The Sleuth of St. James Street | Page 7

changed into a note of solicitation.
"You will not fail me, Excellency - already for my bias to the Master I
am reduced in merit."
I put the scroll into my pocket and went out, for a motorcar had come
into the park, and I knew that Marquis had arrived.
I met Sir Henry and the superintendent in the long corridor; they had
been looking in at my interview through the elevated grating.
"Marquis," I cried, "the judge was right to cut short the criminal trial
and issue a lunacy warrant. This creature is the maddest lunatic in this
whole asylum. The human mind is capable of any absurdity."
Sir Henry looked at me with a queer ironical smile.
"The judge was wrong," he said. "The creature, as you call him, is as
sane as any of us."
"Then you believe this amazing story?" I said.
"I believe Rodman was found at daylight dead on the hearth, with
practically every bone in his body crushed," he replied.
"Certainly," I said. "We all know that is true. But why was he killed?'
Again Sir Henry regarded me with his ironical smile.
"Perhaps," he drawled, "there is some explanation in the report in your
pocket, to the Monastic Head. It's only a theory, you know."

He smiled, showing his white, even teeth.
We went into the superintendent's room, and sat down by a smoldering
fire of coals in the gate. I handed Marquis the roll of vellum. It was in
one of the Shan dialects. He read it aloud. With the addition of certain
formal expressions, it contained precisely the Oriental's testimony
before the court, and no more.
"Ah!" he said in his curiously inflected Oxford voice.
And he held the scroll out to the heat of the fire. The vellum baked
slowly, and as it baked, the black Chinese characters faded out and
faint blue ones began to appear.
Marquis read the secret message in his emotionless drawl:
"`The American is destroyed, and his accursed work is destroyed with
him. Send the news to Bangkok and west to Burma. The treasures of
India are saved."'
I cried out in astonishment.
"An assassin! The creature was an assassin! He killed Rodman simply
by crushing him in his arms!"
Sir Henry's drawl lengthened.
"Its Lal Gupta," he said, "the cleverest Oriental in the whole of Asia.
The jewel-traders sent him to watch Rodman, and to kill him if he was
ever able to get his formulae worked out. They must have paid him an
incredible sum."
"And that is why the creature attached himself to Rodman!" I said.
"Surely," replied Sir Henry. "He brought that bronze Romulus carrying
off the Sabine woman and staged the supernatural to work out his plan
and to save his life. I knew the bronze as soon as I got my eye on it -
old Franz Josef gave it as a present to Mahadal in Bombay for
matching up some rubies."

I swore bitterly.
"And we took him for a lunatic!"
"Ah, yes I" replied Sir Henry. "What was it you said as I came in? `The
human mind is capable of any absurdity!"

II. The Reward
I was before one of those difficult positions unavoidable to a visitor in
a foreign country.
I had to meet the obligations of professional courtesy. Captain Walker
had asked me to go over the manuscript of his memoirs; and now he
had called at the house in which I was a guest, for my opinion. We had
long been friends; associated in innumerable cases, and I wished to
suggest the difficulty rather than to express it. It was the twilight of an
early Washington winter. The lights in the great library, softened with
delicate shades, had been turned on. Outside, Sheridan Circle was
almost a thing of beauty in its vague outlines; even the squat, ridiculous
bronze horse had a certain dignity in the blue shadow.
If one had been speculating on the man, from his physical aspect one
would have taken Walker for an engineer of some sort, rather than the
head of the United States Secret Service. His lean face and his angular
manner gaffe that impression. Even now, motionless in the big chair
beyond the table, he seemed - how shall I say it? - mechanical.
And that was the very defect in his memoir. He had cut the great cases
into a dry recital. There was no longer in them any pressure of a human
impulse. The glow of inspired detail had been dissected out. Everything
startling and wonderful had been devitalized.
The memoir was a report.
The bulky typewritten manuscript lay on the table beside the electric
lamp, and I stood about uncertain how to tell him.

"Walker," I said, "did nothing wonderful ever happen to you