sleep.
*
Consciousness came to me slowly. The window had worked farther down in its casings, and sleet-armed rain was stabbing at my face. My feet and legs felt stiff with a rheumatic stiffness, and my head was aching abominably.
“Damn these Jerry coaches,” I swore spitefully as I rose to force the window back in place. “If I ever see a Pullman car again I’ll—”
My anger protests slipped away from my lips. The blackness of the night had given way to a diluted gray, and by this dim uncertain light I made the forms of my companions out—and there was something horribly wrong with them. ApKern was slumped down in his seat as if he had been a straw man from which the stuffing had been jerked, Amberson lay with feet splayed out across the aisle; Weinberg’s shoulders drooped, and his hands hung down beside his knees and swung as flaccidly as strings with each movement of the train. The girl across from me lay back against her cushions, head bent at an unnatural angle. Thus I called the roll with a quick frightened glance and noted that the stranger was not present.
Yes, he was! He was lying on the floor at apKern’s feet, one arm bent under him, his legs spread out as though he’d tried to rise, felt too tired for it, and decided to drop back. But in the angles of his flaccid legs, their limpness at the hips and knees and ankles, I read the signs no doctor has to see twice. He was dead.
The others? I jerked the leather light-cord, and as the weak bulb blossomed into pale illumination took stock. Dead? No, their color was too bright. Their cheeks were positively flushed—too flushed! I could read it at a glance. Incredibly, I was the only person in that cramped compartment not suffering carbon monoxide poisoning.
I drove my fist through the window, jerked the door open and as the raw air whistled through the compartment, I bent to examine Miss Watrous. Her pulse was very weak but still perceptible. So were Weinberg’s, Amberson’s, and apKern’s. The stranger was past helping, and the air would help revive the others.
My first job was to find the chef de train—the conductor—and report the casualty.
“Find whoever is in charge of this confounded pile o’ junk,” I told an enlisted man I met in the corridor of the next coach. “There’s been an accident back there—four officers and a Red Cross woman gassed—”
“Gassed?” he echoed unbelievingly. “Does the captain mean—”
“The captain means just what he says,” I snapped. “Go get me the conductor toot sweet. Shake it up!”
“Yes, sir.” He saluted and was off like the proverbial shot, returning in a few moments with a young man whose double bars proclaimed him a captain, with the red R denoting he was in the Railroad Section on his shoulder.
It was no time to stand on ceremony. Technically, I suppose, the Medical Corps outranked the Railroad Section, but I tendered him a salute. “Gas?” he echoed as the corporal had when I completed my recital.
“If we haven’t five cases of carbon monoxide poisoning—one of ‘em fatal—back there, I never rode an ambulance,” I answered shortly. “How it happened, I don’t know—”
“How’d you happen not to get it?” he broke in suspiciously.
“I was sitting by the window, and it worked loose in the night. Air blew directly in my face. That accounts for the girl’s not being more affected, too. She was facing backward, so didn’t get the full effect of ventilation, but her case seems the mildest. Major Amberson, who was farthest from the window, seems most seriously affected, but all of them were unconscious.”
We had reached the compartment as I concluded. “Help me with this poor chap,” I directed, bending to take up the dead man’s shoulders. “If they have a spare compartment, we can put him in that.”
“There’s one right down the corridor,” he told me. “Party debarked at Chálons when we took the train over from the Frogs.”
“Thank the Lord for that,” I answered. “If the French were still in charge, we’d have the devil of a time explaining—ah!” Amazement fairly squeezed the exclamation from me.
“What is it, sir?”
“This,” I answered, reaching under apKern’s feet and holding up a metal cylinder. The thing was six or eight inches long by about two inches in diameter, made of brass or copper, like those fire extinguishers carried on trucks and buses in America, and fitted with a nozzle and thumb-screw at one end.
“What’s it smell like?” he demanded, staring at my find uncomprehendingly.
“Like nothing. That’s just it—”
“How d’ye mean—”
“That cylinder was filled with CO—carbon monoxide—which is a colorless and odorless gas almost as deadly as phosgene. It was pumped in under pressure, and late last night someone turned the thumb-screw while we were asleep, let the gas escape, and—”
“Nuts!” he interrupted with a shake of his head. “No one would be such a fool. It’d get him, too—”
“Yes?” I broke in sarcastically. “Think so, do you?” Rolling the dead man over to get a grip beneath his arms I had discovered something he was lying on. A small, compact, but perfect gas mask.
“Well—I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” he declared as I held my find up. “I sure will. But how’d it happen he was the only one to get it in the neck, when he was all prepared—”
“That’s what we’ll have to find out, or what a board of inquiry will determine,” I replied. “Help me get him into that compartment, then we’ll see about first aid for these—”
“Here, what goes on?” Weinberg sat up suddenly and stared about him like a man emerging from a bad dream. “What’re you guys up to?”
“How d’ye feel?” I countered.
“Terrible, now you mention it. My head is aching like nobody’s business, but”—he bent and touched the supine dead man, then straightened with a groan as he pressed hands against his throbbing temples—“what’s all this? Did his Nibs pass out, or—”
“Clear out,” I assured him. “He’s dead as mutton, and the rest of us came near joining him. Look after ‘em a moment, will you? I’ll be right back.”
*
Fresh air and copious draughts of cognac, followed by black coffee and more brandy, had revived the gas victims when I returned. Amberson was still too weak to stand, apKern complained of dizziness and clouded vision, but Weinberg, tough and wiry as a terrier, seemed none the worse for his close call. Due to her seat beside the window, Miss Watrous seemed less seriously affected than the rest. In half an hour she was ministering to apKern and Amberson, and they were loving it.
“Look here, Carmichael,” Weinberg said as we bent above the dead man while Amberson went through his papers, “this is no case of CO poisoning.”
“If it isn’t, I never used a pulmotor on a would-be suicide in South Philly,” I rejoined. “Why, there’s every indication of—”
“Of your granddad’s Sunday-go-to-meetin’ hat!” he broke in. “Take a look, Professor.”
Obediently, I bent and looked where he was pointing. “Well, I’ll be—” I began, and he grinned at me, wrinkling up his nose and drawing back his lips till almost all his teeth showed at the same time.
“You sure will,” he agreed, “but not until you’ve told me what you make of it.”
“Why, the man was throttled!” I exclaimed.
There was no doubting it. Upon the dead man’s throat were five distinct livid patches, one, some three inches in size, roughly square, the other four extending in broken parallel lines almost completely around the neck.
“What d’ye