said irritably.
“Nothing? You saw nothing? Come, now, my friend—the dim light, the possibility that you might have looked away?—eh?”’
“Nothing! The light was clear enough for me to see this man Saulomon at the other end. I wasn’t looking away, because I was waiting for him to get my ticket.”
“But, if I may ask, what were you doing in the corridor?”
“Great God! Can’t a man step out for a cigar if he likes?”
“You could have smoked in your compartment, if I may mention it. Peste, but no matter! You could not have mistaken each other, possibly?”
“No, we could not. Both of us are over six feet; I have a beard, but it isn’t black, and neither of us went near the compartments at the time this woman screamed. You want a small man with his nose chopped off. But why concentrate here? If I may mention it, why not discover how the person who killed this fellow Merc er killed him anyway? I had only been standing in the corridor five minutes or so. How did the murderer get in and out?”
“He didn’t go through a bolted door,” said Villon, smiling. “He must, therefore, have come through the window.”
“Wriggling a normal body through five or six inches of space while the train was in motion?”
“Well, he might have been a very small man.”
“A dwarf, yes. Where does your dwarf come from? And how is he able to strangle a man?”
“Why—from the roof of the carriage, possibly. They do it frequently in the American moving pictures.” Villon’s face was a strange caricature of an intelligent man being stupid; the dull-smiling lips and suspicious eyes strikingly naive. For Villon was baffled, and he
