“All that stuff left on the bed. Your old Sherlock type would say: ‘These flowers were placed here by an ex-gardener, with red hair and a missing little finger.’ But to my mind, the deduction would be that the flowers were put there by a man the farthest possible remove from an ex-gardener, rather, a man of keen, sharp wits and decided ingenuity.”
“Merely as a blind, or, rather as a misleading clue?” I suggested.
“Yes. Now, the superfluity of those things on the bed, I mean the multiplicity of them, betokens a nature inclined to overdo. Like a man who, getting on a steam-boat, ties himself on.”
“Or,” put in Lora, “if a man compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.”
“Yes, something of that sort. Yet it may be that he started on his mad career of bed decorating and went on and on, sort of absent-mindedly.”
“Got started and couldn’t stop.”
“Exactly. Say he placed the flowers first, then, seeing the orange and crackers, added those, then, noticing the crucifix, used that; then the handkerchief, and finally draped the scarf round them all, just because it was handy by.”
“And the watch in the pitcher?”
“Oh, that dratted thing! That throws the whole matter into another category. That watch is my hope and my stumbling block, both.”
“You’ve been mysterious before, Kee, about that watch. Now out with it. What’s the separate mystery of the watch in the pitcher?”