The musician smiled reassuringly.
“I got already paid for this,” he explained.
Up went the brass to his lips again. The tonal stairway which leads up to the chorus of Egypt rose in rasping wailfulness. It culminated in an excessive, unendurable, brazen shriek—and the Honorable William Linder experienced upon the undefended rear of his person the most violent kick of a lifetime not always devoted to the arts of peace. It projected him clear of the window-sill. His last sensible vision was the face of the musician, the mouth absurdly hollow and pursed above the suddenly removed mouthpiece. Then an awning intercepted the politician’s flight. He passed through this, penetrated a second and similar stretch of canvas shading the next window below, and lay placid on his own front steps with three ribs caved in and a variegated fracture of the collar-bone. By the time the descent was ended the German musician had tucked his brass under his arm and was hurrying, in panic, down the street, his ears still ringing with the concussion which had blown the angry householder from his own front window. He was intercepted by a running policeman.
“Where was the explosion?” demanded the officer.
“Explosion? I hear a noise in the larch house on the corner,” replied the musician dully.
The policeman grabbed his arm. “Come along back. You fer a witness! Come on; you an’ yer horn.”
“It iss not a horn,” explained the German patiently, “it iss a B-flat trombone.”
Along with several million other readers, Average Jones followed the Linder “bomb outrage” through the scandalized head-lines of the local press. The perpetrator, declared the excited journals, had been skilful. No clue was left. The explosion had taken care of that. The police (with the characteristic stupidity of a corps of former truck-drivers and bartenders, decorated with brass buttons and shields and without further qualification dubbed “detectives”) vacillated from theory to theory. Their putty-and-pasteboard fantasies did not long survive the Honorable William Linder’s return to consciousness and coherence. An “inside job,” they had said. The door was locked and bolted, Mr. Linder declared, and there was no possible place for an intruder to conceal himself. Clock-work, then.
“How would any human being guess what time to set it for,” demanded the politician in disgust, “when I never know, myself, where I’m going to be at any given hour of any given day?”
“Then that Dutch horn-player threw the bomb,” propounded the head of the “Detective Bureau” ponderously.