Part 60 (2/2)

Into one of these compartments Neeland stepped, hoping for seclusion, but backed out again, the place being full of artillery officers playing cards.

In vain he bribed the guard, who offered to do his best; but the human contents of a Channel pa.s.senger steamer had unwillingly spent the night in the quaint French port, and the Paris-bound train was already full.

The best Neeland could do was to find a seat in a compartment where he interrupted conversation between three men who turned sullen heads to look at him, resenting in silence the intrusion. One of them was the fox-faced man he had already noticed on the packet, tender, and customs dock.

But Neeland, whose sojourn in a raw and mannerless metropolis had not blotted out all memory of gentler cosmopolitan conventions, lifted his hat and smilingly excused his intrusion in the fluent and agreeable French of student days, before he noticed that he had to do with men of his own race.

None of the men returned his salute; one of them merely emitted an irritated grunt; and Neeland recognised that they all must be his own delightful country-men--for even the British are more dignified in their stolidity.

A second glance satisfied him that all three were undoubtedly Americans; the cut of their straw hats and apparel distinguished them as such; the nameless grace of Mart, Haffner and Sharx marked the tailoring of the three; only Honest Werner could have manufactured such headgear; only New York such footwear.

And Neeland looked at them once more and understood that Broadway itself sat there in front of him, pasty, close-shaven, furtive, sullen-eyed, the _New York Paris Herald_ in its seal-ringed fingers; its fancy waistcoat pockets bulging with cigars.

”Sports,” he thought to himself; and decided to maintain incognito and pa.s.s as a Frenchman, if necessary, to escape conversation with the three tired-eyed ones.

So he hung up his hat, opened his novel, and settled back to endure the trip through the rain, now beginning to fall from a low-sagging cloud of watery grey.

After a few minutes the train moved. Later the guard pa.s.sed and accomplished his duties. Neeland inquired politely of him in French whether there was any political news, and the guard replied politely that he knew of none. But he looked very serious when he said it.

Half an hour from the coast the rain dwindled to a rainbow and ceased; and presently a hot sun was gilding wet green fields and hedges and glistening roofs which steamed vapour from every wet tile.

Without asking anybody's opinion, one of the men opposite raised the window. But Neeland did not object; the rain-washed air was deliciously fragrant; and he leaned his elbow on his chair arm and looked out across the loveliest land in Europe.

”Say, friend,” said an East Side voice at his elbow, ”does smoking go?”

He glanced back over his shoulder at the speaker--a little, pallid, sour-faced man with the features of a sick circus clown and eyes like two holes burnt in a lump of dough.

”_Pardon, monsieur?_” he said politely.

”Can't you even pick a Frenchman, Ben?” sneered one of the men opposite--a square, smoothly shaven man with slow, heavy-lidded eyes of a greenish tinge.

The fox-faced man said:

”He had me fooled, too, Eddie. If Ben Stull didn't get his number it don't surprise me none, becuz he was on the d.a.m.n boat I crossed in, and I certainly picked him for New York.”

”Aw,” said the pasty-faced little man referred to as Ben Stull, ”Eddie knows it all. He never makes no breaks, of course. You make 'em, Doc, but he doesn't. That's why me and him and you is travelling here--this minute--because the great Eddie Brandes never makes no breaks----”

”Go on and smoke and shut up,” said Brandes, with a slow, sidewise glance at Neeland, whose eyes remained fastened on the pages of ”Les Bizarettes,” but whose ears were now very wide open.

”Smoke,” repeated Stull, ”when this here Frenchman may make a holler?”

”Wait till I ask him,” said the man addressed as Doc, with dignity.

And to Neeland:

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