“I am sorry that he has seen you.”
“And so was I at first. But there was no getting out of it.”
“What effect do you think it will have upon his plans now that he knows you are here?”
“It may cause him to be more cautious, or it may drive him to desperate measures at once. Like most clever criminals, he may be too confident in his own cleverness and imagine that he has completely deceived us.”
“Why should we not arrest him at once?”
“My dear Watson, you were born to be a man of action. Your instinct is always to do something energetic. But supposing, for argument’s sake, that we had him arrested tonight, what on earth the better off should we be for that? We could prove nothing against him. There’s the devilish cunning of it! If he were acting through a human agent we could get some evidence, but if we were to drag this great dog to the light of day it would not help us in putting a rope round the neck of its master.”
“Surely we have a case.”
“Not a shadow of one—only surmise and conjecture. We should be laughed out of court if we came with such a story and such evidence.”
“There is Sir Charles’s death.”
“Found dead without a mark upon him. You and I know that he died of sheer fright, and we know also what frightened him, but how are we to get twelve stolid jurymen to know it? What signs are there of a hound? Where are the marks of its fangs? Of course we know that a hound does not bite a dead body and that Sir Charles was dead before ever the brute overtook him. But we have to prove all this, and we are not in a position to do it.”