Simon took out a handkerchief and wiped the gun carefully all over. It was a small-caliber weapon, and the single crack of it should not have alarmed anyone who heard it among the other noises of the train.
Still holding it in his handkerchief, he folded Voyson’s fingers around the butt, taking care to impress their prints on the shiny surface. Voyson slumped in the corner, with the bullet puncture in his right temple showing in the center of a shaded circle of burnt cordite. Working with dispassionate speed, the Saint dropped his sandwich and pepper-pot out of the window, picked up a couple of crumbs, and erased his fingerprints from the handle. He wiped the inside catch of the door in the same way, slid it back, and brushed his handkerchief over the outside as he closed it again. There was no flaw in the scene: nothing could have seemed more natural than that a man in Voyson’s position should have lost his nerve and taken the easy way out. Simon was without pity or regret.
But as he went back to his own compartment he felt happy. He had always known that the old days were good, and the return had its own emotion.
He saw his fellow-travellers again with a sense of surprise and unreality. For a while he had almost forgotten them. But the old German caught his hand as he sat down, holding it in a kind of tremulous eagerness, with a pathetic brilliance awake in his dulled eyes.
“I vant to thank you,” he said. “You safe me from doing something very foolish. I vas a coward — a traitor. I run away.”
“Don’t we all?” said the Saint.
The old man shook his head.
“Dot vould have been a wicked thing to do. But I am not like dot now. Perhaps it isn’t so bad. I am used to vork, und at my age I have so much experience, I am a better vorkman than any young man. So I say, I go back und vork again. Does a few more years matter so much?”
“And I’m going to work too,” said the girl. “Between us, we’ll get it all back twice as quickly.”
Simon looked at them both for a long time. There was ninety thousand dollars in his pocket, which was money in any man’s life. He could have enjoyed every cent of it. He didn’t want to see what he was seeing.