‘By Jove!’ cried Fred, ‘that’s it, Elinor; and the canny fellow had wit enough to push the catch back in place after he was outside again.’
I said nothing, for a moment. My thoughts were adjusting themselves quickly to the new situation from which I must make my deductions. I realized at once that I must give up my theory of the tutor, of course, and anyway I hadn’t had a scrap of evidence against him except his fitness for the position. But, given the surety of burglars from outside, I knew just what to do: look for footprints, to be sure.
I glanced around for the light snow that always falls in detective stories just before the crime is committed, and is testified, usually by the village folk, to have stopped just at the crucial moment. But there wasn’t a sign of snow or rain or even dew. The veranda showed no footprints, nor could the smooth lawn or flagged walks be expected to. I leaned against the veranda railing in despair, wondering what Sherlock Holmes would do in a provoking absence of footprints, when I saw in the flower-bed beneath several well-defined marks of a man’s shoes.
‘There you are, Fred!’ I cried, and rushed excitedly down the steps.
They all followed, and, sure enough, in the soft earth of the wide flower-bed that surrounded the veranda were strong, clear prints of large masculine footgear.
‘That clears us, girls,’ cried Janet gleefully, as she measured her daintily shod foot against the depressions.
‘Don’t touch them!’ I cried. ‘Call Mr Prout the detective.’
Mr Prout appeared, and politely hiding his chagrin at not having discovered these marks before I did, proceeded to examine them closely.
‘You see,’ he said in a pompous and dictatorial way, ‘there are four prints pointing toward the house, and four pointing toward the street. Those pointing to the street are superimposed upon those leading to the house, hence we deduce that they were made by a burglar who crossed the flower-bed, climbed the veranda, stepped over the rail and entered at the window. He then returned the same way, leaving these last footprints above the others.’
As all this was so palpably evident from the facts of the case, I was not impressed much by the subtlety of his deductions and asked what he gathered from the shape of the prints.
He looked at the well-defined prints intently. ‘They are of a medium size,’ he announced at last, ‘and I should say that they were made by a man of average height and weight, who had a normal-sized foot.’
Well, if that wasn’t disappointing! I thought of course that he would tell the man’s occupation and social status even if he didn’t say that he was left-handed or that he stuttered, which is the kind of thing detectives in fiction always discover.
So I lost all interest in that Prout man, and began to do a little deducing on my own account. Although I felt sure, as we all did, that the thief was a burglar from outside, yet I couldn’t measure the shoes of an absent and unidentified burglar, and somehow I felt an uncontrollable impulse to measure shoes.
Without consulting anybody, I found a tape-measure and carefully measured the footprints. Then I went through the house and measured all the men’s shoes I could find, from the stable-boy’s up to Fred’s.
It’s an astonishing fact, but nearly all of them fitted the measurements of the prints on the flower-bed. Men’s feet are so nearly universal in size, or rather their shoes are, and too, what with extension soles and queer-shaped lasts, you can’t tell anything about the size or style of a man from his footprints.
So I gave up deducing and went to talk to Fred Farland.
‘Fred,’ I said simply, ‘did you take Christabel’s crystal?’
‘No,’ he answered with equal simplicity, and he looked me in the eyes so squarely and honestly that I knew he spoke the truth.
‘Who did?’ I next inquired.
‘It was a professional burglar,’ said Fred, ‘and a mighty cute one; but I’m going to track him and get that crystal before Christabel comes home.’
‘Let me help!’ I cried eagerly. ‘I’ve got the true detective instinct, and I know I can do something.’
‘You?’ said Fred incredulously. ‘No, you can’t help; but I don’t mind telling you my plan. You see I expect Lord Hammerton down to make me a visit. He’s a jolly young English chap that I chummed with in London. Now, he’s a first-rate amateur detective, and though I didn’t expect him till next month, he’s in New York, and I’ve no doubt that he’d be willing to come right off. No one will know he’s doing any detecting; and I’ll wager he’ll lay his hands on that ball in less than a week.’
‘Lovely!’ I exclaimed. ‘And I’ll be here to see him do it!’
‘Yes, the mater says you’re to stay a fortnight or more; but mind, this is our secret.’
‘Trust me,’ I said earnestly; ‘but let me help if I can, won’t you?’
‘You’ll help most by not interfering,’ declared Fred, and though it didn’t altogether suit me, I resolved to help that way rather than not at all.
A few days later Lord Hammerton came. He was not in any way an imposing-looking man. Indeed, he was a typical Englishman of the Lord Cholmondeley type, and drawled and used a monocle most effectively. The afternoon he came we told him all about the crystal. The talk turned to detective work and detective instinct.
Lord Hammerton opined in his slow languid drawl that the true detective mind was not dependent upon instinct, but was a nicely adjusted mentality that was quick to see the cause back of an effect.
Herbert Gay said that while this doubtless was so, yet it was an even chance whether the cause so skilfully deduced was the true one.
‘Quite so,’ agreed Lord Hammerton amiably, ‘and that is why the detective in real life fails so often. He deduces properly the logical facts from the evidence before him; but real life and real events are so illogical that his deductions, though true theoretically, are false from mere force of circumstances.’
‘And that is why,’ I said, ‘detectives in story-books always deduce rightly, because the obliging author makes the literal facts coincide with the theoretical ones.’
Lord Hammerton put up his monocle and favored me with a truly British stare. ‘It is unusual,’ he remarked slowly, ‘to find such a clear comprehension of this subject in a feminine mind.’
They all laughed at this; but I went on: ‘It is easy enough to make the spectacular detective of fiction show marvellous penetration and logical deduction when the antecedent circumstances are arranged carefully to prove it all; but place even Sherlock Holmes face to face with a total stranger, and I, for one, don’t believe that he could tell anything definite about him.’
‘Oh, come now! I can’t agree to that,’ said Lord Hammerton, more interestedly than he had spoken before. ‘I believe there is much in the detective instinct besides the exotic and the artificial. There is a substantial basis of divination built on minute observation, and which I have picked up in some measure myself.’
‘Let us test that statement,’ cried Herbert Gay. ‘Here comes Mr Wayne, Harold’s tutor. Lord Hammerton never has seen him, and before Wayne even speaks let Lord Hammerton tell us some detail, which he divines by observation.’
All agreed to this, and a few minutes later Mr Wayne came up. We laughingly explained the situation to him and asked him to have himself deduced.
Lord Hammerton looked at Arthur Wayne for a few minutes, and then said, still in his deliberate drawl: ‘You have lived in Japan for the past seven years, in government service in the interior, and only recently have returned.’
A sudden silence fell upon us all – not so much because Lord Hammerton made deductions from no apparent evidence, but because we all knew Mr Wayne had told Detective Prout that he never had been in Japan.
Fred Farland recovered himself first, and said: ‘Now that you’ve astonished us with your results, tell us how you attained them.’
‘It is simple enough,
’ said Lord Hammerton, looking at young Wayne, who had turned deathly white. ‘It is simple enough, sir. The breast-pocket on the outside of your coat is on the right-hand side. Now it never is put there. Your coat is a good one – Poole, or some London tailor of that class. He never made a coat with an outer breast-pocket on the right side. You have had the coat turned – thus the original left-hand pocket appears now on the right side.
‘Looking at you, I see that you have not the constitution which could recover from an acute attack of poverty. If you had it turned from want, you would not have your present effect of comfortable circumstances. Now, you must have had it turned because you were in a country where tailoring is not frequent, but sewing and delicate manipulation easy to find. India? You are not bronzed. China? The same. Japan? Probable; but not treaty ports – there are plenty of tailors there. Hence, the interior of Japan.
‘Long residence, to make it incumbent on you to get the coat turned, means government service, because unattached foreigners are allowed only as tourists. Then the cut of the coat is not so very old, and as contracts run seven or fourteen years with the Japanese, I repeat that you probably resided seven years in the interior of Japan, possibly as an irrigation engineer.’
I felt sorry then for poor Mr Wayne. Lord Hammerton’s deductions were absolutely true, and coming upon the young man so suddenly he made no attempt to refute them.
And so as he had been so long in Japan, and must have been familiar with rock crystals for years, Fred questioned him sternly in reference to his false statements.
Then he broke down completely and confessed that he had taken Christabel’s crystal because it had fascinated him.
He declared that he had a morbid craving for crystals; that he had crept down to the present room late that night, merely to look at the wonderful, beautiful ball; that it had so possessed him that he carried it to his room to gaze at for a while, intending to return with it after an hour or so. When he returned he saw Fred Farland, and dared not carry out his plan.
‘And the footprints?’ I asked eagerly.
‘I made them myself,’ he explained with a dogged shamefacedness. ‘I did have a moment of temptation to keep the crystal, and so tried to make you think that a burglar had taken it; but the purity and beauty of the ball itself so reproached me that I tried to return it. I didn’t do so then, and since –’
‘Since?’ urged Fred, not unkindly.
‘Well, I’ve been torn between fear and the desire to keep the ball. You will find it in my trunk. Here is the key.’
There was a certain dignity about the young man that made him seem unlike a criminal, or even a wrong-doer.
As for me, I entirely appreciated the fact that he was hypnotized by the crystal and in a way was not responsible. I don’t believe that man would steal anything else in the world.
Somehow the others agreed with me, and as they had recovered the ball, they took no steps to prosecute Mr Wayne.
He went away at once, still in that dazed, uncertain condition. We never saw him again; but I hope for his own sake that he never was subjected to such a temptation.
Just before he left, I said to him out of sheer curiosity: ‘Please explain one point, Mr Wayne. Since you opened and closed that window purposely to mislead us, since you made those footprints in the flower-bed for the same reason, and since to do it you must have gone out and then come back, why were the outgoing footprints made over the incoming ones?’
‘I walked backward on purpose,’ said Mr Wayne simply.
PHILO GUBB
Created by Ellis Parker Butler (1869-1937)
Philo Gubb works as a paper-hanger in a small town in Iowa. He is also an enthusiast for the Sherlock Holmes stories who is taking a correspondence course in how to be a ‘deteckative’. Whenever the opportunity arises, he tries to put into practice what he is learning, adopting a series of disguises which fool nobody and solving crimes more through amiable persistence and good luck than any deductive skills. Gubb himself is said to commit ‘a major crime during every case on which he works: the murder of the English language’. Comic crime stories rarely work very well. Comic crime stories that are more than a century old should be very nearly unreadable but the tales featuring Philo Gubb retain their charm. They were the work of Ellis Parker Butler, Iowa-born but long resident in New York, who, in addition to a successful career in banking, was also a prolific writer of novels and short stories. The first Philo Gubb story appeared in The Red Book magazine in 1913. Several dozen others followed, mostly in the next four years, although Butler returned to the character on a handful of occasions in the 1920s and 1930s. Gubb was popular enough to appear in several short films in the silent era and for the stories to be regularly reprinted.
PHILO GUBB’S GREATEST CASE
Philo Gubb, wrapped in his bathrobe, went to the door of the room that was the headquarters of his business of paper-hanging and decorating as well as the office of his detective business, and opened the door a crack. It was still early in the morning, but Mr Gubb was a modest man, and, lest anyone should see him in his scanty attire, he peered through the crack of the door before he stepped hastily into the hall and captured his copy of the Riverbank Daily Eagle. When he had secured the still damp newspaper, he returned to his cot bed and spread himself out to read comfortably.
It was a hot Iowa morning. Business was so slack that if Mr Gubb had not taken out his set of eight varieties of false whiskers daily and brushed them carefully, the moths would have been able to devour them at leisure.
P Gubb opened the Eagle. The first words that met his eye caused him to sit upright on his cot. At the top of the first column of the first page were the headlines.
MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF HENRY SMITZ
Body Found In Mississippi River By Boatman Early This AM.
Foul Play Suspected
Mr Gubb unfolded the paper and read the item under the headlines with the most intense interest. Foul play meant the possibility of an opportunity to put to use once more the precepts of the Course of Twelve Lessons, and with them fresh in his mind Detective Gubb was eager to undertake the solution of any mystery that Riverbank could furnish. This was the article:
Just as we go to press we receive word through Policeman Michael O’Toole that the well-known mussel-dredger and boatman, Samuel Fliggis (Long Sam), while dredging for mussels last night just below the bridge, recovered the body of Henry Smitz, late of this place.
Mr Smitz had been missing for three days and his wife had been greatly worried. Mr Brownson, of the Brownson Packing Company, by whom he was employed, admitted that Mr Smitz had been missing for several days.
The body was found sewed in a sack. Foul play is suspected.
‘I should think foul play would be suspected,’ exclaimed Philo Gubb, ‘if a man was sewed into a bag and deposited into the Mississippi River until dead.’
He propped the paper against the foot of the cot bed and was still reading when someone knocked on his door. He wrapped his bathrobe carefully about him and opened the door. A young woman with tear-dimmed eyes stood in the doorway.
‘Mr P Gubb?’ she asked. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you so early in the morning, Mr Gubb, but I couldn’t sleep all night. I came on a matter of business, as you might say. There’s a couple of things I want you to do.’
‘Paper-hanging or deteckating?’ asked P Gubb.
‘Both,’ said the young woman. ‘My name is Smitz – Emily Smitz. My husband –’
‘I’m aware of the knowledge of your loss, ma’am,’ said the paper-hanger detective gently.
‘Lots of people know of it,’ said Mrs Smitz. ‘I guess everybody knows of it – I told the police to try to find Henry, so it is no secret. And I want you to come up as soon as you get dressed, and paper my bedroom.’
Mr Gubb looked at the young woman as if he thought she had gone insane under the burden of her wo
e.
‘And then I want you to find Henry,’ she said, ‘because I’ve heard you can do so well in the detecting line.’
Mr Gubb suddenly realized that the poor creature did not yet know the full extent of her loss. He gazed down upon her with pity in his bird-like eyes.
‘I know you’ll think it strange,’ the young woman went on, ‘that I should ask you to paper a bedroom first, when my husband is lost; but if he is gone it is because I was a mean, stubborn thing. We never quarrelled in our lives, Mr Gubb, until I picked out the wall-paper for our bedroom, and Henry said parrots and birds-of-paradise and tropical flowers that were as big as umbrellas would look awful on our bedroom wall. So I said he hadn’t anything but Low Dutch taste, and he got mad. “All right, have it your own way,” he said, and I went and had Mr Skaggs put the paper on the wall, and the next day Henry didn’t come home at all.
‘If I’d thought Henry would take it that way, I’d rather had the wall bare, Mr Gubb. I’ve cried and cried, and last night I made up my mind it was all my fault and that when Henry came home he’d find a decent paper on the wall. I don’t mind telling you, Mr Gubb, that when the paper was on the wall it looked worse than it looked in the roll. It looked crazy.’
‘Yes’m,’ said Mr Gubb, ‘it often does. But, however, there’s something you’d ought to know right away about Henry.’
The young woman stared wide-eyed at Mr Gubb for a moment; she turned as white as her shirtwaist.
‘Henry is dead!’ she cried, and collapsed into Mr Gubb’s long, thin arms.
Mr Gubb, the inert form of the young woman in his arms, glanced around with a startled gaze. He stood miserably, not knowing what to do, when suddenly he saw Policeman O’Toole coming toward him down the hall. Policeman O’Toole was leading by the arm a man whose wrists bore clanking handcuffs.
American Sherlocks Page 19
