The Mystery of the Four Fingers

by Fred M. White

"Won't you sit down?" the cripple asked again. "I should like to have a little chat with you. Here are whisky and soda, and some cigars, for the excellence of which I can vouch, as I import them myself. Perhaps, also, you share with me a love of flowers?"

With a wave of his strong arm, the speaker indicated the wealth of blossoms which arose from all sides of the room. There were flowers everywhere. The luxuriant blooms seemed to overpower and dwarf the handsome furnishings of the room. At the far end, folding doors opened into the conservatory, which was a veritable mass of brilliant colors. The cripple smiled upon his blossoms, as a mother might smile on her child.

"These are the only friends who never deceive you," he said. "Flowers and dogs, and, perhaps, little children. I know this, because I have suffered from contact with the world, as, perhaps, you will notice when you regard this poor body of mine. I think you said just now you came here entirely by yourself."

"That is a fact," Gurdon replied. He was beginning to feel a little more at his ease now. "Let me hasten to assure you that I came here with no felonious intent at all. I was looking for somebody, and I thought that my friend came here. You will pardon me if I do not explain with any amount of detail, because the thing does not concern myself altogether. And, besides—"

Gurdon paused; he could not possibly tell this stranger of the startling events which had led to his present awkward situation. In any case, he would not have been believed.

"We need not go into that," the cripple said. "It is all by the way. You came here alone; and, I take it, when you left your home, you had not the slightest intention of coming here. To make my meaning a little more clear, if you disappeared from this moment, and your friends never saw you again, the police would not have the slightest clue to your whereabouts."

Gurdon laughed just a little uneasily; he began to entertain the idea that he was face to face with some dangerous lunatic, some man whose dreadful troubles and misfortunes had turned him against the world. Evidently, it would be the right policy to humor him.

"That is quite correct," he said. "Nobody has the least idea where I am; and if the unpleasant contingency you allude to happened to me, I should go down to posterity as one of the victims of the mysterious type of crime that startles London now and again."

"I should think," said the stranger, in a thin, dry tone, that caused Gurdon's pulses to beat a little faster—"I should think that your prophecy is in a fair way to turn out correct. I don't ask you why you came here, because you would not tell me if I did. But you must have been spying on the place, or you would not have had the misfortune to tread on a damaged grating, and finish your adventure ignominiously in the cellar. As I told you just now, I have enemies who are absolutely unscrupulous, and who would give much for a chance of murdering me if the thing could be done with impunity. Common sense prompts me to take it for granted that you are in some wry connected with the foes to whom I have alluded."

"I assure you, I am not," Gurdon protested. "I am the enemy of no man. I came here to night—"