Seagraves returned the telegram to Brandon, winking an eye disparagingly and smiling at what the Chief Inspector had evidently considered a necessary precaution.
The afternoon waned. Early evening found the train three-quarters of an hour behind time. If this kept up they would not arrive before two in the morning.
Olga sat besides Seagraves facing Brandon.
"I would give much for a cigarette," she announced out of a long silence at ten o'clock, addressing herself to Seagraves.
"This isn't a smoker," observed the crime specialist, glancing around, "but there are only two other passengers in the car. Try it."
He offered her his box, and she took one and lighted it. Filling her lungs with the comforting smoke, she exhaled it in a great cloud and, after a meditative pause, murmured:
"At last I am to see poor Paul."
She looked Seagraves steadily in the eye and added in a queer tone that she felt her brother was very near tonight.
It was a mixed train, and the day couches appeared to have much the better of the sleepers as to occupancy. Seagraves noted casually that, besides themselves, their car boasted but two other passengers, and though they might have been snugly asleep in their respective berths, they had apparently elected to sit out the short run, evidently preferring reclining to rising and dressing at 1:30 or 2 o'clock A. M.
"Do you see the man sitting all alone in the last seat with the handkerchief over his face, to keep the light out of his eyes?" Olga's ruminant voice finally broke in upon the monotonous clackety-clack of wheels upon rail-joints.
"Yes—what about him?" asked Seagraves.
"Nothing, only he—he looks like Paul," she answered in a guarded voice, as though she feared Brandon, cat-naping now, might overhear her strange language.
"Olga!" ridiculed the detective, "get a grip on yourself."
Having thus counseled the prisoner, Seagraves was thoughtful for a long space; then he looked over at Olga, saw an odd, uneasy expression on her pretty face and quickly said:
"Here—have another cigarette, Olga. Burn 'em up!"
At midnight the conductor passed through the car.
"We'll make the city a little before two o’clock," he said in answer to a sleepy-voiced interrogation from Brandon, who seemed to have banished sleep and was blinking about the car.
"What—we all alone?" he asked Seagraves. Then he caught sight of the two lonely passengers at the far end of the car. "No; two others," he murmured, answering his own question.
He was turning his gaze away from the man with the handkerchief over his face when something, Seagraves noted, drew his eyes inquiringly back to the sleeper's hunched figure. The movement caused Seagraves to follow Brandon's scrutiny. He marked the fact that the handkerchief had fallen from their fellow-passenger's face, and—was it because of Olga's suggestion, or was it merely a silly midnight fancy—he assuredly seemed to trace a certain vague resemblance between the solitary sleeper and the notorious Paul Slavsky, long ago dead.
The idea brought with it a queer, though distinct, sense of unpleasantness. The booming voice of Brandon, breaking in upon his wholly disagreeable train of thought, was highly reassuring.
"Huh!" laughed the Inspector, "I thought I recognized that chap."
At a quarter to one, Seagraves shook Brandon out of a doze and said, "Keep the lady company for a few minutes. I'm going into the smoker."
"All right, Joe," drawled Brandon, opening his slightly reddened eyes and seeming to be perfectly wide awake.
Seagraves disappeared into the smoking-room, returning some ten or fifteen minutes later. To his surprise he noted that Brandon, evidently not caring to take a chance on Olga's diving out of the open window, had handcuffed her fast to the seat and had once more
