“I’m afraid it must be true,” he said steadily.
“But I spoke to him only a little vhile ago. I thank him. Und he shook hands with me.” The old man’s voice was pleading, pleading tremulously for the light that wasn’t there. “No man could have acted a lie like dot... Vait! I go to him myself, und he’ll tell me it isn’t true.”
He stood up and dragged himself shakily to the door, holding the luggage rack to support himself.
Simon filled his lungs. He fell back into the reality of it with a jolt like a plunge into cold water, which left him braced and tingling. Mentally, he shook himself like a dog. He realized that the fragment of drama which had been flung before him had temporarily obscured everything else; that because the tragedy had struck two people who had given him a glimpse of a rare loveliness that he had forgotten for many years, he had taken their catastrophe for his own. But they were only two of many thousands. One never feels the emotion of these things, except academically, until it touches the links of one’s own existence. Life was life. It had happened before, and it would happen again. Of the many crooked financiers whom the Saint had known to their loss, there was scarcely one whose victims he had ever considered. But Bruce Voyson was actually on the train, and he must have been carrying some wealth with him, and the old man knew what he looked like.
The girl was rising to follow, but Simon put his hands on her shoulders and held her back.
“I’ll look after him,” he said. “Perhaps you’d better stay here.”
He swung himself through the door and went wafting down the corridor, long-limbed and alert. A man like Bruce Voyson would be fair game for any adventurer, and it was in things like that that the Saint was most at home. The fact that he could be steered straight to his target by a man who could really recognize the financier when he saw him, in spite of his disguise, was a miracle too good to miss. Action, swift and spontaneous and masterly, was more in the Saint’s line than a contemplation of the brutal ironies of Fate, and the prospect of it took his mind resiliently away from gloom.
He followed the old man along the train at a leisured distance. At each pause where the old man stopped to peer into a compartment the Saint stopped also and lounged against the side, patient as a stalking tiger. Sometime later he pushed into another carriage and found himself in the dining car, for it was an early train with provision for the breakfasts of late-rising travellers. The old man was standing over a table half-way down, and one glance was enough to show that he had found his quarry.
Simon sank unnoticed into the adjoining booth. In a panel mirror on the opposite side he could see the man who must have been Bruce Voyson — a thin dowdily dressed man with the almost white hair and tinted glasses which the old German had described. The glasses seemed to hide most of the sallow face, so that the line of the thin straight mouth was the only expressive feature to be seen. The old German was speaking.
“Mr Voyson, I’m asking you a question und I vant an answer. Is it true dot your company is smashed?”