Thomas stood in the linen closet with the pillowcases in his arms and thought about what he had seen. A passenger putting a bundle in the hamper was not, by itself, a crime. Passengers put all manner of things in the hamper. But no man wrapped a thing in a bath towel to throw it away, and no man looked up and down a corridor the way Kessler had looked unless he was afraid of being seen, and Thomas had been watching people on trains for twenty-six years and he knew the difference between a man disposing of something and a man hiding something the way he knew the difference between a made bed and an unmade one.
He said nothing. He finished his rounds. He told himself it was not his business, and it was true that it was not his business, and it was also true that he was already afraid. A porter did not accuse a passenger. A porter, especially a colored porter, did not stand in a corridor and tell a conductor that a white man in a good suit had hidden something in the hamper. Thomas had seen what happened to porters who forgot the second kind of work. He had seen a man in Kansas City lose eighteen years of seniority for telling a conductor that a passenger had been in the wrong berth. The passenger had complained. The company had listened to the passenger. The man's name had been Ellis, and he had been a good porter, and after Kansas City he worked the extra board for two years, filling in where he was sent, until his knees gave out. Thomas had written to him at Christmas for three years running. Then the letters came back.
So he said nothing, and the evening went on, and at a quarter to nine the knocking started at the drawing-room door, and Mrs. Vance's jewel case was gone, and the conductor came with the special agent, and the search of the berths began.
Thomas opened the roomettes with his passkey, one by one, while Pruett and Dillard and Mrs. Vance and her nephew watched. The Hendersons' roomette: two berths, two suitcases, nothing amiss. The Marchettis' section: a young couple's traveling clutter, innocent as children. Roomette four, Kessler's: the berth turned down and unslept-in, a suitcase, a shaving kit, a newspaper. Nothing. He worked methodically, the way he did everything, and with each door the corridor grew quieter. The passengers had come out of their rooms to watch, in robes and slippers, and nobody spoke. Dot Marchetti had her hand over her mouth. Old Mr. Henderson stood very straight, his wife's hand on his arm. Kessler himself stood in his doorway with his arms folded, watching the search of his own roomette with an expression of polite interest, as if it were a card trick being done for his amusement — and Thomas, meeting his eyes for one second, saw nothing there at all, which was somehow worse than guilt would have been.
And then they came to roomette nine, Mrs. Ellison's, and Thomas put his key in the lock with a hand that had gone steady in the way his hands went steady when there was nothing else to do, and he opened the door, and Pruett pulled back the blanket, and there — on the sheet, where no sheet had held anything at six o'clock when his own hands had drawn it tight — lay a sapphire brooch, winking blue in the corridor light.
Mrs. Vance made a sound like a sob. "That's mine. That's my brooch."
The corridor went very still. Thomas looked at the brooch lying on the clean sheet, and he looked at Mrs. Ellison standing in her robe with her hands folded, her face gone white, and he understood, all at once and completely, what was going to happen now. The brooch in the lady's berth. The quiet woman traveling alone. The conductor's mind, which he had watched swing shut like a door an hour ago in this same corridor. They would take her off the train. They would leave her at some night station in the mountains with her suitcase, and the train would go on, and nobody would ever unmake what was about to be made.
And he understood something else, standing there with his passkey in his hand: that he was the only person on this train who knew the berth had been empty at six o'clock. That he had seen Kessler with the towel-wrapped bundle at twenty past eight. That if he said so now, in front of the conductor and the special agent and the lady whose brooch it was, he would be a colored porter accusing a white passenger of theft to save a