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 of the morning.  I had acted on my first impulse—­the masculine one of shielding a woman.

The doctor had unfastened the coat of the striped pajamas and exposed the dead man’s chest.  On the left side was a small punctured wound of insignificant size.

“Very neatly done,” the doctor said with appreciation.  “Couldn’t have done it better myself.  Right through the intercostal space:  no time even to grunt.”

“Isn’t the heart around there somewhere?” I asked.  The medical man turned toward me and smiled austerely.

“That’s where it belongs, just under that puncture, when it isn’t gadding around in a man’s throat or his boots.”