myself.”
Major Wright put his hand on my shoulder. The paternal effect was spoilt by the fact that he had to reach up. “You can’t tell what you did. Maybe it just looked like a comfortable place to lie down.”
The light dazzled me. My eyes were sore and heavy in my head. My throat felt raw, as if someone had reamed it out with a file. “This is the third death,” I said. “Yet nobody seems to give a damn. Don’t people get tired of all these deaths?”
The conductor and the S.P. man paid no attention to me. They were making plans to get Hatcher’s body off the train.
“Look,” Major Wright said. “I like my work, but one corpse on my hands is enough for one evening. For God’s sake go to bed. That’s an order in two senses, professional and military.”
“All right,” I said finally. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Good night. Pleasant dreams.”
On the way out I heard him tell the conductor that he thought he’d close Hatcher’s eyes, because the sclera of the eyeball was drying and turning brown.
The ladder was standing ready at my upper berth. As I started up on shaky knees, I noticed that the light in Mary’s lower berth was still on.
“Sam?” I saw her white hand fumbling between the heavy green curtains, and then her face. Washed shining for the night, with her bright hair done up on top of her head, she looked naïve and very young, like a nymph peering between green boughs.
I said, “Good night.”
“Sam, what’s the matter with your face? What’s happened?”
“Be quiet. You’ll wake everyone.”
“I won’t be quiet. I want you to tell me what’s happened. You’ve got a bruise on your forehead, and you’re covered with dirt. You’ve been fighting.”
“No, I haven’t. I’ll tell you in the morning.”
“Tell me now.” She reached up and took light hold of my arm. The confused alarm on her face was so flattering that I almost laughed.
“If you insist. Move over.”
I sat on the edge of her berth and, in a low voice which grew steadily hoarser, told her what had happened.
More than once she said, “You might have been killed.”
The second time I answered, “Hatcher was. By God, I don’t believe it was an accident. Maybe that poisoned bottle was intended for me.”
“How could anyone know that you were going to drink out of it? And didn’t you say a hole had been bored in the bottom and resealed? That couldn’t have been done on the train.”
“I don’t know. I do know one thing. I’m not going to touch another drink until I get to the end of this trouble.”
My mind’s eye was struck by the sordidness of the scene which had seemed jolly enough at the time: Hatcher and me sprawled on the shabby leather seats of the smoking-room drinking ourselves to death or to the edge of it. A strong revulsion placed me for the first time in my life on the side of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
The remembered scene was so vivid that I could see every detail of the room, the brown bottle on the floor, Hatcher’s thin lips mumbling over his letter.
“I wonder if it’s still on the train,” I said to myself.
I must have spoken aloud because Mary said, “What?”
“Hatcher’s letter. He wrote part of a letter while I was with him and went to mail it in the club car. Maybe it’s still there.”
“Do you think there could be anything in it bearing on his death?”
“It’s possible. I’m going to the club car now, before that letter’s taken off the train.”
I leaned forward to get up but she laid a restraining hand on my arm. “No. I’ll go. You look terrible, Sam.”
“I admit my head’s swimming. I think it’s trying to swim the English Channel.”
“Poor dear.” She patted my arm. “Please go to bed, Sam.”
“See if you can read the name and address on that letter through the sides of the box.”
“I will.”
I climbed the ladder to my berth. It seemed very high. I took off my coat. It was such an effort that I played with the idea of simply falling back and going to sleep as I was, without undressing. I heard the heavy rustle of Mary’s curtains falling to behind her, and then the soft rapid sounds of her feet retreating in the direction of the club car.
Then I heard fainter sounds moving towards me, a mere susurrus of feet so faint that it was suspicious. I opened a narrow crack in my curtain and peered down. Moving swiftly and silently like a panther in the jungle path which I had imagined the aisle to be, a man glided beneath me in the direction Mary had gone. All I could see was the top of his head and his shoulders, but I knew him by their shape.
When the door at the end of the car had closed softly behind him I climbed down the ladder and followed him. My mind, inflamed by shock and fear, hated the beady-eyed man so much that I hoped wildly I would catch him in some overt act, and have an excuse to club him with my fists. He had looked like an animal stalking game. I felt like another.
But when I stood on the shaking windy platform at the end of the club car and saw him again through the window in the door, he was standing in the passageway quietly doing nothing. Rather, he was standing with his face turned away from me, intently watching the interior of the car. Making no attempt to conceal my movements, I opened the door and walked towards him. He started and turned in a quick graceful movement and his right hand jumped unconsciously towards the left lapel of his coat. I deliberately jostled him as I passed him, and made contact with a hard object under his left breast which could have been a gun in a shoulder holster.
It was Mary he had been watching. She was sitting by the mailbox at the far end of the shadowy car, which was half full of sleeping people and dimly lit by a small light at each end. As I walked towards her among stretched-out legs, I tried to keep in the line of vision of the man in the passageway. She glanced up startled when she heard me. She had a pair of eyebrow pluckers in her right hand and Hatcher’s letter in her left.
“Put it back,” I said in a hoarse whisper. “You’re being watched, and it’s a Federal offense to tamper with a mailbox.”