“If that car goes there,” I told him. “If it doesn’t, follow it.”
XIII AND LEARN THE SOOTHING EFFECTS OF FOND DU LAC TWINS.
It went direct to the LaSalle Street station; and Doris and George and Felice were standing in the carriage court watching porters pick up their luggage, when I drove in.
They glanced at me; that was all. At least it was all I saw, and they went up to the train shed. I snatched a ticket and a coupon for an “upper” from the Pullman window and went through the cars. Doris and Felice had a compartment together about the middle of the train. George wasn’t with them; he seemed to possess a section in a car near mine. He possessed also a large, piggy, Trafalgar-Square-looking portmanteau, yellow in color. I didn’t know where he picked it up. I hadn’t seen it at the Blackstone; probably he’d had it sent direct to the train.
I had lost a lot of my prejudice against George since I saw him parked in a separate car from Doris. He looked at me, realized he had seen me several times recently and half nodded. I nodded and went on. When I glanced back, he was drifting rearward to the observation car where he sat down and picked up an afternoon paper. With as much casualness as I could manage, I dropped into a chair nearly opposite. The average Chicago to New York twenty-hour-train travel filled the other chairs with their varying degrees of self-consciousness and importance. There were the usual clothing merchants vociferous over discounts and braiding; there were a couple of advertising men lying—unless they were Sarazen and Johnny Black in disguise—about how they did the second nine at Skokie; there was a pleasant, middle-aged married couple, happy to all appearances; there was a mother with a son under her thumb; then there were half a dozen assorted males varying from the emphatic, self-made-man type to mild, chinless youths who might be either chorus men or bond salesmen. They always look alike to me.
And they always irritate me so that I did not notice that another man was beyond them until I observed that George was watching that far end of the car. He wasn’t doing it conspicuously; he was so subtle about it that if I had not been paying particular attention to him, I’d never have guessed anybody here was worrying him. But some one was—one of those bulldog-jaw, assertive sort of chaps that make you think right away of the reform candidate, and who gives you, at the same glance, the reason that reform administrations fail. Not a tactful face at all but highly determined. He was about thirty-five and was young for his type, I thought, until I considered that his type has to be younger sometime. Anyway, there he was, solid and belligerent, and with a copy of the Iron Age before his face.
I had to look at him eight or ten times before I became absolutely sure that he wasn’t reading it but, in turn, was watching George when George was looking the other way.
So a man hunt—other than my own (if you called my operations a hunt)—was on aboard this train; and the stalking was in process before me.