“And so on,” said Villon, putting down the paper. “Miss Mertz was a somewhat difficult witness, as you will perceive. That is all.”
He sat down. In the stillness his chair creaked. Taxis hooted along the quai below. Leaning forward, Villon rested his head on his clasped hands.
“It would almost make one think wild things,” Saulomon said in a low voice. “If you were aboard The Blue Arrow, night after night, you would feel it. Thieves, murderers, ghouls, ride it, streams of them, and we don’t know them; we hardly see them—in the mist. But their evil remains, like a draught out of a cellar.” He looked up suddenly. The sharp features, the long, powerful hands, the eyes of a mystic, made him incongruous in his rôle. But in the next instant stolidity closed over him, and he stared down at the floor.
It was as though the imagination of all three, focused on a weird train and a strangler’s hands, brought a little of the blue mystery of it into that room. A sense of remoteness added to their feeling of nearness to a dead man in a false beard—which somehow made it all the more horrible. A sudden noise would have startled them. They were looking at murder, through the distorted magnifying-glass of an eye witness.
III
It was some moments later that Miss Brunhilde Mertz arrived, escorted by Mr. Septimus Depping. They sat in chairs so that a semi-circle was formed round Villon’s desk. Miss Mertz leaned forward, a heavy stuffed woman, staring down over the icy bulges of her figure through glasses which made her eyes terrifying in size; she carried her gray hair like a war-banner, and spoke with the baffled ferocity of a saint who knows he is right but can convince nobody. A hat resembling
