“There is no ‘if’ about Jeff’s disappearance,” rejoined George hotly. “That we know. There is no ‘if’ about this letter, written in his own hand long after, written to a non-existent wife, in care of Billy Beebe; written under no conceivable conditions and for no conceivable purpose except to convey information under the very eyes of a vigilant jailer; a wanton and senseless folly, that could serve no purpose but to stir us to cruel and useless alarm, if it does not carry to us this information. When two hundred and fifty-six grossly improbable things point each to a common center, the grossness of each separate improbability makes the designed pointing just so much more convincing. You won’t let me go on. By Heavens, we are discussing the laws of evidence and lower mathematics, instead of deciphering this letter!”
“Let Mr. Aughinbaugh be!” said Pringle. “Jeff said, once and again, that George would tell us what to do. We know two very significant truths, and only two: Jeff left Mr. Aughinbaugh’s rooms a few minutes before midnight. He should have reached his own rooms just after midnight; he didn’t. There are the contradicting events, apparently giving each other the lie; there, and not at another time. If Thorpe and his striker lied—and men do lie, even politicians—Jeff is accounted for. And it is the weakness of a lie that it is no real thing, but an appearance botched upon the very truth. When in doubt, search for the joint. The lie is compressed by hard facts into these few minutes. George is looking in the right place, George knows what to do; go on, George! That will be all from the Great Objectors.”
Chapter X
“And then he will say to himsel’, The son of Duncan is in the heather and has need of me.”
—Alan Breck.
SO George went on: “As Mr. Pringle says, the fact of Jeff’s disappearance at this exact time and possible place strengthened all of the otherwise far-fetched ‘ifs’ twenty-fold. For that reason I stopped any translation of Jeff’s letter, though I had barely begun it, to state in full my theory, or rather my hypothesis, based on the remarkable conjunction of a hinted conspiracy, the occasion and motive of a conspiracy, and what was in all likelihood the consummation of that conspiracy, with both Jeff and Tillotson as victims.
“We will now take up the consideration of the letter. See if it does not reinforce my hypothesis on every point, until, as block after block falls inevitably into place, ordered and measured, it becomes a demonstration.
“To begin with, the reference to the ‘French Revolution’ is to the paragraph that I finished reading to him a few minutes before he left me, telling of a man secretly and falsely imprisoned in the Bastille by a lettre de cachet, a letter of hiding, procured by some powerful personage; a man whose one vain thought and hope and prayer was to have some word of his wife—of his dear wife. And there, I have no doubt, is where Jeff got the idea for this dear, sudden wife of his. Shall I read the paragraph for you?”
He should; and did.
“And from that paragraph—as I told Jeff in the very last words I spoke to him—Dickens got the inspiration for his novel, ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’ What did Jeff say? In effect, that a great writer could find material for a novel from any page. ‘A Tale of Two Cities!’ And here are the two cities, El Paso and Juarez, side by side—as closely associated as Sodom and Gomorrah, of which, indeed, they remind me at times. Could he, under the circumstances, say any plainer: ‘I am in Juarez, in a strong and secret prison’?”