“What was it, my boy?” he said.
“A cave, sir,” I answered—“a scoop in the wall where he’d hidden—water and a cave like that other. And the shot in his head! My God! who fired it? My God, sir!”
“An awful retribution,” he said. “But come, come—you are overwrought; and no wonder. Let us go back to the house—or into the open fields, if you prefer it; and Jannaway shall give us the story of his discovery, in good matter-of-fact reviving prose.”
* * * * * * * * *
The detective took from his pocket the letter which he had obtained from Mrs Dalston, and held it up to the light for our inspection.
“Do you observe the water-mark, gentlemen—Nolans, the big North Hampshire paper mills? It was that first put me on the scent. Here was local-made foreign note-paper, asserted to have been received from Spain. He might, of course, have took some with him; but it wasn’t likely, was it, seeing as how the letter itself refers to the journey as unpremeditated, and him away from home, or wished it to be supposed so, at the time? Inference, that he’d wrote it here for a blind, and give it to be produced by Mrs D. in case of inquiry, while he himself dropped into hiding.
“He was clever, and he knew a good deal—not the least of his knowledge that the game was threatening to be up with him—but the best of his sort make their slips. He’d made his, and it left me pretty convinced that he’d be found lying close somewheres about the neighbourhood, while the hunt ran abroad.
“I didn’t much cotton to the house, myself, for a solution. It was reasonable to suppose, of course, that, during his tenancy of the place, he hadn’t overlooked its best facilities for concealment. But, then, where he could find a way, others could too, and the reputation of the farm promised a pretty searching inquiry into its holes and corners. No, I thought, if our gentleman’s to be unearthed at all, it will be from somewheres characteristic of his genius, and the least likely to be considered by the ordinary. Probability pointed to the house for that: therefore I made it my business to look outside.
“Now, I don’t know if you may recall, gentlemen, a rather queer thing—and that was the odd laugh the lady give in answer to our Italian friend’s remark that she’d been too precipitate? She had—she admitted it indirectly. She’d always been looking, the inference was, for this solution to the long grudge she’d bore against him, and, when at last it come, it come too late. Why? By God, gentlemen, the answer took me in a flash. It was because she herself had already anticipated the law by killing him.
“Once, in my mind, I couldn’t get it out. Yet, if it was true, it only made the puzzle deeper. For where could she have hid him, none the less? and why had she chosen this particular time more than another for the deed? The plain answer to that second seemed because he must have put himself suddenly at her mercy, in a way he’d never done before, and the temptation had proved too strong for her. It was then for the first time that the well occurred to me. Could she have pushed him in unexpected when he was gone to draw water?