“You must not say those things,” I expostulated. “Perhaps, after all, your friends—”
“I had no friends on the train.” Her voice was hard again, her tone final. She drew her hand from under mine, not quickly, but decisively. A car was in sight, coming toward us. The steel finger of civilization, of propriety, of visiting cards and formal introductions was beckoning us in. Miss West put on her shoe.
We said little on the car. The few passengers stared at us frankly, and discussed the wreck, emphasizing its horrors. The girl did not seem to hear. Once she turned to me with the quick, unexpected movement that was one of her charms.
“I do not wish my mother to know I was in the accident,” she said. “Will you please not tell Richey about having met me?”
I gave my promise, of course. Again, when we were almost into Baltimore, she asked to examine the gun-metal cigarette case, and sat silent with it in her hands, while I told of the early morning’s events on the Ontario.
“So you see,” I finished, “this grip, everything I have on, belongs to a fellow named Sullivan. He probably left the train before the wreck,—perhaps just after the murder.”
“And so—you think he committed the—the crime?” Her eyes were on the cigarette case.
“Naturally,” I said. “A man doesn’t jump off a Pullman car in the middle of the night in another man’s clothes, unless he is trying to get away from something. Besides the dirk, there were the stains that you saw. Why, I have the murdered man’s pocket-book in this valise at my feet. What does that look like?”
I colored when I saw the ghost of a smile hovering around the corners of her mouth. “That is,” I finished, “if you care to believe that I am innocent.”
The sustaining chain of her small gold bag gave way just then. She did not notice it. I picked it up and slid the trinket into my pocket for safekeeping, where I promptly forgot it. Afterwards I wished I had let it lie unnoticed on the floor of that dirty little suburban car, and even now, when I see a woman carelessly dangling a similar feminine trinket, I shudder involuntarily: there comes back to me the memory of a girl’s puzzled eyes under the brim of a flopping hat, the haunting suspicion of the sleepless nights that followed.