Chapter XV
Thursday morning, April the eleventh, found us none the worse for our wetting in the creek the afternoon before; and as Holmes and I were dressing in our room, he loudly boasted that before another day had passed he would succeed in finding the four remaining diamond cuff-buttons.
"Well, I hope so, Holmes; only I can't help thinking what a supreme chump that Earl is for keeping those five servants of his from whom you extracted the first seven cuff-buttons, – Yensen, Thorneycroft, Galetchkoff, Bunbury, and Xanthopoulos!" I said; "because at any time they are liable to steal the darned cuff-buttons again. Then there's Vermicelli, who was mixed up in the plot with the Greek, and the Countess herself!"
"What of it, Doc?" grinned Holmes, as he bent down to lace his shoes. "His Nibs can't very well fire her, can he? And as to the five servants whom he has so mercifully retained, that's his funeral, not ours. I was hired at an exorbitant fee to get back the cuff-buttons, and when I have done so my duties end. Handing out free advice to people who have not asked for it generally doesn't get you anything, I have observed."
I subsided, knowing from long experience how bull-headed Holmes was, and we went downstairs to breakfast, at which meal the Earl and Countess both did the honors to the assembled party. It developed then that Inspector Barnabas Letstrayed, in spite of his nap on the billiard-table the day before, had also bestirred himself in an eleventh hour attempt to find some of the cuff-buttons before Holmes dug them all up, and he told us how he had been all through the servants' rooms on the fifth floor, rummaging in their dressers and clothes-closets, and peeking under the beds, in a vain endeavor to unearth at least one of the stolen gems. He had also been down in the wine-cellar, on the theory that some of the servants might have gone down there to get drunk, and while in that condition might have dropped the gems, but there also he was doomed to disappointment.
"Cheer up, Barney, old boy; maybe I'll let you stand beside me when I nab the next thief, and you can thus share in the honor of apprehending him," said Holmes. Letstrayed, however, seemed to think that my partner was unjustly putting something over on him in getting back so many of the cuff-buttons when he, Letstrayed, couldn't find one. After breakfast the Earl suggested that we take a walk about the grounds, which proved to be a pleasanter jaunt than the one we took at Holmes's insistence on Tuesday morning; for the grass had been dried by this time by the sunshine that had followed Monday's rain.
The nine of us, including the Countess, rambled around the wide-spreading lawn by twos and threes, and I contrived to draw Holmes past the stables and gardens back to the small patch of woods that adjoined the castle grounds at the rear, where we seated ourselves on a fallen tree-trunk.
"Now, look here, Holmes, I've just been thinking – " I began.
"What! Again?" interrupted Holmes, with a grin.
"Don't interrupt me, please," I said seriously. "I want you to dope out for me the process of reasoning you went through yesterday noon in the music room behind the locked doors. Some of the moves you have made are too many for me, and I seek enlightenment."
"Well, Doc," said Holmes, as he took out his pocket-knife, pulled a sliver of wood off the tree-trunk we were sitting on, and began to whittle it, "the red clay I found on Eustace Thorneycroft's shoes was pretty good evidence that he had been around the stable, where the only red clay in the neighborhood is located; so I disguised myself as the race-track loafer and pried his secret out of the none too bright Olaf Yensen, the coachman. Then I found cigar ashes of the peculiar Pampango brand, which I can always spot with a microscope, on the Countess's shoes, which proved that she had been in the Earl's rooms just after he had smoked a Pampango and before the room had been swept out, so I was able to nail her as one of the kleptomaniacs – "
"Yes, yes, I know that already," I hastened to say; "but what about your seizing Galetchkoff, Bunbury, and Xanthopoulos? You didn't seem to have any shoe-sole clues by which to follow there."
"Doc, when I can't get 'em any other way I pull off my feminine intuition, which I have inherited in large measure from my French mother, and I can always run 'em down with that! Now when we were chasing that Russian hash-mixer or biscuit-shooter out of the kitchen door closely pursued by Louis with the butcher-knife, your old Uncle Hemlock's intuition told him that there was another one of the guilty wretches who had cabbaged the cuff-buttons! Similarly with the egregious Egbert when he put his retreating forehead in at the door of the billiard-room, just after I had picked the fifth diamond treasure out of the pool-table pocket; and also with the Mephistophelian valet Luigi, when I decided to pull the strong-arm stuff on him and search him for a note from an accomplice. Little old Intuition, – with a capital I, – told me that they were the ginks I was after."
And the accomplished old poser calmly whittled away at the sliver of wood in his hand.
"Aw, come off!" I replied. "I really thought you could hand me something more plausible than that, Holmes. Unquestionably you do show flashes of genius sometimes in recovering articles or in spotting criminals guilty of murder and so on, but at other times you're simply playing to blind, dumb luck, only your vanity is so enormous that you won't admit it. You want everybody to believe that you dope out all your problems with that wonderful deductive reasoning power that you get from injecting 'coke' into your arm, and sitting still with a pipe in your mouth! 'Intuition,' my eye! You might be able to tell that to Barney Letstrayed, but you can't tell it to me!"
And I disgustedly threw away another little sliver of wood I had picked off the tree-trunk.
Holmes merely laughed and said:
"I guess you're simply sore because I dumped you into the creek accidentally yesterday, Doc. The old saying has it that no man is a hero to his valet, but I guess I'm not a hero to my physician either. Cheer up though, Watson; when we get back to the little old rooms in Baker Street after this cuff-button fever is over, why I'll split up with you fifty-fifty on the reward I get from the Earl. How's that, eh?"
"Pretty good, I guess. But I would like some information on your deductions from the remaining four pairs of shoes, – Tooter's, Hicks's, Lord Launcelot's, and most important of all, Billie Budd's, the last of whom you publicly bawled out as a robber and thief at luncheon on Tuesday. How are you going to account for them, – huh?" I inquired.
"Now, Doc, you betray a reprehensible desire to anticipate the prescience of the Almighty in thus seeking to ascertain the future while we are still in the present tense, similar to the people who go to call on fortune-tellers, and the girls who always read the last page of a novel first, to see how it comes out! But suffice it to say that I found both Pampango cigar ashes and the toilet-powder that the Earl uses on Budd's shoes; wine-stains on Uncle Tooter's shoes; flour on Hicks's shoes, and garden earth on Launcelot's shoes. I'll tell you more later."
Having given forth this cryptic information, Holmes arose, brushed off his trousers, and added that we'd better be getting back to the castle, or the Earl would be sending out a general alarm for us. And that's all I could possibly get out of him.
At the edge of the woods there was a considerable stretch of bare pebbly ground before we came to the rear lawn, and I stumbled over a fair-sized pebble, which gave me an idea.
"Holmes," I said, "I think I know the derivation of the name of the noble castle out in front there, – Normanstow Towers. You see they claim that the oldest part of the castle dates from the Norman Conquest, though the rest of it only goes back to about 1400, and if all these pebbles were here at the time of William the Norman, then this is the place where probably William the Norman stubbed his toe, as he was chasing around inspecting the castles he had set up to keep the Saxons in subjection, hence, Norman's toe, – Normanstow! How's that for etymology?"
"Watson, you ought to be shot for a joke like that, – darned if you oughtn't," replied Holmes with a smile.
We then continued our walk to the castle, where we turned in at the kitchen door at his request, all the rest of our party having reëntered the castle by the front door.
"Now here is where I will have a difficult job ahead of me, handling the touchy and sensitive supervisor of this hash-foundry, Watson," Holmes remarked as we entered the kitchen and said "Good morning" to Louis La Violette the chef; "for I have good reason to believe that he knows where a certain party has hidden one of the remaining cuff-buttons."
"Louis," he began, turning to that worthy, who was putting away the breakfast dishes, while Ivan, his assistant, sat in a corner picking out the stems from some hothouse strawberries; "I called to congratulate you on the uniform excellence of the repasts you have prepared since I have been an honored guest in this castle, and to say that I consider them absolutely Lucullan, not to say Apician, in their delicious sumptuousness. Here, have a cigarette on me." And Holmes politely proffered to the chef his silver cigarette case, – the one that the Sultan of Zanzibar had given him three years before as a reward on a certain case.
La Violette swelled up like a pouter pigeon on hearing this taffy from the great detective, and bowed profoundly, his black eyes gleaming, as he took a cigarette and lit it.
"Thank you, Mr. Holmes. I always endeavor to do my best in the culinary line, with the help of Monsieur Harrigan, who serves the wines at the end of the dinners I prepare," replied he.
"You are both geniuses in your line," agreed Holmes, as we settled down in a couple of kitchen chairs, and I listened while he tried to pull the chef's leg for some cuff-button information; "and I can appreciate your cookery all the more, since I am half a fellow-country-man of yours. My mother was French, as Doctor Watson informed the world in one of my very first adventures."
"Ah! You don't say so! Why in the world didn't you tell me about it before? May I ask what your mother's maiden name was?" queried the pleased Louis.
"Le Sage. She was a direct descendant of the family of the great French author of the seventeenth century, Alain René Le Sage," answered Holmes.
"Well, well, well! I must treat on that," returned Louis, and he bustled around into the pantry, and got out a bottle of Bordeaux wine he had hidden there by the flour-bin for contingencies. "Here, just try some of this elegant wine from my native province of Guienne," he added, filling three glasses, which he offered one each to Holmes and myself.
"Fine, fine!" commended Holmes, as he smacked his lips. "By the way, Louis, what do you think about the four remaining diamond cuff-buttons still floating around? I have reason to believe they are still inside the castle, and that Billie Budd did not get away with them."
Louis put down his glass, and regarded Holmes peculiarly.
"Those cuff-buttons are not worrying me one single bit, and if I had taken any of the worthless gewgaws, which are hardly fit for a Latin Quarter masquerade ball, I would have assuredly soon become ashamed of having them in my possession and have returned them to the Earl. However," and Louis seemed to hesitate a moment, "if anybody else in Normanstow Towers still holds the gems, there is no telling what may happen to them. I wish I could help you find the things; but when a Canadian gentleman who tells you he is half French, and used to live in that beautiful city of Quebec, comes and – and – "
Here Louis happened to notice Holmes watching him narrowly, and instantly realizing the horrible break he had made, got terribly embarrassed, and stammered out:
"Er, no, I mean, er – that is – "
But Holmes jumped up and didn't give him a chance to finish it.
"Ha, ha! The only Canadian in this neck of the woods is Mr. William Q. Hicks, of Saskatoon. I knew before that he stole one of the cuff-buttons, but now that you give yourself away and admit that you know of his theft also, you are in duty bound to tell me where he has hidden the darned thing. Come, Monsieur La Violette, I am more French than Hicks is, as my mother was born in France itself, while his was just a French-Canadian; so come across with your confidence, and rest assured that I will not misplace it by ever telling Hicks that you informed on him. The deadly flour-marks on the soles of his shoes indicated to my eagle eye, ably assisted by the magnifying glass, that Hicks had been loafing around in the pantry; which could only mean that he was having confidential relations with you, since the guests of an earl, from a far-off country, do not commonly come down from the drawing-room and associate with the chef in the pantry unless they have something very ulterior up their sleeve, —n'est-ce pas?"
Louis got more confused and embarrassed than ever, and was about to make some kind of answer when Donald MacTavish appeared in the doorway leading from the cellar, wiping his lips, and with a fatuous grin on his face.
"Oh, Scotty, Scotty! I am sure you'll never get to be a member of the W. C. T. U. when you carry on like that," said Holmes, noticing the footman's caught-with-the-goods expression. "Down in the Earl's wine-cellar again, sampling 'em up, eh?"
The second footman bowed awkwardly, and was about to pass into the dining-room when Holmes caught the glint of something sparkling in his left hand.
Chapter XVI
"Stop right where you are, MacTavish!" Holmes shouted commandingly, "and show me your left paw so I can see what you are trying to carry away with you. Something more valuable than the tinfoil off a wine-bottle top, I'll warrant!"
The footman looked around at me, then at Louis and Ivan, and finally at Holmes, whose threatening expression cowed him, and he shambled over and, with a deep-drawn sigh, gave up the eighth diamond cuff-button.
"Well, I was afraid that sooner or later something like this would happen," he remarked with downcast eyes, "and I would be jerked up sharp and the darned thing taken away from me. Blast that man Weelum Budd, anyhow! He came to me last Monday and talked me into hiding the shiner for him, so he could play it safe up in the drawing-room and I would have to take the blame for it if it was captured by you before he could get back!"
With undisguised pleasure my partner took the gem, holding it up so that Louis could view it plainly, and said: "But where has your base tempter been keeping himself these past two days, Donald? Have you had any secret communications with him? Better 'fess up, or it may go hard with you."
"Why, he came sneaking around here last night about nine-o'clock while you people were in the music room listening to Lord Launcelot play the mandolin, and he said he was boarding at the village inn under an assumed name – "
"And those rabbit-headed constables there couldn't recognize him!" growled Holmes, shaking his fist. "But did Budd tell you when he expects to collect the cuff-buttons from his dupes here and make a get-away!"
"Yes," replied Donald, "he said he would come for them to-morrow, Friday, morning, and he didn't seem to mind it when I told him that Mr. Hemlock Holmes had gotten back the first seven cuff-buttons, either; for he claimed he could swipe 'em all again, anyhow. Said that you were only a big bluff."
"Oh, I am, am I! Well, I can tell you that Mr. W. X. Budd, of Melbourne, Australia, will find to-morrow to be a darned unlucky Friday for him, all right. Now we'll just go into the library, where the Earl is probably indulging his great taste for literature by reading the labels on the wine-bottles, and we'll tell him how his good man Donald fell from grace through the wiles of an Australian thief. So, front and center, Scotty; forward, march!"
With these words Holmes waved smilingly to Louis, the chef, as a sign of what his friend Hicks could expect when Holmes the detective should collar him for the ninth cuff-button, and then he and I accompanied the scared footman into the presence of the Earl.
"Well, now what?" inquired the noble master of the castle, putting down a copy of London Punch on the library table, and turning to inspect the arrivals. "Don't tell me that that little cuss from Balmoral Palace there has been caught with any of my ancestral gems on him!"
"But I will tell you, anyhow, George, because it's the sad and undoubted truth," answered Holmes, as he handed over the eighth missing bauble to His Lordship, took out a cigarette, and lit it. "The time is now 9:15 a. m., and I herewith present you with eight-elevenths of your stolen property, trusting to have the other three-elevenths recovered for you before the sun goes down. As the old Roman Emperor Titus, or somebody, used to say:
"Count that day lost whose low descending sun
Views from thy hand no diamond-capture done!"
"Eh, what? Well, by thunder, this is getting to be something fierce!" commented the Earl as he took the cuff-button from Holmes and stowed it away in his vest-pocket, "not the recovery of them, which I welcome, but the melancholy fact that I have been betrayed now by no less than, seven different people in whom I have reposed confidence, – my own wife, my secretary, my coachman, my second cook, my second gardener, and now by both my footmen! I wonder who is going to be the next guilty miscreant!"
And the Earl scratched his head with perplexity.
"Who did you think took them, anyhow? The horses out in the stables, huh?" inquired Holmes humorously. "But where is the rest of our recent little promenade party by this time? Watson and I got lost in the woods back there, and we lost sight of the others."
"Oh, they're up in the billiard-room, shoving the ivories around on the green tables," answered the Earl, rising and stretching himself.
"And with their heads containing about as much ivory as the billiard-balls, I suppose. Honestly, I never saw such a pack of gilded loafers in my life! Don't they ever try to improve their minds! It seems that you have some faint glimmerings of literary appreciation, since you read London Punch there, but those other ginks don't even read that much! Let's go up and inspect their playing, especially that of Mr. Hicks," Holmes concluded, winking meaningly at me, as we left the library and mounted the stairs.
Up on the fourth floor we entered the billiard-room where so much time was killed, and found Lord Launcelot, Hicks, Tooter, and Thorneycroft shooting a game of billiards, with old man Letstrayed, the so-called police inspector, fast asleep in one of the splint-bottomed chairs, as usual. Holmes picked up a cue, and playfully poked Letstrayed in the ribs with it.
"Wake up, Barney, and hear the birds sing!" he called out.
The sleepy inspector jumped up in surprise, while the other four men laughed and continued their game, and the Earl and I sat down as Holmes walked over and butted into the playing.
"Say, I don't think that Hicks is holding his cue just right, fellows," said he, grabbing that worthy's cue away from him and leaning over the table to try a shot himself. "Look, – this is the way to do it!"
"Aw, you're not holding it right yourself, Holmes," said Launcelot, who prided himself on his knowledge of billiards.
"Sneeze, kid, your brains are dusty. I guess I could shoot pool and billiards along with the world's experts when you were studying your A, B, C's! You see, I'm forty-nine years old, while you're barely thirty," replied the old boy, as sassy as ever.
"Hicks, I'm astonished at your playing," he continued in an authoritative tone; "why, a man so smart as to keep a diamond cuff-button hidden for three days while he confides in the Earl's chef down in the pantry should be able to play this intellectual game better than that!"
The Canadian's mouth opened, and his eyes bulged out with fright as he heard his recent deeds thus published to the assembled crowd, while all his audience showed astonishment as great as Hicks's.
"Now, look me in the eye, William Hicks!" Holmes went on, pointing his finger at his victim, "and tell His Lordship the Earl if that isn't the actual truth I just spoke."
"Er – er, ah, – I guess it is. I can't see how you ever found it out, but that crook of a Budd he came to me with one of the gems, and induced me to keep it for him till he called for it," was the admission of the confused Hicks, who, with reddened face, sheepishly fished out the stolen cuff-button and handed it to the astonished Earl.
"And now Billie Hicks is a thief, too!" said the latter. "How the Sam Hill did you ascertain that, Holmes?"
"Well, if Mr. Hicks hadn't been so careless as to stand around in the spilled flour on the pantry-floor when he was foolishly confiding his little game to the chef, perhaps I wouldn't have been able to apprehend him now," replied Holmes, clearing his throat. "Are you awake there, Letstrayed? You see that's how it's done, examining the incriminating stains on the soles of the shoes. Not the daintiest job in the world, perhaps, but it brings the results, and that's the main thing. This now makes a total of nine of the Puddingham cuff-buttons I have unearthed, and I have promised myself that I shall bag the other two by to-night."
"Do you always keep the promises you make to yourself, Holmes?" said Launcelot, with a grin.
"You just bet your life I do, – every time! But as His Lordship has evidently filed a nolle in the case of The State vs. Hicks, we'll go on with the billiards, with that Canadian gentleman remaining still unhanged. Now shoot 'em up, fellows."
So saying, the cold-blooded old sleuth sailed into the game with the other four men, and I sat tight in one of the chairs and talked about the weather with Letstrayed, which was about the extent of the latter's conversational abilities, although every once in a while I could hear him say to himself under his breath: "Nine down – two to come!"
They played on at the billiard-table for over two hours, and then it was noontime, and the still abashed MacTavish, the footman, came in and announced luncheon.
The Earl led the way down to the dining-room, and after we had been seated, Holmes told Harrigan to pass the word out to La Violette in the kitchen that his Canadian friend had confessed his share in the diamond robbery, but that Louis shouldn't worry about any possible indictment as an accomplice, and that he trusted that the green peas would be as good as ever, prepared under his able direction.
"Won't you try some of the Ceylon tea I brought in, Holmes?" asked Tooter. "I may as well advertise it all I can, now that you have exposed my secret salesmanship in the castle."
"No, thanks," said Holmes crisply, "I always prefer coffee, anyhow, – the stronger the better; and moreover, I am still more interested in what I thought that tea-packet was that you had upstairs when I intruded on your love-making."
"All right, suit yourself then, you old crab! I'm going right ahead with my plans for marrying Teresa Olivano anyhow, in spite of you and the Earl and your dodgasted cuff-buttons."
And Uncle J. Edmund Tooter said no more for the remainder of the luncheon.
When the meal was over, and Inspector Letstrayed seemed somewhat more overcome than usual, the party dispersed, and Holmes and I took a walk through the rooms on the first floor, – "just for fun," as he put it. It was then a little after one o'clock. As we were going through the kitchen, where the now subdued La Violette greeted us with a silent bow, Holmes's eagle eye caught sight of Uncle Tooter's coat-tail just disappearing behind the cellar-door. With a whispered warning to me and a quiet seizure of my arm, Holmes tiptoed after him, softly opened the cellar-door, and as Tooter's steps died away along the cement floor of the cellar, we went inside, locked the door, and I stationed myself on the top step, while Holmes went down.