“What was it?” asked Philo Gubb.
“It was a speck of red pepper no bigger than the point of a pin,” said Chi Foxy, “crushed into the carpet by the old miser’s bed, where he had been killed. I picked up the speck of red pepper and microscoped it, and I saw that along one edge it was sort of brown, where it had been burned a little.”
“Have you got it now?” asked P. Gubb.
“Got it?” said Chi Foxy. “I should say not. While I was lookin’ at it a breeze come and blowed it away, and I never saw it again, but that was enough for me. ‘Red pepper,’ I says, ‘partly burned,’ and I began to tremble. ’Cause why? ’Cause I never was able to get smoking tobacco strong enough to suit me, and to make it taste snappy I always put a little red pepper in my pipe. I turned as white as a sheet. ‘Red pepper partly burned!’ I says to myself. ‘Nobody in the world but me puts red pepper in his tobacco.’
“Well, sir, I started tracing myself back and I found out I was the murderer. And I was the detective after the murderer. I was everybody concerned. In a moment I was overcome by criminal fear and I fled. I fled all over Europe, Asia, and Africa, and wherever I went I was right after myself, ready to arrest me.”
Chi Foxy paused and glanced at P. Gubb questioningly. With a solemn face the great Correspondence School detective blinked his bird-like eyes at Chi Foxy.
“So now arrest me,” said Chi Foxy.
Philo Gubb rubbed his chin. “I’d like to favor you by so doing, Mr. Jones,” he said, “for I can easy see, Mr. Higgs, that you can’t arrest yourself, but it is against the instructions in Lesson Six of the Rising Sun Correspondence School of Deteckating for a graduate to arrest a man without a good clue, and the only clue you had was blowed away.”
For a moment this seemed to annoy Chi Foxy, but his face suddenly brightened.
“Clue?” he said. “Say, friend, I wouldn’t ask you to arrest me on any such clue as a speck of red pepper. No, sir! But I’ve got a clue that’ll mean something. I can tell you right where I buried that old miser’s bones, I can. You go up the river road until you come to a tool-house on the railway, and just back of the tool-house is a dwellin’-house—old and unpainted. All right! Right in that yard, close to the railway fence, the bones is buried. Now, you turn me over to the law, and you go up there—”