The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes

I must have started involuntarily, for I felt Holmes lean toward me.

'The mask,' he whispered. 'Our own trophy is likely to be less impressive but rather more dangerous.'

Leaning back in my seat I tried to relax, but the sight of that grisly relic had turned my thoughts into a new field of conjecture. The sinister white-clad figure of Chundra Lal, Colonel Warburton's Indian servant, arose in my mind's eye and I attempted to recall the exact words used by Miss Murray in describing the effect of the death- mask upon the man. Perhaps even more than Holmes, I knew enough about India to realize that religious fanat­ icism and a sense of sacrilege would not only justify any crime but inspire in the devotee a cunning of execution which might well baffle the preconceptions of our Western minds, however experienced in the ways of our fellow- men.

I was considering whether I should open the subject to my companions when my attention was arrested by the low creak of a door-hinge. There was not a moment to lose in warning Holmes that somebody was entering the room. But when I stretched out my hand it was only to find that my friend was no longer beside me.

There followed a period of complete stillness and then a stooping figure, its footsteps muffled by the carpet, whisked across the faint ray of light from the French window and vanished into the shadows immediately in front of me. I had a fleeting impression of a high-collared cape and the dull glitter of some long, thin object grasped in a half-raised hand. An instant later, there came a gleam of light in the fireplace, as though the shutter of a dark lantern had been slid back, and then a gentle tapping and tinkling.

I was rising to my feet when a smothered yell rang through the room followed instantly by the sounds of a furious struggle.

'Watson! Watson!'

With a thrill of horror I recognized Holmes's voice in that half-choked cry, and plunging forward through the darkness, I hurled myself upon a writhing mass that loomed suddenly before me.

A grip like steel closed round my throat and as I raised my arm to force back the head of my dimly seen assailant he buried his teeth in my forearm like some savage hound. The man possessed the strength of a madman and it was not until MacDonald, having lit a gas-jet, sprang to our assistance that we succeeded in mastering his struggles. Holmes, his face strained and bloodless, leaned back against the wall, his hand clasping his shoulder where he had been hit with a heavy brass poker that now lay in the fireplace amid the splintered shards of window-glass which he had placed there on our previous visit.

'There's your man, MacDonald!' he gasped. 'You can arrest him for the murder of Colonel Warburton and for the attempted murder of his wife.'

MacDonald flung back our assailant's cape and for a moment I stared in silence before an exclamation of amazement broke from my lips. For, in that first glance, I had failed to recognize in those lowering features and vicious, baleful eyes the bronzed, handsome countenance of Captain Jack Lasher.

The first streaks of dawn were glimmering through the window when my friend and I found ourselves back in Baker Street.

I poured out two stiff brandy-and-sodas and handed one to Holmes. As he leaned back in his chair, the gaslight beside the mantelpiece threw his keen aquiline features into bold relief and I was glad to observe that a little colour was stealing into his face.

'Really, Watson, I owe you an apology,' said he. 'Captain Jack was a dangerous man. How is your arm where he savaged you?'

'A little painful,' I admitted. 'But nothing that iodine and a bandage cannot repair. I am far more concerned about your shoulder, my dear fellow, for he gave you an ugly blow with that poker. You must allow me to look at it.'

'Later, later, Watson. I assure you that it is nothing worse than a bruise,' he replied, with a touch of impatience. 'Well, I can confess now that there were mo­ments tonight when I had the gravest doubts that our man would walk into the trap.'

'Trap?'

'A baited trap, Watson, and had he not swallowed my dainty morsel it would have gone hard with us to bring Captain Lasher to book. I gambled on the fact that a murderer's fears will sometimes override his intelligence. And so it turned out.'

'Frankly, I do not understand even now how you un­ravelled this case.'

Holmes leant back in his chair and put his finger tips together.

'My dear fellow, there was no great difficulty in the problem. The facts were obvious enough but the delicacy of the matter lay in the need that the murderer himself should confirm them by some overt act. Circumstantial evidence is the bane of the trained reasoner.'

'I have observed nothing.'

'You observed everything but failed to reason. In the course of Miss Murray's narrative, she mentioned that the door of the curio room was locked and yet the window-curtains were not drawn, not drawn, mark you, Watson, in a ground-floor room overlooking the public street. A most unusual proceeding. You may recall that I interrupted Miss Murray to enquire as to Colonel Warburton's conventional habits.

'The circumstances suggested to my mind the pos­sibility that Colonel Warburton might have been expecting a visitor and that the nature of that visit was such that either he or the caller preferred that it should occur privately by the French windows rather than the front door. This elderly soldier was recently married to a young and beautiful wife and I therefore discarded the idea of a vulgar assignation. If I was right in my theory, then the visitor must be a man whose private interview with Colonel Warburton would be resented by some other member of the household and hence the obvious step of joining the colonel via the French windows.'

'But they were locked,' I objected.

'Naturally. Miss Murray stated that Mrs. Warburton accompanied her husband to the curio room immediately after dinner and apparently a quarrel arose between them. It occurred to me that, if the colonel was expecting a visitor, then what more natural than he would leave the curtains undrawn so that his caller should observe that he was not alone. At first, of course, these were all mere con­jectures that could possibly fit the facts.'

'And the identity of this mysterious visitor?'

'Again, a conjecture, Watson. We knew that Mrs. Warburton disapproved of Captain Lasher, her husband's nephew. I give you these vagaries as they first occurred to me during the earlier part of Miss Murray's narrative. I could not have moved in the matter, had not the latter part of her story contained the one singular fact that changed the slightest of suspicions into the absolute cer­tainty that we were in the presence of a cold-blooded and calculated murder.'

'I must say that I cannot recall...'

'Yet you yourself underlined it, Watson, when you used the term 'intolerable.' '

'Great heavens, Holmes,' I burst out. 'Then, it was Miss Murray's remark about the smell of the colonel's cigar...'

'In a room in which two shots had just been fired! It would have reeked of black powder. I knew, then, that no shots had been fired within the curio room.'

'But the reports were heard by the household.'

'The shots were fired from outside through the closed windows. The murderer was an excellent marksman and therefore conceivably a military man. Here, at last, was something to work upon and, later on, I received confirmation from your own lips, Watson, when having lit one of the colonel's cigars I waited until I heard you below and then fired two shots from the same calibre revolver as that which killed Warburton.'

'In any case, there should have been powder burns,' I said thoughtfully.

'Not necessarily. The powder from a cartridge is a tricky element and the absence of burns proved nothing. The smell of the cigar was of far greater importance. I must add, however, that useful though your confirmation was, my visit to the house had already elucidated the whole case in my mind.'

'You were startled at the appearance of the Indian servant,' I rejoined, somewhat nettled at the trace of self-satisfaction which I discerned in his manner.

'No Watson, I was startled at the broken window through which he retreated.'

'But Miss Murray had told us that Captain Lasher broke the window in order to enter the room.'

'It is an unfortunate fact, Watson, that a woman will invariably omit from her narrative that exact precision of detail which is as essential to the trained observer as bricks and mortar to a builder. If you will recall, she stated that Captain Lasher ran out of the house, looked through the French window and then, picking up a stone from the