THE MARK OF DEATH
THE MOUNTAIN LIMITED was clicking slowly over the rails that trail through the highest and wildest land in America — the western slope of the Rockies. Speed was cut down as the big special labored toward the highest point on its line — nearly seven thousand feet above sea level.
Midnight had struck.
Outside, the gloomy mountains hung over the track; seemed about to close in on it, and wipe out the train and all its passengers.
Within the club car of the train, only a handful of men remained in the comfortable chairs.
All of these were dozing away, with the exception of one who sat at the end of the car, puffing furiously at a pipe that was no longer alight. His lips twitched, his eyes blinked furiously, and every time one of his dozing companions stirred, he whirled around quickly, as though the sound had some hideous portent.
Pulling a watch from his pocket, he gave it a hurried glance, then allowed his eyes to wander around the car. Satisfied that no one was observing him, he crossed quickly to the writing desk.
His hand shook, partly from nervousness and partly from the swaying of the train. Making no effort to control the blotching of the pen, he pushed it rapidly across the paper. There was something furtive in his haste.
Finally he signed his name — Stephen Laird — and blotted the letter. Just then one of the other men in the car mumbled something drowsily, and Laird thrust the letter into his pocket. He leaned back and assumed an air of nonchalance that was obviously false.
For a minute he sat there, tensely posed in an attitude of ease. Then, he took the sheet of letter paper from his pocket, and laid it on the desk.
Rapidly Laird addressed an envelope, blotted it, put the letter in, and stamped it. The glue from the stamp smeared over his lower lip as he licked it with sharp, uncertain movements.
Stephen Laird jumped up from the desk, and started to walk forward in the car. Suddenly he stopped, went back to the writing desk, and, picking up the blotter that he had used, thrust it into his pocket.
It was a new sheet of white blotting paper, and had retained an almost perfect reproduction of what Laird had written. Drops of sweat appeared upon his forehead, as though in horror at a near escape.
The sweat made a mark on the man’s forehead stand out in relief. It was a red mark — almost as red as blood. There was something awe-striking about it.
LAIRD started toward the front end of the car again. As he neared the corridor, the porter appeared, blinking drowsily. Laird handed the Negro a dollar bill.
“How soon can you mail a letter for me?” he asked in a low, nervous, voice.
“Next stop is Truckee, suh,” answered the porter.
“How soon?” was the sharp retort.
“Bout fo’ty minutes, suh. Train goes downhill pretty soon, now.”
Laird hesitated. His hand moved toward the pocket where he had put the letter.
“Come and see me in twenty minutes, then. I’ll have a letter for you.”
“Yes, suh.”
“Or, no, wait a minute.” Laird took the letter from his pocket, and held it tentatively for a minute. He studied the porter through narrowed eyelids.
The porter gazed back timidly. He noticed that the passenger’s eyes were close together. They seemed like two threatening knife points to the superstitious Pullman hand.
Laird seemed satisfied with his scrutiny. He relaxed slightly, and handed the porter the letter. The latter gazed at it slyly, and said:
“I’ll sho’ mail this, Misteh Laird. I won’t forget now!”
Laird jumped.
“How did you know my name?” He shot the question at the terrified porter viciously.
“Fum the envelope, suh. Jus’ fum the corner of the envelope.”
Again Laird relaxed. The porter tried to pull himself together, but just as he was on the point of regaining his composure, he noticed the little red mark on Laird’s forehead.
It seemed to strike terror to the Negro’s soul, though he could not explain why. There was something sinister about the bloodlike mark.
Laird laughed, half in relief at having gotten the letter off his hands, half in amusement at the porter’s obvious terror. Then he turned and walked unconcernedly back toward the rear of the train.
After the passenger had gone, the porter stood still a moment, trying to connect the red mark with something else in his experience. Finally he shook his head, and walked to the letter rack in the rear of the car.
Into the open rack he dropped the letter. There were already a half dozen envelopes there, ready to be mailed at Truckee.
The porter disappeared into the linen closet. Immediately one of the dozing men leaped to his feet. He sprang to the letter rack, threw a quick glance around the car, and withdrew the letter the porter had just placed there. Then he hurried from the car.
THE train was slowing down still further as it reached the pass through the mountains. As the man who had just stolen the letter hastened in the same direction Stephen Laird had taken, he noticed that there was hardly any sideward motion at all.
The letter thief quickly reached the observation car. It was deserted. The man walked to the glass door at the rear of the car, hesitated a few moments, and then stepped out onto the platform.
Although it was now past one o’clock, there was a man sitting in the darkness on the left side of the little platform. He glanced up sharply as the thief appeared; but the newcomer paid no attention to him. Instead, he dusted off the unoccupied chair, and sat down on the right side of the gallery.
After a few minutes of silence, the man on the left lighted a cigarette. The glare of the match in his cupped hands revealed the sallow, nervous features of Stephen Laird. The crimson mark stood out over the blinking, furtive eyes.
The match went out. Laird’s head was facing forward, looking straight back along the dropping tracks that stretched to the coast.
The train rattled as it bumped over a switch point and onto the double-tracked roadbed that indicated a bypass. A signal post appeared.
It carried a single green light. Laird’s eyes focused on that glare. His body shook with an irresistible shudder. That single disk of brilliant green had awakened some horrible memory in his mind!
He mumbled: “Green! Green! Like those other lights — like those awful eyes!”
The words were not loud enough for the man who had stolen the speaker’s letter to distinguish. His side of the platform was wrapped in a blanket of clickings and grumblings as a long line of darkened sleepers passed by, bound west.
Brakes ground as the eastbound limited slowed. A crying gasp sounded on the observation platform. It rose to a crescendo that was completely obscured by the noise of the brakes and the passing train. Finally it sank to a gasping moan.
The observation platform was dark. The brakeman who climbed over the rear railing noticed nothing as he swung his lantern over the right side of the platform for an increase in speed.
The limited picked up speed on the easy down grade to Truckee. The brakeman, his work done, turned to go into the car. His red lantern swung within a foot of the chair that Laird had been occupying. The light showed the huddled, motionless form of a man. His head was forward on his chest. His breath was coming in short, audible gasps.
The brakeman set down the lantern and shook the huddled body. There was no response. Quickly the train hand swung the helpless man into the closed part of the car, and dropped him on a long couch.
The light in the car showed a horrible sight. Stephen Laird’s chest was covered with blood. His coat and vest were ripped to shreds. He had been brutally stabbed!
The brakeman dropped to his knees to support the gory victim, and shouted for the porter. The latter brought the conductor, who tried to force water between Laird’s lips.
Both the brakeman and the conductor focused their eyes on the crimson sign that stood out like a beacon against the deathly pallor of Laird’s forehead.
The porter ran to try and find a doctor. It was immediately apparent that without medical assistance, Laird would not live the few minutes it would take the train to get to Truckee and a hospital.
Laird’s lips were moving. The conductor bent over, trying to catch something that would give a clew to the attack.
“Eyes,” said the dying man. “Green eyes!”
The conductor reached for a slip of paper. He urged Laird to speak further.
“In the box,” was all he could distinguish.
“Yes,” said the conductor. “In the box. What box?”
“See — ” The words were cut off by a gurgle of blood issuing from Laird’s pale lips.
The dying man said something indistinguishable. The conductor crouched closer.
“T — A - G — ” A pause, and then: “A — ” The pale lips and dimming brain were trying to say something of such importance that it had to be spelled. The conductor wrote down the letters.
They were the last that Stephen Laird ever said. His mouth opened, and more blood gushed forth. His fingers twitched twice, and then stiffened.
A physician, hastily aroused by the observation-car porter, hurried in, dressed in trousers over pajamas. He bent over Laird a moment, and then straightened.
“He’s dead,” he said. “Murdered!”
THE conductor went through Laird’s pocket, looking for a railroad check. He found it, in an envelope marked Stephen Laird. He wrote the name on a sheet of paper, and then copied his notes. He read them to the doctor:
” ‘See in the box. Tag A.’ He tried to spell it. ‘T — A - G’ — then, he managed to gasp out the letter ‘A.’ That was all he was able to say.”
The brakeman went out on the platform where he had found Laird’s body. He called to the conductor, pointed to the blood-stained corner of the platform, and held up a piece of white paper.
“Right here, where I found — found him, there was this.”
The conductor took the fragment. It was part of the blotter that Laird had thrust into his pocket in the club car. This scrap bore only two letters: R and D, in reverse, the last letters of the murdered man’s signature.
The conductor did not realize this. He searched for the rest of the blotter, in vain.
“Go up ahead,” he said to the brakeman, “and bring back the porter from the club car. Maybe he’ll know something. This looks like one of the line’s blotters.”
The porter, brought in by the brakeman, eyed the body cautiously.
“Yes, suh,” he said. “That’s the one, suh. He give me a letter, suh, jus’ a li’l while ago. I got it heah, Misteh Conductuh, right heah in the mail foh Truckee.”
While he spoke, he had been searching through the mail for Truckee. There was no envelope with Stephen Laird’s name on the corner.
Meanwhile the observation-car porter and the brakeman had been having trouble keeping curious passengers out of the car. The brakeman called to the conductor.
“Here’s a gentleman who says he’s from the newspapers, conductor. Shall I let him in?”
The conductor nodded his assent. A man bustled forward, dressed, like the doctor, in pajamas and trousers. He showed the conductor his credentials. He was a correspondent from one of the newspaper syndicates, returning from a Western story.
The conductor told this man what he knew about the murder. The latter’s eyes glistened. This was a fine story. “Murder on the Mountain Limited.” He could already see the headlines.
He made a special note of the mysterious last words of Stephen Laird.
“Laird said something, too, about eyes,” remarked the conductor thoughtfully. “Green eyes, as I remember it. But that was when I first got there. This is all I have written down: ‘In the box,’ and then ‘see,’ and then this about ‘Tag A,’ that he tried to spell.”
Up ahead, the whistle blasted through the night. The train was coming into Truckee, where the authorities would take over the body and the mystery.
The little group of men around the dead man dropped into silence. The correspondent was sitting down scribbling off a telegram to file at the station.
But he said nothing about the red mark on Stephen Laird’s forehead, because no one had thought to mention it.
That mark was scarcely noticeable now. It was nothing more than a faint blur.
Living, the red mark on Laird’s forehead had impressed three men: the porter, the conductor, and the brakeman.
Now that Laird was dead, the mark was dying, too, as though it were connected with his soul, rather than with his body. In the excitement, the mark was forgotten.
The porter had been sent back to his car. All that the newspapers and the authorities were told was that a man had been found stabbed on the observation platform; a fragment of blotter had been found beside him; he had uttered certain vague words and letters before his death; and a letter which he had written had been stolen.
But of all the details marking the murder of Stephen Laird, that vanished crimson mark was most significant. For it was that sign that brought him to his doom!
That spot that shone like blood was the mark of death! Now, death had struck; and its mark — no longer needed — was gone!