ever a man was three parts mad with terror, that man's
name is Pinner. What can have put the shivers on
him?"
"He suspects that we are detectives," I suggested.
"That's it," cried Pycroft.
Holmes shook his head. "He did not turn pale. He was
pale when we entered the room," said he. "It is just
possible that--"
His words were interrupted by a sharp rat-tat from the
direction of the inner door.
"What the deuce is he knocking at his own door for?"
cried the clerk.
Again and much louder cam the rat-tat-tat. We all
gazed expectantly at the closed door. Glancing at
Holmes, I saw his face turn rigid, and he leaned
forward in intense excitement. Then suddenly came a
low guggling, gargling sound, and a brisk drumming
upon woodwork. Holmes sprang frantically across the
room and pushed at the door. It was fastened on the
inner side. Following his example, we threw ourselves
upon it with all our weight. One hinge snapped, then
the other, and down came the door with a crash.
Rushing over it, we found ourselves in the inner room.
It was empty.
But it was only for a moment that we were at fault.
At one corner, the corner nearest the room which we
had left, there was a second door. Holmes sprang to
it and pulled it open. A coat and waistcoat were
lying on the floor, and from a hook behind the door,
with his own braces round his neck, was hanging the
managing director of the Franco-Midland Hardware
Company. His knees were drawn up, his head hung at a
dreadful angle to his body, and the clatter of his
heels against the door made the noise which had broken
in upon our conversation. In an instant I had caught
him round the waist, and held him up while Holmes and
Pycroft untied the elastic bands which had disappeared
between the livid creases of skin. Then we carried
him into the other room, where he lay with a
clay-colored face, puffing his purple lips in and out
with every breath--a dreadful wreck of all that he had
been but five minutes before.
"What do you think of him, Watson?" asked Holmes.
I stooped over him and examined him. His pule was
feeble and intermittent, but his breathing grew
longer, and there was a little shivering of his
eyelids, which showed a thin white slit of ball
beneath.
"It has been touch and go with him," said I, "but
he'll live now. Just open that window, and hand me
the water carafe." I undid his collar, poured the
cold water over his face, and raised and sank his arms
until he drew a long, natural breath. "It's only a
question of time now," said I, as I turned away from
him.
Holmes stood by the table, with his hands deep in his
trouser's pockets and his chin upon his breast.
"I suppose we ought to call the police in now," said
he. "And yet I confess that I'd like to give them a
complete case when they come."
"It's a blessed mystery to me," cried Pycroft,
scratching his head. "Whatever they wanted to bring
me all the way up here for, and then--"
"Pooh! All that is clear enough," said Holmes
impatiently. "It is this last sudden move."
"You understand the rest, then?"
"I think that it is fairly obvious. What do you say,
Watson?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "I must confess that I am
out of my depths," said I.
"Oh surely if you consider the events at first they
can only point to one conclusion."
"What do you make of them?"
"Well, the whole thing hinges upon two points. The
first is the making of Pycroft write a declaration by
which he entered the service of this preposterous
company. Do you not see how very suggestive that is?"
"I am afraid I miss the point."
"Well, why did they want him to do it? Not as a
business matter, for these arrangements are usually
verbal, and there was no earthly business reason why
this should be an exception. Don't you see, my young
friend, that they were very anxious to obtain a
specimen of your handwriting, and had no other way of
doing it?"
"And why?"
"Quite so. Why? When we answer that we have made
some progress with our little problem. Why? There
can be only one adequate reason. Some one wanted to
learn to imitate your writing, and had to procure a
specimen of it first. And now if we pass on to the
second point we find that each throws light upon the
other. That point is the request made by Pinner that
you should not resign your place, but should leave the
manager of this important business in the full
expectation that a Mr. Hall Pycroft, whom he had never
seen, was about to enter the office upon the Monday
morning."
"My God!" cried our client, "what a blind beetle I
have been!"
"Now you see the point about the handwriting. Suppose
that some one turned up in your place who wrote a
completely different hand from that in which you had
applied for the vacancy, of course the game would have
been up. But in the interval the rogue had learned to
imitate you, and his position was therefore secure, as
I presume that nobody in the office had ever set eyes
upon you."
"Not a soul," groaned Hall Pycroft.
"Very good. Of course it was of the utmost importance
to prevent you from thinking better of it, and also to
keep you from coming into contact with any one who
might tell you that your double was at work in
Mawson's office. Therefore they gave you a handsome
advance on your salary, and ran you off to the
Midlands, where they gave you enough work to do to
prevent your going to London, where you might have
burst their little game up. That is all plain
enough."
"But why should this man pretend to be his won
brother?"
"Well, that is pretty clear also. There are evidently
only two of them in it. The other is personating you
at the office. This one acted as your engager, and
then found that he could not find you an employer
without admitting a third person into his plot. That
he was most unwilling to do. He changed his
appearance as far as he could, and trusted that the
likeness, which you could not fail to observe, would
be put down to a family resemblance. But for the
happy chance of the gold stuffing, your suspicions
would probably never have been aroused."
Hall Pycroft shook his clinched hands in the air.
"Good Lord!" he cried, "while I have been fooled in
this way, what has this other Hall Pycroft been doing
at Mawson's? What should we do, Mr. Holmes? Tell me
what to do."
"We must wire to Mawson's."
"They shut at twelve on Saturdays."
"Never mind. There may be som
e door-keeper or
attendant--"
"Ah yes, they keep a permanent guard there on account
of the value of the securities that they hold. I
remember hearing it talked of in the City."
"Very good; we shall wire to him, and see if all is
well, and if a clerk of your name is working there.
That is clear enough; but what is not so clear is why
at sight of us one of the rogues should instantly walk
out of the room and hang himself."
"The paper!" croaked a voice behind us. The man was
sitting up, blanched and ghastly, with returning
reason in his eyes, and hands which rubbed nervously
at the broad red band which still encircled his
throat.
"The paper! Of course!" yelled Holmes, in a paroxysm
of excitement. "Idiot that I was! I thought so must
of our visit that the paper never entered my head for
an instant. To be sure, the secret must be there."
He flattened it out upon the table, and a cry of
triumph burst from his lips. "Look at this, Watson,"
he cried. "It is a London paper, an early edition of
the Evening Standard. Here is what we want. Look at
the headlines: 'Crime in the City. Murder at Mawson &
Williams's. Gigantic attempted Robbery. Capture of
the Criminal.' Here, Watson, we are all equally
anxious to hear it, so kindly read it aloud to us."
It appeared from its position in the paper to have
been the one event of importance in town, and the
account of it ran in this way:
"A desperate attempt at robbery, culminating in the
death of one man and the capture of the criminal,
occurred this afternoon in the City. For some time
back Mawson & Williams, the famous financial house,
have been the guardians of securities which amount in
the aggregate to a sum of considerably over a million
sterling. So conscious was the manager of the
responsibility which devolved upon him in consequence
of the great interests at stake that safes of the very
latest construction have been employed, and an armed
watchman has been left day and night in the building.
It appears that last week a new clerk named Hall
Pycroft was engaged by the firm. This person appears
to have been none other that Beddington, the famous
forger and cracksman, who, with his brother, had only
recently emerged from a five years' spell of penal
servitude. By some mean, which are not yet clear, he
succeeded in wining, under a false name, this official
position in the office, which he utilized in order to
obtain moulding of various locks, and a thorough
knowledge of the position of the strong room and the
safes.
"It is customary at Mawson's for the clerks to leave
at midday on Saturday. Sergeant Tuson, of the City
Police, was somewhat surprised, therefore to see a
gentleman with a carpet bag come down the steps at
twenty minutes past one. His suspicions being
aroused, the sergeant followed the man, and with the
aid of Constable Pollack succeeded, after a most
desperate resistance, in arresting him. It was at
once clear that a daring and gigantic robbery had been
committed. Nearly a hundred thousand pounds' worth of
American railway bonds, with a large amount of scrip
in mines and other companies, was discovered in the
bag. On examining the premises the body of the
unfortunate watchman was found doubled up and thrust
into the largest of the safes, where it would not have
been discovered until Monday morning had it not been
for the prompt action of Sergeant Tuson. The man's
skull had been shattered by a blow from a poker
delivered from behind. There could be no doubt that
Beddington had obtained entrance by pretending that he
had left something behind him, and having murdered the
watchman, rapidly rifled the large safe, and then made
off with his booty. His brother, who usually works
with him, has not appeared in this job as far as can
at present be ascertained, although the police are
making energetic inquiries as to his whereabouts."
"Well, we may save the police some little trouble in
that direction," said Holmes, glancing at the haggard
figure huddled up by the window. "Human nature is a
strange mixture, Watson. You see that even a villain
and murderer can inspire such affection that his
brother turns to suicide when he learns that his neck
is forfeited. However, we have no choice as to our
action. The doctor and I will remain on guard, Mr.
Pycroft, if you will have the kindness to step out for
the police."
Adventure IV
The "Gloria Scott"
I have some papers here," said my friend Sherlock
Holmes, as we sat one winter's night on either side of
the fire, "which I really think, Watson, that it would
be worth your while to glance over. These are the
documents in the extraordinary case of the Gloria
Scott, and this is the message which struck Justice of
the Peace Trevor dead with horror when he read it."
He had picked from a drawer a little tarnished
cylinder, and, undoing the tape, he handed me a short
note scrawled upon a half-sheet of slate gray-paper.
"The supply of game for London is going steadily up,"
it ran. "Head-keeper Hudson, we believe, had been now
told to receive all orders for fly-paper and for
preservation of you hen-pheasant's life."
As I glanced up from reading this enigmatical message,
I saw Holmes chuckling at the expression upon my face.
"You look a little bewildered," said he.
"I cannot see how such a message as this could inspire
horror. It seems to me to be rather grotesque than
otherwise."
"Very likely. Yet the fact remains that the reader,
who was a fine, robust old man, was knocked clean down
by it as if it had been the butt end of a pistol."
"You arouse my curiosity," said I. "But why did you
say just now that there were very particular reasons
why I should study this case?"
"Because it was the first in which I was ever
engaged."
I had often endeavored to elicit from my companion
what had first turned is mind in the direction of
criminal research, but had never caught him before in
a communicative humor. Now he sat forward in this arm
chair and spread out the documents upon his knees.
Then he lit his pipe and sat for some time smoking and
turning them over.
"You never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?" he asked.
"He was the only friend I made during the two years I
was at college. I was never a very sociable fellow,
Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and
working out my own little methods of thought, so that
I never mixed much with the men of my year. Bar
fencing and boxing I had few athletic tastes, and then
my line of study was quite distinct from that o
f the
other fellows, so that we had no pints of contact at
all. Trevor was the only man I knew, and that only
through the accident of his bull terrier freezing on
to my ankle one morning as I went down to chapel.
"It was a prosaic way of forming a friendship, but it
was effective. I was laid by the heels for ten days,
but Trevor used to come in to inquire after me. At
first it was only a minute's chat, but soon his visits
lengthened, and before the end of the term we were
close friends. He was a hearty, full-blooded fellow,
full of spirits and energy, the very opposite to me in
most respects, but we had some subjects in common, and
it was a bond of union when I found that he was as
friendless as I. Finally, he invited me down to his
father's place at Donnithorpe, in Norfolk, and I
accepted his hospitality for a month of the long
vacation.
"Old Trevor was evidently a man of some wealth and
consideration, a J.P., and a landed proprietor.
Donnithorpe is a little hamlet just to the north of
Langmere, in the country of the Broads. The house was
and old-fashioned, wide-spread, oak-beamed brick
building, with a fine lime-lined avenue leading up to
it. There was excellent wild-duck shooting in the
fens, remarkably good fishing, a small but select
library, taken over, as I understood, from a former
occupant, and a tolerable cook, so that he would be a
fastidious man who could not put in a pleasant month
there.
"Trevor senior was a widower, and my friend his only
son.
"There had been a daughter, I heard, but she had died
of diphtheria while on a visit to Birmingham. The
father interested me extremely. He was a man of
little culture, but with a considerable amount of rude
strength, both physically and mentally. He knew
hardly any books, but he had traveled far, had seen
much of the world. And had remembered all that he had
learned. In person he was a thick-set, burly man with
a shock of grizzled hair, a brown, weather-beaten
face, and blue eyes which were keen to the verge of
fierceness. Yet he had a reputation for kindness and
charity on the country-side, and was noted for the
leniency of his sentences from the bench.
"One evening, shortly after my arrival, we were
sitting over a glass of port after dinner, when young
Trevor began to talk about those habits of observation
and inference which I had already formed into a
system, although I had not yet appreciated the part
which they were to play in my life. The old man
evidently thought that his son was exaggerating in his
description of one or two trivial feats which I had
performed.
"'Come, now, Mr. Holmes,' said he, laughing
good-humoredly. 'I'm an excellent subject, if you can
deduce anything from me.'
"'I fear there is not very much,' I answered; 'I might
suggest that you have gone about in fear of some
personal attack with the last twelvemonth.'
"The laugh faded from his lips, and he stared at me in
great surprise.
"'Well, that's true enough,' said he. 'You know,
Victor,' turning to his son, 'when we broke up that
poaching gang they swore to knife us, and Sir Edward
Holly has actually been attacked. I've always been on
my guard since then, though I have no idea how you
know it.'
"'You have a very handsome stick,' I answered. 'By
the inscription I observed that you had not had it
more than a year. But you have taken some pains to
bore the head of it and pour melted lead into the hole
so as to make it a formidable weapon. I argued that
you would not take such precautions unless you had
some danger to fear.'
"'Anything else?' he asked, smiling.
"'You have boxed a good deal in your youth.'
"'Right again. How did you know it? Is my nose
knocked a little out of the straight?'
"'No,' said I. 'It is your ears. They have the
peculiar flattening and thickening which marks the
boxing man.'
"'Anything else?'
"'You have done a good deal of digging by your
callosities.'
"'Made all my money at the gold fields.'
"'You have been in New Zealand.'
"'Right again.'