And Josef Krauss did the same. That was the one simple act with which he paid his debt in the only way that was left to him. He did it with an unflinching rendering of the benevolent and rather fatuous smile that belonged to his disguise, playing out the last lines of his part without a fault, while the hot stab of death seared bitterly into his lungs.
He received his ticket back, and beamed at the inspector.
"We come at half past-eleven to Köln, nicht wahr?"
"At eleven thirty-eight, mein Herr."
"So. Now I am very tired. Will you have to disturb me at Wurzburg and Mainz?"
A note rustled in his hand, and the inspector accepted it graciously.
"If you will allow me to keep your ticket until after we have left Mainz, hochehrwürdener Herr, I will see that your sleep is not interrupted."
"Herzlichen Dank!"
The official bowed his way out respectfully—he had pocketed a tip that would have been notable at any time, and which became almost an epoch-making event when the donor's garb confessed to a vocation whose members are rarely able to compete with millionaires in purchasing the small luxuries of travel. The door closed after him; and Simon turned slowly from watching him go, and saw the dour fatalism grinning again from Krauss's eyes.
"At least, my death will put you to no inconvenience," he said.
Then the supernatural endurance which had shored him up through those last minutes seemed to fall away as if the kingpins had been wiped out of it, and he sagged back with a little sigh.
Simon leaned over and dried a thin trickle of blood from one corner of the relaxed mouth. The glazing eyes stared at him mockingly, and Krauss fought for a breath. He spoke once more, but his voice was so low that the Saint only just caught the words.
"Sehen Sie gut nach . . . dem blauen Diamont. . . . Er ist . . . wirklich . . . preislos ..."
Then he was silent.
Simon Templar rose quietly to his feet. He put out a steady hand and pressed the lids down over the derisive eyes that had gone suddenly blind and rigid in their orbits; and then he looked round and saw Monty Hayward in the doorway. Patricia Holm came in behind him.
"You know, Simon," said Monty, after a moment's eloquent stillness, "if you show me a few more stiffs, I believe I shall begin to get quite used to it."
"I shouldn't be surprised," said the Saint laconically.
He took out his cigarette case and canted a cigarette gently into his mouth, facing the others soberly, while they searched for the meaning of his terseness.
"Did you have trouble with that ticket inspector?" hazarded Patricia.
"Not one little bit." The Saint looked at her straightly. "There wasn't any cause for it. You see, Josef figured he had a bill to pay. He told the inspector he wanted to go to sleep, and tipped him like a prince not to be disturbed till we get to Cologne."
Slowly the other two built up in their minds the full significance of that curt explanation, while the only sound in the compartment was the harsh rattle and jar of their race over the metals. It was a silence which paid its inevitable tribute to the code by which the man in the corner had ordered his grim passing.
"Did Josef make that hole?" queried Monty Hayward presently.
"No. Marcovitch did that—the boy friend who tailed you on board. Josef walked in on him, and lost the draw. The last I saw of Marcovitch, he was busting all records down towards the brake van. And I guess he's my next stop."
The Saint pushed his hands into his trouser pockets and walked past, out into the corridor. Patricia and Monty followed him. They lined up outside; and the Saint drew at his cigarette and gazed through a window into the unrolling landscape.
"Not the three of us," he said. "We aren't muscling in. Pat —I think it's your turn for a show. There may be trouble; and the ungodly are liable to be smooth guys before the Lord. I'd like to have you a carriage length behind me. Keep out of sight—and watch your corners. If the party looks tough, beat it quietly back and flag Monty."
"O. K., Chief."
"Monty, you stay around here till you're sent for. Get talking to someone—and keep talking. Then you'll be in balk. You're the reserve line. If we aren't back in twenty minutes, try and find out what's wrong. And see your gun's working!"
"Right you are, old sportsman."
"And remember your wife and children," said the Saint piously.
He turned on his heel and went roaming down the train, humming an operatic aria under his breath. The decks were clearing for action in fresh earnest, and that suited him down to the ground. And yet a little bug of vague perplexity was starting to nose around in the dark backgrounds of his brain, nibbling about in the impenetrable hinterlands of intuition like the fret of a tiny whetstone. It blurred fitfully on the tenuous outfringings of a deep-buried nerve, sending dim flitters of irritation telegraphing up into the obscure recesses of his consciousness; and every one of those messages feathered up a replica of the same ragged little question mark into the sleek line of his serenity. Ten tunes in a minute he glossed the line down again, and ten times in a minute the identical finicky interrogation smudged through it like a wisp of fabric trailed across an edge of wet paint.
Still humming the same imperturbable tune, he came to the end of a coach and eased himself cautiously round into the connection tunnel. With equal caution he stepped across the swaying platforms and emerged circumspectly into the foyer of the next car. Down the length of the alleyway ahead he saw only a small female infant with platinum blonde pigtails, and continued on his way with unruffled watchfulness.
The dying words of Josef Krauss were ticking over in his mind as a kind of monotonous accompaniment to the melody that carolled contentedly along with him as he walked. They repeated themselves in a dozen different languages, word by word and letter by letter, wheeling and countermarching and forming fours in an infinite variety of restless patterns with all the aimless efficiency of a demonstration platoon of trained soldiers—and with precisely as much intelligence. They went through their repertoire of evolutions like a clockwork machine; and it just didn't mean a thing. They ended up exactly where they started: two simple sentences spoken in a voice that had been so weak as to be incapable of expression, qualified by nothing but the enigmatical derision in the doomed man's eyes. Simon could still see those eyes as vividly as if they had been photographed on the air a yard beyond his nose, and the bland, flat gibe in them was the most baffling riddle he had encountered since he began wondering why the female corset should almost invariably be made in the same grisly shade of pink.
Hands still resting loosely in his pockets, Simon Templar continued on his gentle promenade. Nearly every compartment he peered into yielded its quota of specimens for observation, but Marcovitch was not among them. Apart from that serious omission, any philanthropist in the widest sense would have found ample material on which to test the stamina of his eccentric virtue. All along the panorama which unfolded to the Saint's roving eye, other excrescences upon the cosmos roosted at regular intervals in their upholstered pens, each tending his own little candle of witness to God's patronage of the almost human race. Simon looked at them all, and felt his share of the milk of human kindness curdling under the strain. But the second most important question in his mind remained unanswered. It was still probable that Marcovitch was not alone. And if he was not alone, the amount of support he had with him was still an entirely nebulous quantity. The Saint had received no clue by which he could pick out the problematical units of that support from the array of smug bipeds which had passed under his eyes. They might have been there in dozens; or he mightn't have seen one of them yet There was no evidence. It was a gamble on blind odds, and the Lord would have to provide.