"Well, Doc," said Holmes, as he took out his pocket-knife, pulled a sliver of wood off the tree-trunk we were sitting on, and began to whittle it, "the red clay I found on Eustace Thorneycroft's shoes was pretty good evidence that he had been around the stable, where the only red clay in the neighborhood is located; so I disguised myself as the race-track loafer and pried his secret out of the none too bright Olaf Yensen, the coachman. Then I found cigar ashes of the peculiar Pampango brand, which I can always spot with a microscope, on the Countess's shoes, which proved that she had been in the Earl's rooms just after he had smoked a Pampango and before the room had been swept out, so I was able to nail her as one of the kleptomaniacs——"
"Yes, yes, I know that already," I hastened to say; "but what about your seizing Galetchkoff, Bunbury, and Xanthopoulos? You didn't seem to have any shoe-sole clues by which to follow there."
"Doc, when I can't get 'em any other way I pull off my feminine intuition, which I have inherited in large measure from my French mother, and I can always run 'em down with that! Now when we were chasing that Russian hash-mixer or biscuit-shooter out of the kitchen door closely pursued by Louis with the butcher-knife, your old Uncle Hemlock's intuition told him that there was another one of the guilty wretches who had cabbaged the cuff-buttons! Similarly with the egregious Egbert when he put his retreating forehead in at the door of the billiard-room, just after I had picked the fifth diamond treasure out of the pool-table pocket; and also with the Mephistophelian valet Luigi, when I decided to pull the strong-arm stuff on him and search him for a note from an accomplice. Little old Intuition,—with a capital I,—told me that they were the ginks I was after."
And the accomplished old poser calmly whittled away at the sliver of wood in his hand.
"Aw, come off!" I replied. "I really thought you could hand me something more plausible than that, Holmes. Unquestionably you do show flashes of genius sometimes in recovering articles or in spotting criminals guilty of murder and so on, but at other times you're simply playing to blind, dumb luck, only your vanity is so enormous that you won't admit it. You want everybody to believe that you dope out all your problems with that wonderful deductive reasoning power that you get from injecting 'coke' into your arm, and sitting still with a pipe in your mouth! 'Intuition,' my eye! You might be able to tell that to Barney Letstrayed, but you can't tell it to me!"
And I disgustedly threw away another little sliver of wood I had picked off the tree-trunk.
Holmes merely laughed and said:
"I guess you're simply sore because I dumped you into the creek accidentally yesterday, Doc. The old saying has it that no man is a hero to his valet, but I guess I'm not a hero to my physician either. Cheer up though, Watson; when we get back to the little old rooms in Baker Street after this cuff-button fever is over, why I'll split up with you fifty-fifty on the reward I get from the Earl. How's that, eh?"
"Pretty good, I guess. But I would like some information on your deductions from the remaining four pairs of shoes,—Tooter's, Hicks's, Lord Launcelot's, and most important of all, Billie Budd's, the last of whom you publicly bawled out as a robber and thief at luncheon on Tuesday. How are you going to account for them,—huh?" I inquired.
"Now, Doc, you betray a reprehensible desire to anticipate the prescience of the Almighty in thus seeking to ascertain the future while we are still in the present tense, similar to the people who go to call on fortune-tellers, and the girls who always read the last page of a novel first, to see how it comes out! But suffice it to say that I found both Pampango cigar ashes and the toilet-powder that the Earl uses on Budd's shoes; wine-stains on Uncle Tooter's shoes; flour on Hicks's shoes, and garden earth on Launcelot's shoes. I'll tell you more later."