“Very fine chains are much alike,” I managed to say.  “For all I know, this may be mine, but I don’t know how it got into that sealskin bag.  I never saw the bag until this morning after daylight.”

“He admits that he had the bag,” somebody said behind me.  “How did you guess that he wore glasses, anyhow?” to the amateur sleuth.

That gentleman cleared his throat.  “There were two reasons,” he said, “for suspecting it.  When you see a man with the lines of his face drooping, a healthy individual with a pensive eye,—­suspect astigmatism.  Besides, this gentleman has a pronounced line across the bridge of his nose and a mark on his ear from the chain.”

After this remarkable exhibition of the theoretical as combined with the practical, he sank into a seat near-by, and still holding the chain, sat with closed eyes and pursed lips.  It was evident to all the car that the solution of the mystery was a question of moments.  Once he bent forward eagerly and putting the chain on the window-sill, proceeded to go over it with a pocket magnifying glass, only to shake his head in disappointment.  All the people around shook their heads too, although they had not the slightest idea what it was about.

The pounding in my ears began again.  The group around me seemed to be suddenly motionless in the very act of moving, as if a hypnotist had called “Rigid!” The girl in blue was looking at me, and above the din I thought she said she must speak to me—­something vital.  The pounding grew louder and merged into a scream.  With a grinding and splintering the car rose under my feet.  Then it fell away into darkness.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SECOND SECTION

Have you ever been picked up out of your three-meals-a-day life, whirled around in a tornado of events, and landed in a situation so grotesque and yet so horrible that you laugh even while you are groaning, and straining at its hopelessness?  McKnight says that is hysteria, and that no man worthy of the name ever admits to it.

Also, as McKnight says, it sounds like a tank drama.  Just as the revolving saw is about to cut the hero into stove lengths, the second villain blows up the sawmill.  The hero goes up through the roof and alights on the bank of a stream at the feet of his lady love, who is making daisy chains.

Nevertheless, when I was safely home again, with Mrs. Klopton brewing strange drinks that came in paper packets from the pharmacy, and that smelled to heaven, I remember staggering to the door and closing it, and then going back to bed and howling out the absurdity and the madness of the whole thing.  And while I laughed my very soul was sick, for the girl was gone by that time, and I knew by all the loyalty that answers between men for honor that I would have to put her out of my mind.

And yet, all the night that followed, filled as it was with the shrieking demons of pain, I saw her as I had seen her last, in the queer hat with green ribbons.  I told the doctor this, guardedly, the next morning, and he said it was the morphia, and that I was lucky not to have seen a row of devils with green tails.