Eaton obeyed, drawing the light slowly away as Sinclair had directed, and the surgeon dropped the eyelid and exposed the other pupil. "What's that for?" Avery now asked. "I was trying to determine the seriousness of the injury to the brain. I was looking to see whether light could cause the pupil to contract." "Could it?" Connery asked. "No; there was no reaction." Avery started to speak, checked himself--and then he said: "There could be no reaction, I believe, Dr. Sinclair." "What do you mean?" "His optic nerve is destroyed." "Ah! He was blind?" "Yes, he was blind," Avery admitted. "Blind!" Sinclair ejaculated. "Blind, and operated upon within two years by Kuno Garrt!" Kuno Garrt operated only upon the all-rich and -powerful or upon the completely powerless and poor; the unconscious man in the berth could belong only to the first class of Garrt's clientele. The surgeon's gaze again searched the features in the berth; then it shifted to the men gathered about him in the aisle. "Who did you say this was?" he demanded of Avery. "I said his name was Nathan Dorne," Avery evaded. "No, no!" Sinclair jerked out impatiently. "Isn't this--" He hesitated, and finished in a voice suddenly lowered: "Isn't this Basil Santoine?" Avery, if he still wished to do so, found it impossible to deny. "Basil Santoine!" Connery breathed. To the conductor alone, among the four men standing by the berth, the name seemed to have come with the sharp shock of a surprise; with it had come an added sense of responsibility and horror over what had happened to the passenger who had been confided to his care, which made him whiten as he once more repeated the name to himself and stared down at the man in the berth. Conductor Connery knew Basil Santoine only in the way that Santoine was known to great numbers of other people--that is, by name but not by sight. There was, however, a reason why the circumstances of Santoine's life had remained in the conductor's mind while he forgot or had not heeded the same sort of facts in regard to men who traveled much more often on trans-continental trains. Thus Connery, staring whitely at the form in the berth, recalled for instance Santoine's age; Santoine was fifty-one.