iously 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.

"Yes," I answered for the porter. "We've both had one. If you are a
doctor, I wish you would look at the man in the berth across, lower ten.
I'm afraid it's too late, but I'm not experienced in such matters."

Together we opened the curtains, and the doctor, bending down, gave a
comprehensive glance that took in the rolling head, the relaxed jaw, the
ugly stain on the sheet. The examination needed only a moment. Death
was written in the clear white of the nostrils, the colorless lips, the
smoothing away of the sinister lines of the night before. With its new
dignity the face was not unhandsome: the gray hair was still plentiful,
the features strong and well cut.

The doctor straightened himself and turned to me. "Dead for some time,"
he said, running a professional finger over the stains. "These are dry
and darkened, you see, and rigor mortis is well established. A friend of
yours?"

"I don't know him at all," I replied. "Never saw him but once before."

"Then you don't know if he is traveling alone?"

"No, he was not--that is, I don't know anything about him," I corrected
myself. It was my first blunder: the doctor glanced up at me quickly and
then turned his attention again to the body. Like a flash there had come
to me the vision of the woman with the bronze hair and the tragic face,
whom I had surprised in the vestibule between the cars, somewhere in
the small hours