Vance gazed at him reprovingly.
“Permit me,” he said sweetly, “to commend Othello to your attention:
‘How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?’
Or—to descend from a poet to a platitudinarian—let me present for your consid’ration a pentameter from Longfellow: ‘All things come round to him who will but wait.’ Untrue, of course, but consolin’. Milton said it much better in his ‘They also serve—’. But Cervantes said it best: ‘Patience and shuffle the cards.’ Sound advice, Markham—and advice expressed rakishly, as all good advice should be. . . . To be sure, patience is a sort of last resort—a practice to adopt when there’s nothing else to do. Still, like virtue, it occasionally rewards the practitioner; although I’ll admit that, as a rule, it is—again like virtue—bootless. That is to say, it is its own reward. It has, however, been swathed in many verbal robes. It is ‘sorrow’s slave,’ and the ‘sov’reign o’er transmuted ills,’ as well as ‘all the passion of great hearts.’ Rousseau wrote, La patience est amère mais son fruit est doux. But perhaps your legal taste runs to Latin. Superanda omnis fortuna ferendo est, quoth Vergil. And Horace also spoke on the subject. Durum! said he, sed levius fit patientia⸺”
“Why the hell doesn’t Snitkin come?” growled Markham.
Almost as he spoke the door opened, and the detective handed Vance the tape-measure and string.
“And now, Markham, for your reward!”
Bending over the rug Vance moved the large wicker chair into the exact position it had occupied when Benson had been shot. The position was easily determined, for the impressions of the chair’s castors on the deep nap of the rug were plainly visible. He then ran the string through the bullet-hole in the back of the chair, and directed me to hold one end of it against the place where the bullet had struck the wainscot. Next he took up the tape-measure and, extending the string through the hole, measured a distance of five feet and six inches along it, starting at the point which corresponded to the location of Benson’s forehead as he sat in the chair. Tying a knot in the string to indicate the measurement, he drew the string taut, so that it extended in a straight line from the mark on the wainscot, through the hole in the back of the chair, to a point five feet and six inches in front of where Benson’s head had rested.
“This knot in the string,” he explained, “now represents the exact location of the muzzle of the gun that ended Benson’s career. You see the reasoning—eh, what? Having two points in the bullet’s course—namely, the hole in the chair and the mark on the wainscot—, and also knowing the approximate vertical line of explosion, which was between five and six feet from the gentleman’s skull, it was merely necess’ry to extend the straight line of the bullet’s course to the vertical line of explosion in order to ascertain the exact point at which the shot was fired.”
“Theoretically very pretty,” commented Markham; “though why you should go to so much trouble to ascertain this point in space I can’t imagine. . . . Not that it matters, for you have overlooked the possibility of the bullet’s deflection.”