room.
"You've done it now, Watson," said he, coolly. "A pretty mess you've
made of the carpet."
I stooped in some confusion and began to pick up the fruit,
understanding for some reason my companion desired me to take the
blame upon myself. The others did the same, and set the table on its
legs again.
"Hullo!" cried the Inspector, "where's he got to?"
Holmes had disappeared.
"Wait here an instant," said young Alec Cunningham. "The fellow is
off his head, in my opinion. Come with me, father, and see where he
has got to!"
They rushed out of the room, leaving the Inspector, the Colonel, and
me staring at each other.
"'Pon my word, I am inclined to agree with Master Alec," said the
official. "It may be the effect of this illness, but it seems to me
that--"
His words were cut short by a sudden scream of "Help! Help! Murder!"
With a thrill I recognized the voice of that of my friend. I rushed
madly from the room on to the landing. The cries, which had sunk down
into a hoarse, inarticulate shouting, came from the room which we had
first visited. I dashed in, and on into the dressing-room beyond. The
two Cunninghams were bending over the prostrate figure of Sherlock
Holmes, the younger clutching his throat with both hands, while the
elder seemed to be twisting one of his wrists. In an instant the
three of us had torn them away from him, and Holmes staggered to his
feet, very pale and evidently greatly exhausted.
"Arrest these men, Inspector," he gasped.
"On what charge?"
"That of murdering their coachman, William Kirwan."
The Inspector stared about him in bewilderment. "Oh, come now, Mr.
Holmes," said he at last, "I'm sure you don't really mean to--"
"Tut, man, look at their faces!" cried Holmes, curtly.
Never certainly have I seen a plainer confession of guilt upon human
countenances. The older man seemed numbed and dazed with a heavy,
sullen expression upon his strongly-marked face. The son, on the
other hand, had dropped all that jaunty, dashing style which had
characterized him, and the ferocity of a dangerous wild beast gleamed
in his dark eyes and distorted his handsome features. The Inspector
said nothing, but, stepping to the door, he blew his whistle. Two of
his constables came at the call.
"I have no alternative, Mr. Cunningham," said he. "I trust that this
may all prove to be an absurd mistake, but you can see that--Ah,
would you? Drop it!" He struck out with his hand, and a revolver
which the younger man was in the act of cocking clattered down upon
the floor.
"Keep that," said Holmes, quietly putting his foot upon it; "you will
find it useful at the trial. But this is what we really wanted." He
held up a little crumpled piece of paper.
"The remainder of the sheet!" cried the Inspector.
"Precisely."
"And where was it?"
"Where I was sure it must be. I'll make the whole matter clear to you
presently. I think, Colonel, that you and Watson might return now,
and I will be with you again in an hour at the furthest. The
Inspector and I must have a word with the prisoners, but you will
certainly see me back at luncheon time."
Sherlock Holmes was as good as his word, for about one o'clock he
rejoined us in the Colonel's smoking-room. He was accompanied by a
little elderly gentleman, who was introduced to me as the Mr. Acton
whose house had been the scene of the original burglary.
"I wished Mr. Acton to be present while I demonstrated this small
matter to you," said Holmes, "for it is natural that he should take a
keen interest in the details. I am afraid, my dear Colonel, that you
must regret the hour that you took in such a stormy petrel as I am."
"On the contrary," answered the Colonel, warmly, "I consider it the
greatest privilege to have been permitted to study your methods of
working. I confess that they quite surpass my expectations, and that
I am utterly unable to account for your result. I have not yet seen
the vestige of a clue."
"I am afraid that my explanation may disillusion you but it has
always been my habit to hide none of my methods, either from my
friend Watson or from any one who might take an intelligent interest
in them. But, first, as I am rather shaken by the knocking about
which I had in the dressing-room, I think that I shall help myself to
a dash of your brandy, Colonel. My strength had been rather tried of
late."
"I trust that you had no more of those nervous attacks."
Sherlock Holmes laughed heartily. "We will come to that in its turn,"
said he. "I will lay an account of the case before you in its due
order, showing you the various points which guided me in my decision.
Pray interrupt me if there is any inference which is not perfectly
clear to you.
"It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able
to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and
which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated
instead of being concentrated. Now, in this case there was not the
slightest doubt in my mind from the first that the key of the whole
matter must be looked for in the scrap of paper in the dead man's
hand.
"Before going into this, I would draw your attention to the fact
that, if Alec Cunningham's narrative was correct, and if the
assailant, after shooting William Kirwan, had instantly fled, then it
obviously could not be he who tore the paper from the dead man's
hand. But if it was not he, it must have been Alec Cunningham
himself, for by the time that the old man had descended several
servants were upon the scene. The point is a simple one, but the
Inspector had overlooked it because he had started with the
supposition that these county magnates had had nothing to do with the
matter. Now, I make a point of never having any prejudices, and of
following docilely wherever fact may lead me, and so, in the very
first stage of the investigation, I found myself looking a little
askance at the part which had been played by Mr. Alec Cunningham.
"And now I made a very careful examination of the corner of paper
which the Inspector had submitted to us. It was at once clear to me
that it formed part of a very remarkable document. Here it is. Do you
not now observed something very suggestive about it?"
"It has a very irregular look," said the Colonel.
"My dear sir," cried Holmes, "there cannot be the least doubt in the
world that it has been written by two persons doing alternate words.
When I draw your attention to the strong t's of 'at' and 'to', and
ask you to compare them with the weak ones of 'quarter' and 'twelve,'
you will instantly recognize the fact. A very brief analysis of these
four words would enable you to say with the utmost confidence that
the 'learn' and the 'maybe' are written in the stronger hand, and the
'what' in the weaker."
"By Jove, it's as clear as day!" cried the Colonel. "Why on earth
should two men write a letter in such a fashion?"
"Obviously the business was a bad one, and one of the men who
distrusted the other was determined that, whatever was done, each
should have an equal hand in it. Now, of the two men, it is clear
that the one who wrote the 'at' and 'to' was the ringleader."
"How do you get at that?"
"We might deduce it from the mere character of the one hand as
compared with the other. But we have more assured reasons than that
for supposing it. If you examine this scrap with attention you will
come to the conclusion that the man with the stronger hand wrote all
his words first, leaving blanks for the other to fill up. These
blanks were not always sufficient, and you can see that the second
man had a squeeze to fit his 'quarter' in between the 'at' and the
'to,' showing that the latter were already written. The man who wrote
all his words first in undoubtedly the man who planned the affair."
"Excellent!" cried Mr. Acton.
"But very superficial," said Holmes. "We come now, however, to a
point which is of importance. You may not be aware that the deduction
of a man's age from his writing is one which has brought to
considerable accuracy by experts. In normal cases one can place a man
in his true decade with tolerable confidence. I say normal cases,
because ill-health and physical weakness reproduce the signs of old
age, even when the invalid is a youth. In this case, looking at the
bold, strong hand of the one, and the rather broken-backed appearance
of the other, which still retains its legibility although the t's
have begun to lose their crossing, we can say that the one was a
young man and the other was advanced in years without being
positively decrepit."
"Excellent!" cried Mr. Acton again.
"There is a further point, however, which is subtler and of greater
interest. There is something in common between these hands. They
belong to men who are blood-relatives. It may be most obvious to you
in the Greek e's, but to me there are many small points which
indicate the same thing. I have no doubt at all that a family
mannerism can be traced in these two specimens of writing. I am only,
of course, giving you the leading results now of my examination of
the paper. There were twenty-three other deductions which would be of
more interest to experts than to you. They all tend to deepen the
impression upon my mind that the Cunninghams, father and son, had
written this letter.
"Having got so far, my next step was, of course, to examine into the
details of the crime, and to see how far they would help us. I went
up to the house with the Inspector, and saw all that was to be seen.
The wound upon the dead man was, as I was able to determine with
absolute confidence, fired from a revolver at the distance of
something over four yards. There was no powder-blackening on the
clothes. Evidently, therefore, Alec Cunningham had lied when he said
that the two men were struggling when the shot was fired. Again, both
father and son agreed as to the place where the man escaped into the
road. At that point, however, as it happens, there is a broadish
ditch, moist at the bottom. As there were no indications of bootmarks
about this ditch, I was absolutely sure not only that the Cunninghams
had again lied, but that there had never been any unknown man upon
the scene at all.
"And now I have to consider the motive of this singular crime. To get
at this, I endeavored first of all to solve the reason of the
original burglary at Mr. Acton's. I understood, from something which
the Colonel told us, that a lawsuit had been going on between you,
Mr. Acton, and the Cunninghams. Of course, it instantly occurred to
me that they had broken into your library with the intention of
getting at some document which might be of importance in the case."
"Precisely so," said Mr. Acton. "There can be no possible doubt as to
their intentions. I have the clearest claim upon half of their
present estate, and if they could have found a single paper--which,
fortunately, was in the strong-box of my solicitors--they would
undoubtedly have crippled our case."
"There you are," said Holmes, smiling. "It was a dangerous, reckless
attempt, in which I seem to trace the influence of young Alec. Having
found nothing they tried to divert suspicion by making it appear to
be an ordinary burglary, to which end they carried off whatever they
could lay their hands upon. That is all clear enough, but there was
much that was still obscure. What I wanted above all was to get the
missing part of that note. I was certain that Alec had torn it out of
the dead man's hand, and almost certain that he must have thrust it
into the pocket of his dressing-gown. Where else could he have put
it? The only question was whether it was still there. It was worth an
effort to find out, and for that object we all went up to the house.
"The Cunninghams joined us, as you doubtless remember, outside the
kitchen door. It was, of course, of the very first importance that
they should not be reminded of the existence of this paper, otherwise
they would naturally destroy it without delay. The Inspector was
about to tell them the importance which we attached to it when, by
the luckiest chance in the world, I tumbled down in a sort of fit and
so changed the conversation."
"Good heavens!" cried the Colonel, laughing, "do you mean to say all
our sympathy was wasted and your fit an imposture?"
"Speaking professionally, it was admirably done," cried I, looking in
amazement at this man who was forever confounding me with some new
phase of his astuteness.
