American Sherlocks Nick Rennison (best big ereader txt) 📖

I expect Lord Hammerton down to make me a visit. He’s a jolly young English chap that I chummed with in London. Now, he’s a first-rate amateur detective, and though I didn’t expect him till next month, he’s in New York, and I’ve no doubt that he’d be willing to come right off. No one will know he’s doing any detecting; and I’ll wager he’ll lay his hands on that ball in less than a week.’

‘Lovely!’ I exclaimed. ‘And I’ll be here to see him do it!’

‘Yes, the mater says you’re to stay a fortnight or more; but mind, this is our secret.’

‘Trust me,’ I said earnestly; ‘but let me help if I can, won’t you?’

‘You’ll help most by not interfering,’ declared Fred, and though it didn’t altogether suit me, I resolved to help that way rather than not at all.

A few days later Lord Hammerton came. He was not in any way an imposing-looking man. Indeed, he was a typical Englishman of the Lord Cholmondeley type, and drawled and used a monocle most effectively. The afternoon he came we told him all about the crystal. The talk turned to detective work and detective instinct.

Lord Hammerton opined in his slow languid drawl that the true detective mind was not dependent upon instinct, but was a nicely adjusted mentality that was quick to see the cause back of an effect.

Herbert Gay said that while this doubtless was so, yet it was an even chance whether the cause so skilfully deduced was the true one.

‘Quite so,’ agreed Lord Hammerton amiably, ‘and that is why the detective in real life fails so often. He deduces properly the logical facts from the evidence before him; but real life and real events are so illogical that his deductions, though true theoretically, are false from mere force of circumstances.’

‘And that is why,’ I said, ‘detectives in story-books always deduce rightly, because the obliging author makes the literal facts coincide with the theoretical ones.’

Lord Hammerton put up his monocle and favored me with a truly British stare. ‘It is unusual,’ he remarked slowly, ‘to find such a clear comprehension of this subject in a feminine mind.’

They all laughed at this; but I went on: ‘It is easy enough to make the spectacular detective of fiction show marvellous penetration and logical deduction when the antecedent circumstances are arranged carefully to prove it all; but place even Sherlock Holmes face to face with a total stranger, and I, for one, don’t believe that he could tell anything definite about him.’

‘Oh, come now! I can’t agree to that,’ said Lord Hammerton, more interestedly than he had spoken before. ‘I believe there is much in the detective instinct besides the exotic and the artificial. There is a substantial basis of divination built on minute observation, and which I have picked up in some measure myself.’

‘Let us test that statement,’ cried Herbert Gay. ‘Here comes Mr Wayne, Harold’s tutor. Lord Hammerton never has seen him, and before Wayne even speaks let Lord Hammerton tell us some detail, which he divines by observation.’

All agreed to this, and a few minutes later Mr Wayne came up. We laughingly explained the situation to him and asked him to have himself deduced.

Lord Hammerton looked at Arthur Wayne for a few minutes, and then said, still in his deliberate drawl: ‘You have lived in Japan for the past seven years, in government service in the interior, and only recently have returned.’

A sudden silence fell upon us all – not so much because Lord Hammerton made deductions from no apparent evidence, but because we all knew Mr Wayne had told Detective Prout that he never had been in Japan.

Fred Farland recovered himself first, and said: ‘Now that you’ve astonished us with your results, tell us how you attained them.’

‘It is simple enough,’ said Lord Hammerton, looking at young Wayne, who had turned deathly white. ‘It is simple enough, sir. The breast-pocket on the outside of your coat is on the right-hand side. Now it never is put there. Your coat is a good one – Poole, or some London tailor of that class. He never made a coat with an outer breast-pocket on the right side. You have had the coat turned – thus the original left-hand pocket appears now on the right side.

‘Looking at you, I see that you have not the constitution which could recover from an acute attack of poverty. If you had it turned from want, you would not have your present effect of comfortable circumstances. Now, you must have had it turned because you were in a country where tailoring is not frequent, but sewing and delicate manipulation easy to find. India? You are not bronzed. China? The same. Japan? Probable; but not treaty ports – there are plenty of tailors there. Hence, the interior of Japan.

‘Long residence, to make it incumbent on you to get the coat turned, means government service, because unattached foreigners are allowed only as tourists. Then the cut of the coat is not so very old, and as contracts run seven or fourteen years with the Japanese, I repeat that you probably resided seven years in the interior of Japan, possibly as an irrigation engineer.’

I felt sorry then for poor Mr Wayne. Lord Hammerton’s deductions were absolutely true, and coming upon the young man so suddenly he made no attempt to refute them.

And so as he had been so long in Japan, and must have been familiar with rock crystals for years, Fred questioned him sternly in reference to his false statements.

Then he broke down completely and confessed that he had taken Christabel’s crystal because it had fascinated him.

He declared that he had a morbid craving for crystals; that he had crept down to the present room late that night, merely to look at the wonderful, beautiful ball; that it had so possessed him that he carried it to his room to gaze at for a while, intending to return with it after an hour or so. When