"Gentlemen, the Valehampton Ghost," said Cleek; then he whipped out his torch and switched a circle of light upon it where it lay—a little black monkey with a wire muzzle over its mouth and a sponge that glowed brightly and smelt strongly of phosphorus fastened to the top of its shattered head. And hard by the spot where it lay there was one single trail of its footprints going across the fullers' earth and pointing toward the stone tower.
[CHAPTER XVI]
CLEEK EXPLAINS
"How did I manage to find the thing out?" said Cleek, answering the duke's query as they all sat together in the vicarage drawing-room, an hour or more afterward, discussing the affair. "Well, to tell you the truth, I think I got the very first inkling from the ringing of the bells. Oh, no, not through any special power of deduction or any super-human nonsense of that sort, but simply and solely through my memory. You will remember that I said Overton was not very original in his methods. Well, it so happened that I recalled the circumstance of a monkey which escaped from its cage and terrorized a Swiss village some years ago by climbing into the church belfry and inadvertently setting the bells ringing in the middle of the night by hopping from one to the other in an effort to maintain its equilibrium. That, of course, suggested a similar possibility here, and I set about deciding the point by means of the fullers' earth. By the way, Mr. Narkom, I chose fullers' earth not alone because of its yielding quality and its ability to receive impressions of even very slight things falling upon it, but because by reason of its weight and its rather tenacious character it was not so likely as another medium to be blown away by any sudden rising of the wind. I suppose you know that I placed the stuff about the tower's base when I left you at the limousine?"
"I judged that," replied the Superintendent. "The thing which amazed me, however, was all that meaningless stuff about timber and cubic feet you talked about when you came back. I can't even yet get the hang of that."
"Can't you? It will be getting in advance of the story a bit, but I may as well explain it now as later. I had come to the point of certainty regarding the making of a tunnel—how, you shall hear later—and as a tunnel of 288 feet in length will require shoring up and bracing with balks at intervals if one doesn't want it to become one's grave, timber for that purpose becomes a necessity. Now, as it would have been a pretty risky business to have left a trail by purchasing timber, and a worse one to attempt to smuggle it into the Hurdons' cottage, I had to figure out just where those beauties were going to get it. Old or new, they simply must have it, and the idea of old timber set my thoughts going—opened up, as it were, the possibility of the adjoining house being kept tenantless so that they could quietly demolish it and get the wood from there. So, when I went to lay the fullers' earth about the tower, I determined to have a look inside that other cottage and decide the point. A skeleton key let me in, and one flicker of my torch settled the question. The floors were up, the walls had been broken with a sledge-hammer until the place was fairly littered with mortar and lime from end to end, and every joist and beam that could be removed without bringing the place down had been taken away. I made a rapid inventory, calculated roughly about how much timber it would take to supply what had been removed, reduced that to the requirements of the tunnel, and when you caught me going about that little problem in mental arithmetic, I was trying to discover just how far those chaps must have progressed with the tunnel on the basis of the cubic feet of timber used.
"Now, to get back to the beginning. The tunnel idea was really the outcome of speculating with regard to Sir Julius Solinski's possible connection with the matter. That, of course, set me to thinking on the subject of digging for the purpose of getting something out of the earth by secret means and defeating the duke that way; then, when I got to thinking over Captain Paul Sandringham's position in the event of the proposed marriage and the possibility of an heir coming between him and his expectations, and added to that my knowledge of the dishonest character of the man—why, there you are! The tunnel and the reason for it simply evolve themselves by natural means out of such fertile soil as that; and, this much accomplished, it was but a step to the Hurdons and that very delightful garden which was so delightfully kept."
"How?"