"Yes, I've thought of it a lot. But somehow I don't want to do it. I don't want to have anybody mixed up in my affairs as intimately as that. I can't explain my feeling about it. But there is so much noise about this sort of thing if it once rises to the surface, and if there's any graft connected with my name, I'd like to keep the scandal private. Besides," he laughed with a tolerant self-indulgence, "I don't suppose the person lives, Jarvis, who doesn't believe that way down inside of him somewhere, sleeping but never dead, is the genius of the detective. I've made a sort of a covenant with myself that I and no other shall run this thing to cover, and do it without kicking up a noise."
Jarvis was staring speculatively at the foot-lights. "It's one of the most curious cases I ever knew. I'll tell you what, Kenwick. You're the original 'Wise Man from Our Town.' Remember him?
"And when he found his eyes were out,
With all his might and main,
He jumped into the bramble-bush
And scratched them back again."
"A dangerous experiment, I always thought," Kenwick remarked.
"So is dynamite, but sometimes we have to use it, and nothing else will take its place."
"Are you advising me to put a bomb under somebody on the chance that it might be the man who shuffled the deck?"
"No. I'm advising you to do the bramble-bush stunt. Don't jump forward; jump back."
"What do you mean?"
"Why, the more I think of it the more I believe that the solution of this mystery is to be found in the place where it began."
"But where did it begin?"