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drinking and sex so you’d have to make it up. This train, the best in the world, is half empty right now on this trip. Nothing’s happening on it. Right now I’m going to bed.”
    Sanders stood with Darwin Rinehart. “I have to remain on duty, sir.”
    Rinehart blinked, frowned. “What’s there to do in the middle of the night for an assistant whatever kind of agent you said you were?”
    “We have a really special passenger coming aboard in Kansas City,” said Sanders with a tone of pride. “I must be ready.”
    Rinehart knew the world of the Super Chief. It would not stop at Kansas City until two thirty in the morning. There, some of the cars would be temporarily separated from the rest of the train so another sleeper coach could be inserted. Passengers could board that car in Kansas City after nine o’clock the night before, bed down in their compartment and be fast asleep by the time the Super Chief itself actually arrived at Kansas City’s Union Station.
    “Who is the special passenger—a surgeon with special hands?” said Rinehart.
    “Can’t say, sir,” Charlie Sanders said, stiffly. This was no joking matter. “All I can say is that I will be assisted in my duties by a special agent of the Santa Fe Railway Police.”
    Darwin Rinehart gave a halfhearted mocking whistle. Big deal!
    “He’ll be in plainclothes—like me,” Sanders added. “So you might not know when he’s there.”
    Rinehart gave a second whistle.

 
    Jack Pryor was that Santa Fe police detective. He still had the build and moves of the six-foot/205-pound fullback he had been in high school.
    “Mr. Truman told me he’s a light sleeper,” Pryor said to Charlie Sanders, who at five nine/160 pounds had played only second-string baseball in high school. “I hope all this noise ofthe switching didn’t wake him up. He was here right at nine o’clock as soon as the Kansas City sleeper was ready for passengers.”
    The two Santa Fe men, having met and joined forces, were talking at trainside there at the Union Station platform, where the outside clocks now showed the time to be two thirty-five in the morning.
    “What’ll we do if he gets up and starts walking around the train?” Sanders asked.
    “I’ll protect him, you entertain him—isn’t that what we’re here to do?”
    “Did you like Truman—you know, as president?” asked Sanders.
    “You bet. He dropped the bomb and stopped the war. I was only an MP in San Francisco,” said Pryor, a tall, stocky, black-haired man in his fifties. “But what he did kept me from getting any closer to the hot stuff. You’re a Korea vet, aren’t you?”
    “Kind of,” said Sanders. “I joined the Air Force to be a pilot but washed out of flight school and ended up teaching communications at an air base in San Antonio.”
    “We were both lucky.”
    Pryor and Sanders had worked together a couple of times and mostly liked each other, but their difference in age kept them from being really close. There was also a touch of a class problem. Pryor had only a high school education; Sanders was a business administration graduate of the University of Indiana at Bloomington. That aside, Pryor, with body language as wellas words, always let it be known in a friendly manner that, whatever they were doing, he was the senior man present.
    “What about Mrs. Truman?” Sanders asked.
    “She’s not with him. He said she came down with a cold at the last minute and stayed home.”
    “Good, good. Only one of them to worry about.”
    “Anybody else special who is already on the train that I should know about?” Pryor asked.
    “Only Clark Gable. Is everything they say about him true?”
    “If your question has to do with women and drinking on the Super Chief, it is,” Pryor said.
    That was exactly what Sanders had in mind with his question.
    “There’s also a movie producer named Rinehart aboard. He’s in one of the observation car drawing rooms. He’s a Regular. I talked to him about