Hearst ordered beer but Mr. Aldington wanted whisky and after a whispered conversation with the bartender and the passing of a bill, he got it.
“Too cold for beer,” he said to Hearst. “What’s this place like, to stay at, I mean?”
Hearst didn’t know. He noticed that Mr. Aldington was carrying a briefcase.
Mr. Aldington saw him looking at it and winked. “Stimulant,” he said. “I always freeze in this country.”
He went over to the desk and registered. When he came back he said, he wanted to go upstairs and deposit his briefcase. Did Mr. Hearst want to come, too, and they’d all have a drink and then go back to the station together?
It was too cold for beer, Hearst decided, and if Mr. Aldington was going to come up to the Lodge later to see his girlfriend, it would be better to humor him...
The last he saw of Mr. Aldington, Mr. Aldington was disappearing in a grey fuzzy blur which finally wavered and dissolved into nothing.
Hearst looked around the room and found that they’d left him a coat and a peaked cap and a pair of heavy work boots. He put them on and went downstairs, hanging onto the railing. He walked drunkenly over to the desk and the Frenchwoman who owned the Metropole looked up in surprise. She didn’t recognize him at first.
Then she said, “Why, Monsieur Hearst!”
“What day is this?” Hearst croaked, swaying on his feet.
“Drunk,” said Madame Picard sadly. “This is Friday. I did not see you enter.”
“Where’s Henri?” Henri was the bartender.
“This is Henri’s holiday,” Madame Picard said. “And I would not allow him to serve you in your condition. A man who must drive a bus, a man who is responsible for the lives and safety of...”
“I’ve been here all night.”
“Then you owe me money,” Madame Picard said and promptly opened her registry book. There is no record, Monsieur Hearst. You are imagining things. Monsieur Picard, who had his weakness like every man, used to imagine that there were...”
“I’m not drunk,” Hearst said.
“Ho, ho,” said Madame Picard gaily. “Monsieur Picard to the life! Never, never drunk, until he fell over!”
Hearst lurched to the door and wrenched it open, and gasped the cold air into his lungs. Then he closed the door behind him and began to run.
The stationmaster was in his office. When he saw Hearst he regarded him with a frown.
“It’s about time,” he said. “Train’s been in ten minutes and there’s a gang of weekenders raising a racket for the bus.”
He pointed to a group of young men and women standing together in one corner, talking loudly.
“I haven’t got the bus,” Hearst said. “Someone stole it yesterday.”
“You’re crazy,” the stationmaster said. “Where’s your uniform? What are you doing in that rig?”
“I’m telling you,” Hearst said wildly. “A couple of men took the bus yesterday and left me doped up in the Metropole all night.”
“Some kidder you are,” the stationmaster said sourly. “I saw you leave here yesterday. Had a loadful, too, the kind that pay high and like it. And you phoned in like you usually do from Chapelle when the weather’s bad. You said you could make it all right but the roads were bad and you’d be late.”
“I phoned in?” Hearst said slowly. Mr. Aldington knew his job, whatever it was. Only someone who’d made the trip before could have known that he phoned in from Chapelle when the going was tough.
“Give me the phone,” he said. “I’ve got to get in touch with the Lodge.”
“Well, you’d better use pigeons,” the stationmaster said acidly. “The wires are down. I just tried them, to see what was keeping you.”
Hearst sat down abruptly in a chair and passed his hand over his eyes. The stationmaster watched him with a worried frown.
“No one else but you could get that bus through the roads the way they were yesterday,” he said.
“I know,” Hearst said, with mournful pride. “And what did they want with it? Who in hell would want my bus?”
“Kidnapping, maybe. You’d better phone the police.”
Five minutes later Sergeant Mackay of the Mounted Police arrived at the station. A big, taciturn, weather-beaten man of forty, he listened carefully to Hearst’s story. He knew Hearst as a steady young man who liked his job and drank very little. Every day Hearst’s bus passed the corner where the courthouse was and Mackay often waved to him from his office window. He had waved yesterday. He remembered noticing that the bus was full and wondering what strange urge brought people with money to this wilderness in order to slide down hills and break their necks.
“Sounds a little crazy,” he said when Hearst had finished.
“Crazy as hell,” Hearst said wearily. “What did they want — the bus or the people in it or just one of the people in it? And where are the people now?”
“Frozen to death,” said the stationmaster in a sinister whisper.
“Keep out of this, George,” Mackay said, and turned back to Hearst. “They may have gotten the bus through all right. We’ve had no complaints from the Lodge.”
“The wires are down,” Hearst said. “And I guess they figured I just stayed in town on account of the roads. I had to do that once last winter.”
Mackay took out his notebook. He used the notebook chiefly for grocery lists provided by his wife. There wasn’t much crime in the winter up here. People were too busy trying to keep warm.
“What did these two men look like?” he said. “Were they French or English?”
“The big one, Aldington, was English, I think. He had on a grey felt hat and a grey overcoat that looked expensive. Dark skin, black hair, and a lot of teeth.”
“What do you mean, a lot of teeth?” said the stationmaster.
Mackay said, “George, you got work to do, do it. Tell that gang over there that there isn’t any bus today. They”ll have to stay at the hotel overnight.” George went away reluctantly.
“He was toothy,” Hearst said.
“Age?”
“I don’t know. Maybe forty, maybe thirty-five. He looked fit, though, and pretty muscular. His eyes were brown, I guess, and he was good-looking.”
“And the other guy?”
Hearst looked helpless. “I don’t know. He didn’t talk. He just smiled and seemed kind of half-witted. I figure he was French and didn’t want to be spotted.”
“He didn’t make any noise?”
“Well, he laughed once. It was a crazy laugh, sort of high and giggly and shrill. Sounded like Hitler.”
“Like Hitler,” Mackay said thoughtfully, and stared across the desk at Hearst. “Go on.”
“He looked as if he’d been outdoors a lot. He had on these clothes I’m wearing so I guess he was a little smaller than me.”
Mackay ran his eye slowly over the blue serge suit, the peaked cap and the overcoat.
He said suddenly, “Let me see those shoes. Take them off.”
Hearst took them off and Mackay examined the shoes and the lining. Then he dived for the Montreal and District telephone directory. Hearst peered over his shoulder and noted the page number and saw where Mackay’s finger stopped on the page.
Mackay said, “Step out there a minute, Hearst. I’m calling long distance on business.”
“Can’t I...?”
“No.”
Hearst, minus shoes, walked over to the main door where the stationmaster was giving the weekenders a long and untruthful account of the missing bus. He told them that the drifts were fifteen feet high, that even the snowplow was stuck, and that the Metropole was one of the finest hotels in the country. They would be, he said, very surprised.