“No, no, this ain’t so odd, either,” said O’Toole, “for whether Hen Smitz grabbed the bulb before Wiggins changed the new one for the old one, or after he changed it, don’t make so much difference, when you come to think of it.”
“To the deteckative mind,” said Mr. Gubb, “it makes the difference that this ain’t the bulb you thought it was, and hence consequently it ain’t the bulb Mister Wiggins got from the stock-keeper.”
Mr. Gubb started away. The crowd followed him. He did not go in search of the original bulb at once. He returned first to his room, where he changed his undertaker disguise for Number Six, that of a blue woolen-shirted laboring-man with a long brown beard. Then he led the way back to the packing house.
Again the crowd was halted at the gate, but again P. Gubb passed inside, and he found the stock-keeper eating his luncheon out of a tin pail. The stock-keeper was perfectly willing to talk.
“It was like this,” said the stock-keeper. “We’ve been working overtime in some departments down here, and Wiggins and his crew had to work overtime the night Hen Smitz was murdered. Hen and Wiggins was at outs, or anyway I heard Hen tell Wiggins he’d better be hunting another job because he wouldn’t have this one long, and Wiggins told Hen that if he lost his job he’d murder him—Wiggins would murder Hen, that is. I didn’t think it was much of anything but loose talk at the time. But Hen was working overtime too. He’d been working nights up in that little room of his on the second floor for quite some time, and this night Wiggins come to me and he says Hen had asked him for a fresh thirty-two-candle-power bulb. So I give it to Wiggins, and then I went home. And, come to find out, Wiggins sewed that bulb up with Hen.”
“Perhaps maybe you have sack-needles like this into your stock-room,” said P. Gubb, producing the needle Long Sam had given him. The stock-keeper took the needle and examined it carefully.
“Never had any like that,” he said.
“Now, if,” said Philo Gubb,—“if the bulb that was sewed up into the burlap with Henry Smitz wasn’t a new bulb, and if Mr. Wiggins had given the new bulb to Henry, and if Henry had changed the new bulb for an old one, where would he have changed it at?”
“Up in his room, where he was always tinkering at that machine of his,” said the stock-keeper.