The officer hesitated. “My orders are my orders, as madame must know. What I do here I must do through all the train; no woman can leave till she has been examined. But I shall go no farther than necessary. Perhaps madame’s passport will be sufficient. That, madame knows, she must always show upon request.”
The young woman’s indignation subsided, and she sat down and reached for her leather bag. Drexel had been in Russia long enough to know this searching of a train meant that something had happened. And he knew how formidable was this officer—not in himself, but in what he represented, what was massed behind him: a quarter of a million of political police and spies, hundreds of prisons, Siberian exile, the scaffold, blindfolded death from rifle volleys.
Both Drexel and the captain closely watched the young woman. She went through the notes and few articles for the toilet in the little bag; and then a look of annoyance came over her face. Drexel’s heart beat high. He knew what faced the person who had no passport.
She went through the little bag again—and again found nothing.
The captain’s eyes had grown suspicious. “Well, your passport, madame!” he cried roughly. “Or you come with me!”
Drexel knew she was in danger, and in a flash he thought of a dozen wild things that he might do to aid her. But he thought of nothing so wild as what next occurred.
She looked up from her bag and turned those wonderful eyes straight into his face—and smiled! The intimate, domestic, worried smile that a wife might give her husband.
“John, dear,” she said in purest English, “that bothersome passport must have been packed in among your things.”
Henry Drexel may have been unconscious for some portion of an instant. But the captain, who had turned to him, saw never a blink, never a falter.
“Why, perhaps it was, Mary,” said he, and he reached for his bag.