Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 01.djvu/35

Rh whistled through the compartment bent to examine Miss Watrous. Her pulse was very weak but still perceptible, so were Weinberg's, Amberson's and apKern's. The stranger was past helping and the air would help revive the others. My first job was to find the chef de train—the conductor—and report the casualty.

"Find whoever is in charge of this confounded pile o' junk," I told an enlisted man I met in the corridor of the next coach. "There's been an accident back there—four officers and a Red Cross woman gassed—"

"Gassed?" he echoed unbelievingly. "Does the captain mean—"

"The captain means just what he says," I snapped. "Go get me the conductor toot sweet. Shake it up!"

"Yes, sir." He saluted and was off like the proverbial shot, returning in a few moments with a young man whose double bars proclaimed him a captain, with the red R denoting he was in the Railroad Section on his shoulder.

It was no time to stand on ceremony. Technically, I suppose, the Medical Corps outranked the Railroad Section, but I tendered him a salute. "Gas?" he echoed as the corporal had when I completed my recital.

"If we haven't five cases of carbon monoxide poisoning—one of 'em fatal—back there I never rode an ambulance," I answered shortly. "How it happened I don't know—"

"How'd you happen not to get it?" he broke in suspiciously.

"I was sitting by the window, and it worked loose in the night. Air blew directly in my face. That accounts for the girl's not being more affected, too. She was facing backward, so didn't get the full effect of ventilation, but her case seems the mildest. Major Amberson who was farthest from the window seems most seriously affected, but all of them were unconscious."

We had reached the compartment as I concluded. "Help me with this poor chap," I directed, bending to take up the dead man's shoulders. "If they have a spare compartment we can put him in that."

"There's one right down the corridor, he told me. "Party debarked at Châlons when we took the train over from the Frogs."

"Thank the Lord for that," I answered. "If the French were still in charge we'd have the devil of a time explaining—ah! Amazement fairly squeezed the exclamation from me.

"What is it, sir?"

"This," I answered, reaching under apKern's feet and holding up a metal cylinder. The thing was six or eight inches long by about two inches in diameter, made of brass or copper, like those fire extinguishers carried on trucks and buses in America, and fitted with a nozzle and thumb-screw at one end.

"What's it smell like?" he demanded, staring at my find uncomprehendingly.

"Like nothing. That's just it—"

"How d'ye mean—"

"That cylinder was filled with CO—carbon monoxide—which is a colorless and odorless gas almost as deadly as phosgene. It was pumped in under pressure and late last night someone turned the thumb-screw while we were asleep. let the gas escape, and—"

"Nuts!" he interrupted with a shake of his head. "No one would be such a fool. It'd get him, too—"

"Yes?" I broke in sarcastically. "Think so, do you?" Rolling the dead man over to get a grip beneath his arms I had discovered something he was lying on. A small, compact, but perfect gas mask.

"Well—I'll be a monkey's uncle!" he declared as I held my find up. "I sure will. But how'd it happen he was the only one to get it in the neck, when he was all prepared—"