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 you 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 pint 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.
"It is an art which is often useful," said he. "When
I recovered I managed, by a device which had perhaps
some little merit of ingenuity, to get old Cunningham
to write the word 'twelve,' so that I might compare it
with the 'twelve' upon the paper."
"Oh, what an ass I have been!" I exclaimed.
"I could see that you were commiserating me over my
weakness," said Holmes, laughing. "I was sorry to
cause you the sympathetic pain which I know that you
felt. We then went upstairs together, and having
entered the room and seen the dressing-gown hanging up
behind the door, I contrived, by upsetting a table, to
engage their attention for the moment, and slipped
back to examine the pockets. I had hardly got the
paper, however--which was, as I had expected, in one
of them--when the two Cunninghams were on me, and
would, I verily believe, have murdered me then and
there but for your prompt and friendly aid. As it is,
I feel that young man's grip on my throat now, and the
father has twisted my wrist round in the effort to get
the paper out of my hand. They saw that I must know
all about it, you see, and the sudden change from
absolute security to complete despair made them
perfectly desperate.
"I had a little talk with old Cunningham afterwards as
to the motive of the crime. He was tractable enough,
though his son was a perfect demon, ready to blow out
his own or anybody else's brains if he could have got
to his revolver. When Cunningham saw that the case
against him was so strong he lost all heart and made a
clean breast of everything. It seems that William had
secretly followed his two masters on the night when
they made their raid upon Mr. Acton's, and having thus
got them into his power, proceeded, under threats of
exposure, to levy black-mail upon them. Mr. Alec,
however, was a dangerous man to play games of that
sort with. It was a stroke of positive genius on his
part to see in the burglary scare which was convulsing
the country side an opportunity of plausibly getting
rid of the man whom he feared. William was decoyed up
and shot, and had they only got the whole of the note
and paid a little more attention to detail in the
acces
sories, it is very possible that suspicion might
never have been aroused."
"And the note?" I asked.
Sherlock Holmes placed the subjoined paper before us.
If you will only come around
to the east gate you will
will very much surprise you and
be of the greatest service to you and also
to Annie Morrison. But say nothing to
anyone upon the matter
"It is very much the sort of thing that I expected,"
said he. "Of course, we do not yet know what the
relations may have been between Alec Cunningham,
William Kirwan, and Annie Morrison. The results shows
that the trap was skillfully baited. I am sure that
you cannot fail to be delighted with the traces of
heredity shown in the p's and in the tails of the g's.
The absence of the i-dots in the old man's writing is
also most characteristic. Watson, I think our quiet
rest in the country has been a distinct success, and I
shall certainly return much invigorated to Baker
Street to-morrow."
Adventure VII
The Crooked Man
One summer night, a few months after my marriage, I
was seated by my own hearth smoking a last pipe and
nodding over a novel, for my day's work had been an
exhausting one. My wife had already gone upstairs,
and the sound of the locking of the hall door some
time before told me that the servants had also
retired. I had risen from my seat and was knocking
out the ashes of my pipe when I suddenly heard the
clang of the bell.
I looked at the clock. It was a quarter to twelve.
This could not be a visitor at so late an hour. A
patient, evidently, and possibly an all-night sitting.
With a wry face I went out into the hall and opened
the door. To my astonishment it was Sherlock Holmes
who stood upon my step.
"Ah, Watson," said he, "I hoped that I might not be
too late to catch you."
"My dear fellow, pray come in."
"You look surprised, and no wonder! Relieved, too, I
fancy! Hum! You still smoke the Arcadia mixture of
your bachelor days then! There's no mistaking that
fluffy ash upon your coat. It's easy to tell that you
have been accustomed to wear a uniform, Watson.
You'll never pass as a pure-bred civilian as long as
you keep that habit of carrying your handkerchief in
your sleeve. Could you put me up tonight?"
"With pleasure."
"You told me that you had bachelor quarters for one,
and I see that you have no gentleman visitor at
present. Your hat-stand proclaims as much."
"I shall be delighted if you will stay."
"Thank you. I'll fill the vacant peg then. Sorry to
see that you've had the British workman in the house.
He's a token of evil. Not the drains, I hope?"
"No, the gas."
"Ah! He has left two nail-marks from his boot upon
your linoleum just where the light strikes it. No,
thank you, I had some supper at Waterloo, but I'll
smoke a pipe with you with pleasure."
I handed him my pouch, and he seated himself opposite
to me and smoked for some time in silence. I was well
aware that nothing but business of importance would
have brought him to me at such an hour, so I waited
patiently until he should come round to it.
"I see that you are professionally rather busy just
now," said he, glancing very keenly across at me.
"Yes, I've had a busy day," I answered. "It may seem
very foolish in your eyes," I added, "but really I
don't know how you deduced it."
Holmes chuckled to himself.
"I have the advantage of knowing your habits, my dear
Watson," said he. "When your round is a short one you
walk, and when it is a long one you use a hansom. As
I perceive that your boots, although used, are by no
means dirty, I cannot doubt that you are at present
busy enough to justify the hansom."
"Excellent!" I cried.
"Elementary," said he. "It is one of those instances
where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems
remarkable to his neighbor, because the latter has
missed the one little point which is the basis of the
deduction. The same may be said, my dear fellow, for
the effect of some of these little sketches of your,
which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does
upon your retaining in your own hands some factors in