"Possibly."
"Let us examine the third proposition before we apply for a warrant," said Quarles. "The will may have been hidden. If so, it must be in an unexpected place, all the likely places having been looked into. We must try and look into the mind of an eccentric. For a moment let us take any ordinary man, and you will find that he exhibits certain peculiarities. He is a creature of sequences, and he goes on repeating himself. He will continue to wear the same kind of clothes, even though the fashion changes. He will always put certain things into a certain pocket. He will arrange his papers, not in the best way, but in the way he has always arranged them. He can only write on a certain kind of paper with a particular make of pen. Such habits as these are acquired by quite an ordinary man, and no one thinks much about them. Now take a man not quite so ordinary. He gets a mania for storing up useless odds and ends, dislikes destroying anything, touches every second post he passes in his walks, lives on one meal a day, perhaps, or becomes a vegetarian. We say of this man that he is rather eccentric. In short, we notice him because he exaggerates our own peculiarities. Man repeats himself, that is the point. He does a thing his way, not yours. Now take a really eccentric man—Mr. Frisby. We may speak of specific peculiarities in his case, Wigan. He accumulated useless papers and locked them up. He left valuable papers in an open drawer. Broken fragments he carefully concealed in a chest; letters which he treasured he left where anyone might find them. Even if he did destroy a paper he did not tear it up, he twisted it up. Some men invariably tear paper across and across, others crumple it into a ball. Mr. Frisby twisted it. You remember my looking into the paper basket. There were no torn pieces in it, nor crumpled; they were all twisted. A small thing, but significant. I looked into several drawers, you remember. In one was a duster, not just thrown in as you would do, but twisted up. In his bedroom an old alpaca coat had been thrown into a drawer, twisted up. Twisting was a habit of his. How it was acquired I cannot say, but I should guess that in Australia the act of twisting or turning something was a necessary part of his day's work. I have known many sailors acquire the habit. This habit, I argued, might help us in our search. The will was not under lock and key, Mr. Frisby did not keep his valuables like that; unless the search was incomplete it was not lying in an unlocked drawer. Was it twisted up somewhere?"
"His hands," I said excitedly, moving my own as I had seen Oglethorpe move his.
"Exactly, Wigan, twisting, and more. You are making the motion correctly, I was careful to ascertain that. It is the action of unscrewing. The will was screwed into something, and the dying man was trying to make them understand that something had to be unscrewed."
"What is that something, dear?" asked Zena.
"They thought it was the light that troubled him," Quarles went on. "We'll go to the Towers to-morrow, Wigan, and I think we shall find some candelabrum, or, more likely, some old silver candlestick which unscrews. If we do not, I think we shall have to get an interview with Frisby Morton somehow. That is why I wanted to know if he were in Boston. You see, there was a riddle to read, and a bare possibility exists that Morton has read it already."
I thought this most unlikely, but the fact that Quarles had conceived the possibility showed how exceedingly careful he was of details. The will, a very short one, leaving everything to Edward Oglethorpe, was found in an old silver candlestick, which stood, as a rule, on a table in Mr. Frisby's dressing-room.
It was a heavy candlestick which unscrewed just below the cup which held the candle, and the will was in the hollow stem.
Christopher Quarles insisted on dividing the reward into three parts. Zena certainly had had a definite conviction about the affair from the first, so perhaps earned her share; but I am very sure I did nothing to deserve mine.