If I had not been afraid of being ridiculous, I would have followed her.  But I fancied that the apparition of a man in a red and yellow bath-robe, with an unkempt thatch of hair, walking up to her and assuring her that he would protect her would probably put her into hysterics.  I had done that once before, when burglars had tried to break into the house, and had startled the parlor maid into bed for a week.  So I tried to assure myself that I had imagined the lady’s distress—­or caused it, perhaps—­and to dismiss her from my mind.  Perhaps she was merely anxious about the unpleasant gentleman of the restaurant.  I thought smugly that I could have told her all about him:  that he was sleeping the sleep of the just and the intoxicated in a berth that ought, by all that was fair and right, to have been mine, and that if I were tied to a man who snored like that I should have him anesthetized and his soft palate put where it would never again flap like a loose sail in the wind.

We passed Harrisburg as I stood there.  It was starlight, and the great crests of the Alleghanies had given way to low hills.  At intervals we passed smudges of gray white, no doubt in daytime comfortable farms, which McKnight says is a good way of putting it, the farms being a lot more comfortable than the people on them.

I was growing drowsy:  the woman with the bronze hair and the horrified face was fading in retrospect.  It was colder, too, and I turned with a shiver to go in.  As I did so a bit of paper fluttered into the air and settled on my sleeve, like a butterfly on a gorgeous red and yellow blossom.  I picked it up curiously and glanced at it.  It was part of a telegram that had been torn into bits.

There were only parts of four words on the scrap, but it left me puzzled and thoughtful.  It read, “-ower ten, car seve-.”

“Lower ten, car seven,” was my berth-the one I had bought and found preempted.

CHAPTER III

ACROSS THE AISLE

No solution offering itself, I went back to my berth.  The snorer across had apparently strangled, or turned over, and so after a time I dropped asleep, to be awakened by the morning sunlight across my face.

I felt for my watch, yawning prodigiously.  I reached under the pillow and failed to find it, but something scratched the back of my hand.  I sat up irritably and nursed the wound, which was bleeding a little.  Still drowsy, I felt more cautiously for what I supposed had been my scarf pin, but there was nothing there.  Wide awake now, I reached for my traveling-bag, on the chance that I had put my watch in there.  I had drawn the satchel to me and had my hand on the lock before I realized that it was not my own!

Mine was of alligator hide.  I had killed the beast in Florida, after the expenditure of enough money to have bought a house and enough energy to have built one.  The bag I held in my hand was a black one, sealskin, I think.  The staggering thought of what the loss of my bag meant to me put my finger on the bell and kept it there until the porter came.