However, on reflection, he quite understood that she could have had no
difficulty in boarding the midnight train for New York without being
noticed by him; because he was not expecting her to do such a thing
and he had paid no attention to the group of passengers emerging from
the waiting room when the express rolled in.
"This is rather funny," he thought. "I wish I could find her. I wish
she'd be friendly enough to pay me a visit. Scheherazade is certainly
an entertaining girl. And it's several hours to New York."
He lingered a while longer, but seeing and hearing nothing except
darkness and assorted snores, he stepped into his stateroom and locked
the door again.
Sleep was now impossible; the idea of Scheherazade prowling in the
dark corridor outside amused him intensely, and aroused every atom of
his curiosity. Did the girl really expect an opportunity to steal the
box? Or was she keeping a sinister eye on him with a view to summoning
accomplices from vasty metropolitan deeps as soon as the train
arrived? Or, having failed at Brookhollow, was she merely going back
to town to report "progress backward"?
He finished his mineral water, and, still feeling thirsty, rang, on
the chance that the porter might still be awake and obliging.
Something about the entire affair was beginning to strike him as
intensely funny, and the idea of foreign spies slinking about
Brookhollow; the seriousness with which this young girl took herself
and her mission; her amateur attempts at murder; her solemn mention of
the Turkish Embassy--all these excited his sense of the humorous. And
again incredulity crept in; and presently he found himself humming
Irwin's immortal Kaiser refrain: "Hi-lee! Hi-lo!
Der vinds dey blow
Joost like die wacht am Rhine!
Und vot iss mine belongs to me,
Und vot iss yours iss mine!"
There came a knock at his door; he rose and opened it, supposing it to
be the porter; and was seized in the powerful grasp of two men and
jerked into the dark corridor.
One of them had closed his mouth with a gloved hand, crushing him
with an iron grip around the neck; the other caught his legs and
lifted him bodily; and, as they slung him between them, his startled
eyes caught sight of Ilse Dumont entering his drawing-room.
It was a silent, fierce struggle through the corridor to the front
platform of the vestibule train; it took both men to hold, overpower,
and completely master him; but they tried to do this and, at the same
time, lift the trap that discloses the car steps. And could not manage
it.
The instant Neeland realised what they were trying to do, he divined
their shocking intention in regard to himself, and the struggle became
terrible there in the swaying vestibule. Twice he nearly got at the
automatic pistol in his breast pocket, but could not quite grasp it.
They slammed him and thrashed him around between them, apparently
determined to open the trap, fling him from the train, and let him
take his chances with the wheels.