“Well? I don’t see——”
“Why, it makes the message read ‘Two men did this,’ instead of ‘women did this.’ The words are run together, for he couldn’t lift the pencil——”
“He always did that,—his writing always shows connected words!”
“So, there’s the message as clear as print! The T on the onyx just fits to the first mark on the paper,—any one can see that,—and we have the dying statement, ‘Two men did this.’ With what is undoubtedly the further instruction, ‘get both’.”
“What a revelation! Who can they be?”
“It ought to be easy to find out. They are, of course, some of the bakery men. And Sir Herbert’s idea was that doubtless one would be apprehended, but for us to get both of them.”
“And the women are out of it!”
“Ab—s—lute—ly! But we must go warily. You see, the guilty men have been glad to hide behind the idea of ‘women’ which came to their rescue by the merest chance. It’s all so easily understood now. Sir Herbert, with dying effort and failing eyesight, wrote hurriedly, and efficient, though he was, his haste made him begin his writing off the paper instead of on it. His habit of connecting words, or his inability from weakness to lift his pencil, made the words ‘Two men,’ the capital missing, seem to be ‘women.’ Think how delighted the two men must have been at this! I doubt if they realized what did happen,—more likely they thought Sir Herbert denounced women for some reason of his own. Now, to catch them we must walk delicately, like Scriptural Agag, and spring on them unawares.”
“Which way shall we look?”
“Take the Bakery men in turn. Crippen first, I should say.”