Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/34

48 "Look there!" the lad exclaimed as he nudged his companion. "Lookit that glutton feedin' his face with hands and feet. Bet you couldn't do that!"

The innocent remark was devastating in effect. The girl seemed suddenly to lose all strength and wilted brokenly against the railing set before the cages. Her face was twisted in mute agony, her brow was glistening with sweat, her cheeks had gone pale with a pallor that passed white and seemed gray verging on green. And from the tortured mask of stricken features her eyes seemed to beg for pity.

I ran to offer her my help, but she smiled away my kindly meant assistance. "A—little—faint," she murmured in a voice that shook as if it took her last remaining ounce of strength to speak. "I'll—be—all—right." Then with the frightened boy assisting me we got her to the red-wheeled dog-cart waiting by the fountain, and he had driven her away.

That had been in 1910—nine years ago. I had been a barely-noticed bystander—a member of the audience of her brief drama—she had been the star of the short tragedy. No wonder she had failed to recognize in the uniformed medical officer the callow intern who had helped her.

Was there, I asked myself as I leaned back against the hard, uncomfortable cushions of the German railway coach, some connection between the lad's reference to her inability to feed herself with her foot and her collapse, or had she been seized with a fainting spell? If she had, it sounded like a cardiac affection, yet the girl who slept so peacefully across from me was certainly in the prime of health. More, he must have passed a rigid physical examination before they let her come overseas. Puzzling over it I saw the lights of Chálons station flash past, watched the darkness deepen on the window pane once more, and fell into a chilled, uncomfortable sleep.

came to me slowly. The window had worked farther down in its casings, and sleet-armed rain was stabbing at my face. My feet and legs felt stiff with a rheumatic stiffness, my head was aching abominably.

"Damn these Jerry coaches," I swore spitefully as I rose to force the window back in place. "If I ever see a Pullman car again I'll—"

My anger protests slipped away from my lips. The blackness of the night had given way to a diluted gray, and by this dim uncertain light I made the forms of my companions out—and there was something horribly wrong with them. ApKern was slumped down in his seat as if he had been a straw man from which the stuffing had been jerked, Amberson lay with feet splayed out across the aisle; Weinberg's shoulders drooped, his hands hung down beside his knees and swung as flaccidly as strings with each movement of the train. The girl across from me lay back against her cushions, head bent at an unnatural angle. Thus I called the roll with a quick frightened glance, and noted that the stranger was not present.

Yes, he was! He was lying on the floor at apKern's feet, one arm bent under him, his legs spread out as though he'd tried to rise, felt too tired for it, and decided to drop back. But in the angles of his flaccid legs, their limpness at the hips and knees and ankles, I read the signs no doctor has to see twice. He was dead.

The others? I jerked the leather light-cord, and as the weak bulb blossomed into pale illumination took stock. Dead? No, their color was too bright. Their cheeks were positively flushed—too flushed! I could read it at a glance. Incredibly, I was the only person in that cramped compartment not suffering carbonic oxide poisoning.

I drove my fist through the window, jerked the door open and as the raw air