“Ay, but how? There must have been some greedy fingers to take them,” said McSweeny, who seemed to instinctively guess the suggestion that was coming.
“Perhaps not,” said the old gentleman, as calmly; “a spirit hath not flesh or bones. Did you never hear of evil spirits?”
McSweeny almost jumped to his feet, and fumbled apprehensively with his red scalp.
“Faith have I,” he answered, with a shudder, thinking probably of the “Spirit Rappers” described in “Strange Clues.” “If it’s a good healthy ghost of the owld-fashioned kind your going to mintion, it’s all right, but your table-rapping ones I’ll have nothing to do with.”
“I don’t profess to say what kind of spirit took them,” solemnly replied Mr Stafford, “but it must have been a covetous spirit. I’ve told you all I know of the affair. The jewels are gone, and that’s exactly how they vanished. I could not ask the servants about them, for they never saw them, and were not near me at the time. I don’t feel inclined to lose them, yet I am certain that no human hand took them.”
“Rats, mebbe?” hopefully suggested McSweeny.
“No; there is not a hole in the room.”
“A jackdaw then—it might have come down the chimney.”
“Impossible. I must have heard it, and seen it. No; the jewels disappeared right under my nose, without a sound. I leave you to solve the mystery and recover the property.”
McSweeny had asked for a difficult case, and now that he had got one he was bound to express himself highly elated at the apparently unsolvable mystery. He volubly promised the robbed gentleman not only that he would speedily lay the thief by the heels, but that, spirit or no spirit, he would recover the property as well. His inward resolve, of course, was that if he found himself making no progress with the case, he would shove the finishing of it on me, while, if by some rare stroke of good luck he did succeed, the greater renown would attach to his efforts on account of his emphatic declarations. Full of these assurances, he accompanied Mr Stafford out to that gentleman’s house at the South Side, and was taken up to the room in which the jewels had so magically disappeared. He got Mr Stafford to sit down in the exact spot and attitude he had occupied when the robbery took place. When this had been done, and every part of the room examined, McSweeny was more puzzled than ever. His reason told him most emphatically that the valuables could not have gone without hands, and yet he could not suggest even to himself how fingers could have got at them. There was not a crevice in the room—the house was a modern one, and therefore could not have any invisible stairs, doors, or passages in the walls; and even if these had existed, he could not conceive it possible for anyone to enter the room and remove the jewels before the owner’s eyes, and he sitting there wide awake, looking straight before him. However, he had promised great things, and by his confident looks, and winks, and nods hinted at greater, so all he could now do was to take refuge in a little boldness. In entering the house he had got his eye on the page-boy, who was in the act of stuffing something out of sight into one of his pockets. As McSweeny reached the boy’s side a whiff of the page’s breath ascended to his nostrils, and seemed to point to the cause of the hurried act of concealment.