She was of a Latin brunette type, with masses of wavy black hair, great lustrous brown eyes and a piquant beauty of face. As her profile was exposed to me my memory was jogged awake. She was Watkins's pretty lady! And I was reinforced in this conclusion when I recalled the muscle she had exhibited in helping me up, the off-hand expertness with which she had gagged me, performances reminiscent of the way the valet had been tripped and despoiled of his pistol.
After a muttered interchange of words with Toutou in a language I did not understand, she fastened her gaze on me, and evidently something of my thoughts was reflected in my face, for she burst out laughing.
"You can't make me out!" she jeered in an unmistakable American accent. "You're not the first, Mr. Nash. How is old Watkins? He knows Hélène, too, and I'll bet he never wants to see me again. I laugh whenever I think of him lying there on the floor gaping up into his own pistol. And say, you were lucky that day. I came near fetching a bomb with me, and if I had I sure would have piled it into that passage. Where would you have been then, eh?"
She chuckled impishly, and Toutou from the shadows at his end of the compartment—as I came to find out, the man had an animal's aversion for the light when his enemies were present—snarled a sentence that was partly French, partly something else.
"Your affectionate friend tells me to quit kidding and get down to business," she interpreted with a smile. "I'm going to take that gag out, Mr. Nash, and Toutou is going to sit beside you with his hand on the back of your neck, and if you so much as start to yip he'll break it just as if you were a chicken." Her eyes glinted harshly. "Do you get me? That goes."
I nodded my head. Toutou moved up beside me, and a shiver wrenched my spine, as his hand unfastened the gag and enclosed my neck.
"We are perfectly safe," she continued. "You are my insane husband. We are Americans, and I am taking you to relatives in Italy. Toutou is the physician in charge of the case." She reached inside her bodice and produced some papers. "Here are your passport and a medical certificate. Everything is in order.
"The one question is: are you going to do business with us willingly or must we make you?"
I moistened my lips.
"I don't know what you mean," I answered as coolly as I could. "I haven't got anything you might want. Search me."