Which compartment had the fellow said? Paul abruptly discovered that
he was rattled, terribly rattled, and he turned back out of the place.
He paused shortly, however, and took hold of himself.
"Now, now!" he said, aloud. "You're a bum reporter, my boy." An
instant later he forced himself to jerk open the first door at his
hand.
For what seemed a full minute he stared into the cavern, as if
petrified, then he closed the door softly. Sweat had started from his
every pore. Alone once more in the great room, he stood shivering.
"God!" he muttered. This was newspaper training indeed.
He remembered now having read, several days before, about an Italian
laborer who had been crushed by a falling column. To one unaccustomed
to death in any form that object, head-on in the obscurity of the
compartment, had been a trying sight. He began to wonder if it were
really cold or stiflingly hot.
The boy ground his teeth and flung open the next door, slamming it
hurriedly again to blot out what it exposed. Why didn't they keep them
covered? Why didn't they show a card outside? Must he examine every
grisly corpse upon the premises?
He stepped to the third door and wrenched it open. He knew the girl at
once by her wealth of yellow hair and the beauty of her still, white
face. There was no horror here, no ghastly sight to weaken a man's
muscles and sicken his stomach; only a tired girl asleep. Anderson
felt a great pity as he wheeled the truck opposite the door and
reverently drew out the slab on which the body lay. He gazed upon her
intently for some time. She was not at all as he had pictured her, and
yet there could be no mistake. He took the printed description from
his pocket and reread it carefully, comparing it point by point. When
he had finished he found that it was a composite word photograph,
vaguely like and yet totally unlike the person it was intended to
portray, and so lacking in character that no one knowing the original
intimately would have been likely to recognize her from it.
So that was why no word had come in answer to all this newspaper
publicity. After all, this case might not be so difficult as it had
seemed; for the first time the dispirited youth felt a faint glow of
encouragement. He began to formulate a plan.
Hurriedly he fumbled for his note-book, and there, in that house
of death, with his paper propped against the wall, he wrote a
two-hundred-word description; a description so photographically exact
that to this day it is preserved in the Buffalo police archives as a
perfect model.
He replaced the body in its resting-place and went out. There was no
chill in him now, no stumbling nor weakness of any sort. He had found
a starting-point, had uncovered what all those trained newspaper men
had missed, and he felt that he had a chance to win.
Twenty minutes later Burns, who had just come in from supper, turned
back from his desk with annoyance and challenge in his little, narrow
eyes.
"Well?"
"I think I've got her, Mr. Burns."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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