“But,” I exclaimed, “that would be carrying professional jealousy a bit too far—if that’s what you mean!”
“It would be carrying it so far that we can rule it out of court,” he answered. “So that’s what I don’t mean. Let’s go back and analyse the occurrence. I say the dog was not stolen by poachers, because of the chloroform; you said the same yourself. I say that the thief knew the dog was blind, because he knew he was in a darkened room above the coach-house, and he stole him from there. A poacher would have gone to the kennel, and found it empty—and that would have been the end of that. But the man who knew the dog was in a special room must have known why he was there; and it seems to me that the man who steals a blind dog steals him because, for some reason or other, he wants a blind dog—that very one, probably. Have you got me?”
“Yes,” I said, “I follow you so far. Go on.” And I was surprised to find how relieved I was at this suggested complication. I felt that if we could only attribute this amazing week of mysteries to some human agent I should be able to grapple with it.
“Now I come to my main point,” Garnesk continued, “and it’s this: The man who wanted Sholto because he was blind wanted him to experiment on. But no professional man would do a thing like that, even supposing there to be one about. That motive again is ruled out of court. There remains one possible solution——”
“Well?” I asked breathlessly, for even now I failed to grasp the conclusion my scientific companion could be coming to. “Go on!”
“If this thief did not want Sholto to experiment on himself, he stole the dog in order to prevent me from experimenting on him.”
I laughed aloud from sheer excitement and the relief of finding some tangible thing to go on, for the oculist’s argument struck me as very nearly perfect.
“You ought to be at Scotland Yard,” I said. “You seem to me to have hit the nail on the head.”
“The two callings are very closely allied,” he said modestly. “Detectives deal with murderers and thieves, and I with nerves and tissues. It is all a question of diagnosis.”