"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 015 - Green Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

"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.