CHAPTER IV.
NUMBERS SEVEN AND NINE
Afterwards, when I tried to recall our discovery of the body in lower ten, I found that my most vivid impression was not that made by the revelation of the opened curtain. I had an instantaneous picture of a slender blue-gowned girl who seemed to sense my words rather than hear them, of two small hands that clutched desperately at the seat beside them. The girl in the aisle stood, bent toward us, perplexity and alarm fighting in her face.
With twitching hands the porter attempted to draw the curtains together. Then in a paralysis of shock, he collapsed on the edge of my berth and sat there swaying. In my excitement I shook him.
“For Heaven’s sake, keep your nerve, man,” I said bruskly. “You’ll have every woman in the car in hysterics. And if you do, you’ll wish you could change places with the man in there.” He rolled his eyes.
A man near, who had been reading last night’s paper, dropped it quickly and tiptoed toward us. He peered between the partly open curtains, closed them quietly and went back, ostentatiously solemn, to his seat. The very crackle with which he opened his paper added to the bursting curiosity of the car. For the passengers knew that something was amiss: I was conscious of a sudden tension.
With the curtains closed the porter was more himself; he wiped his lips with a handkerchief and stood erect.
“It’s my last trip in this car,” he remarked heavily. “There’s something wrong with that berth. Last trip the woman in it took an overdose of some sleeping stuff, and we found her, jes’ like that, dead! And it ain’t more’n three months now since there was twins born in that very spot. No, sir, it ain’t natural.”
At that moment a thin man with prominent eyes and a spare grayish goatee creaked up the aisle and paused beside me.
“Porter sick?” he inquired, taking in with a professional eye the porter’s horror-struck face, my own excitement and the slightly gaping curtains of lower ten. He reached for the darky’s pulse and pulled out an old-fashioned gold watch.
“Hm! Only fifty! What’s the matter? Had a shock?” he asked shrewdly.