Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/265

Rh Then he walked up the platform to look in at Sims. The man was apparently asleep, peacefully exhausted, with his head thrown back and his face as waxy as death. The train bore him gently away, and Colburn remained looking at the other passengers as they were carried by.

He blinked and started—turning to follow a vanishing window with his eyes. For the fraction of a second he had seen Fisher's fat profile—the whitish eyes fixed in a malevolent stare ahead of him, as if through the walls of the intervening cars he could see his brother.

Fisher! He must have followed them.

The two red lights on the tail of the train swiftly receded in the darkness. One of them winked, like an eye, as a telegraph pole for an instant blotted it out. And Colburn had a vague feeling that it expressed a humorous contempt of him for standing on the platform while that train, with the tragedy that freighted it, dwindled and disappeared from him forever down the rails. Had he missed a story, after all? For a moment he wished that he had let Sims talk; and then his professional instinct for news assured him that a story eleven years old was not worth—

Pshaw! It was the money! Fisher had promised him one hundred dollars!

"Well, the dirty barber!" he muttered. "The dirty barber!"

And he felt relieved. His newspaper conscience was clear. It was only money he had failed to get.