They rode on without speaking through the squalid town—the whilom rival and the victim of brilliant Moscow. They rode straight to the station, where they dined in, by the way, one of the best railway refreshment rooms in the world. At one o’clock the night express from Moscow to St. Petersburg, with its huge American locomotive, rumbled into the station. Paul secured a chair in the long saloon car, and then returned to the platform. The train waited twenty minutes for refreshments, and he still had much to say to Steinmetz; for one of these men owned a principality and the other governed it. They walked up and down the long platform, smoking endless cigarettes, talking gravely.
Steinmetz stood on the platform and watched the train pass slowly away into the night. Then he went toward a lamp, and taking a pocket-handkerchief from his pocket, examined each corner of it in succession. It was a small pocket-handkerchief of fine cambric. In one corner were the initials S.S.B., worked neatly in white—such embroidery as is done in St. Petersburg.
“Ach!” exclaimed Steinmetz shortly; “something told me that that was he.”
He turned the little piece of cambric over and over, examining it slowly, with a heavy Germanic cunning. He had taken this handkerchief from the body of the nameless rider who was now lying alone on the steppe twelve miles away.
Steinmetz returned to the large refreshment room, and ordered the waiter to bring him a glass of Benedictine, which he drank slowly and thoughtfully.
Then he went toward the large black stove which stands in the railway restaurant at Tver. He opened the door with the point of his boot. The wood was roaring and crackling within. He threw the handkerchief in and closed the door.
“It is as well, mon prince,” he muttered, “that I found this, and not you.”