Chapter XV
Thursday morning, April the eleventh, found us none the worse for our wetting in the creek the afternoon before; and as Holmes and I were dressing in our room, he loudly boasted that before another day had passed he would succeed in finding the four remaining diamond cuff-buttons.
"Well, I hope so, Holmes; only I can't help thinking what a supreme chump that Earl is for keeping those five servants of his from whom you extracted the first seven cuff-buttons,—Yensen, Thorneycroft, Galetchkoff, Bunbury, and Xanthopoulos!" I said; "because at any time they are liable to steal the darned cuff-buttons again. Then there's Vermicelli, who was mixed up in the plot with the Greek, and the Countess herself!"
"What of it, Doc?" grinned Holmes, as he bent down to lace his shoes. "His Nibs can't very well fire her, can he? And as to the five servants whom he has so mercifully retained, that's his funeral, not ours. I was hired at an exorbitant fee to get back the cuff-buttons, and when I have done so my duties end. Handing out free advice to people who have not asked for it generally doesn't get you anything, I have observed."
I subsided, knowing from long experience how bull-headed Holmes was, and we went downstairs to breakfast, at which meal the Earl and Countess both did the honors to the assembled party. It developed then that Inspector Barnabas Letstrayed, in spite of his nap on the billiard-table the day before, had also bestirred himself in an eleventh hour attempt to find some of the cuff-buttons before Holmes dug them all up, and he told us how he had been all through the servants' rooms on the fifth floor, rummaging in their dressers and clothes-closets, and peeking under the beds, in a vain endeavor to unearth at least one of the stolen gems. He had also been down in the wine-cellar, on the theory that some of the servants might have gone down there to get drunk, and while in that condition might have dropped the gems, but there also he was doomed to disappointment.
"Cheer up, Barney, old boy; maybe I'll let you stand beside me when I nab the next thief, and you can thus share in the honor of apprehending him," said Holmes. Letstrayed, however, seemed to think that my partner was unjustly putting something over on him in getting back so many of the cuff-buttons when he, Letstrayed, couldn't find one. After breakfast the Earl suggested that we take a walk about the grounds, which proved to be a pleasanter jaunt than the one we took at Holmes's insistence on Tuesday morning; for the grass had been dried by this time by the sunshine that had followed Monday's rain.
The nine of us, including the Countess, rambled around the wide-spreading lawn by twos and threes, and I contrived to draw Holmes past the stables and gardens back to the small patch of woods that adjoined the castle grounds at the rear, where we seated ourselves on a fallen tree-trunk.
"Now, look here, Holmes, I've just been thinking——" I began.
"What! Again?" interrupted Holmes, with a grin.
"Don't interrupt me, please," I said seriously. "I want you to dope out for me the process of reasoning you went through yesterday noon in the music room behind the locked doors. Some of the moves you have made are too many for me, and I seek enlightenment."