The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes

'Looks to me like a hair, sir,' replied Constable Kibble, gazing through the lens. 'No, it's not a hair. It's a brown thread.'

'Quite so. Perhaps you would kindly remove it and place it in this envelope. Now Watson, give me a hand up.' Holmes scrambled into the fork of the tree and, sup­porting himself by the branches, peered about him, 'Ha, what have we here!' he chuckled. 'A fresh scrape on the trunk, traces of mud in the fork and another small thread from some coarse brownish material clinging to the bark where a man might lean his back. Quite a treasure-trove. I am about to jump down and I want you both to watch the exact place where I land. So!' He stepped to one side. 'Now, what do you see?'

'Two small indentations.'

'Precisely. The marks of my heels. Look wider.'

'By Jingo!' cried the constable. 'There are four, not two! They are identical.'

'Save that the others are not quite so deep.'

'The man was lighter!' I ejaculated.

'Bravo, Watson. Well, I think that we have seen all that we need.'

The officer fixed Holmes with his earnest eyes. 'Look here, sir,' he said. 'I'm clean out of my depth. What's all this mean?'

'Probably your sergeant's stripes, Constable Kibble. And now, let us join the others.'

When we reached the house, the police-officer showed us into a long, sparsely furnished room with a groined roof. Doctor Nordham, who was writing at a table in the window, looked up at our entrance. 'Well, Mr. Holmes?'

'You are preparing your report, I perceive,' my friend remarked. 'May I suggest that you pay particular regard that you do not convey a false impression?'

Dr. Nordham gazed stonily at Holmes. 'I fail to under­stand you,' said he. 'Can you not be more explicit?'

'Very well. What are your views on the death of Mr. Josua Ferrers of Abbotstanding?'

'Tut, sir, there is no question of views. We have both visual and medical evidence that Josua Ferrers committed suicide by cutting his own throat.'

'A remarkable man, this Mr. Ferres,' Holmes ob­served, 'who, not content with committing suicide by cutting his jugular vein, must continue to sever the rest of his neck with an ordinary clasp-knife until, in the words of Mr. Tonston here, he had cut his throat literally from ear to ear. I have always felt that, were I to commit murder, I should avoid errors of that kind.'

My friend's words were followed by a moment of tense silence. Then Dr. Nordham rose abruptly to his feet, while Tonston, who had been leaning against the wall with his arms folded, lifted his eyes to Holmes's face.

'Murder is an ugly word, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,' he said quietly.

'And an ugly deed. Though not, perhaps, to the Mala Vita.'

'What nonsense is this!'

'Tut, I was relying upon your knowledge of Sicily to fill in any small details that I may have overlooked. However, as you dismiss as nonsense the name of this terrible secret society, it will doubtless interest you to learn a few of the facts.'

'Have a care, Mr. Holmes.'

'To you, Dr. Nordham, and to Constable Kibble, there will appear to be gaps in my brief account.' My friend continued. 'But as these can be filled in later, I will address myself to you, Watson, as you were present dur­ing Miss Ferrers narrative.

'It was obvious from the first that her father was hiding from some peril of so relentless a nature that even in the depth of this deserted country-side he went in fear of his life. As the man had come from Sicily, an island notorious for the power and vindictiveness of its secret societies, the most likely explanation was that either he had offended some such organization or as a member he had trans­gressed some vital rule. As he made no attempt to invoke the police, I inclined to the latter supposition and this became a certainty with the first appearance of the Dark Angels. You will recall that they were nine in number, Watson, and that the print, inscribed with the words 'six and three,' was nailed to a tree in the avenue on Decem­ber 29th.

'The next visitation took place on February 11th, ex­actly six weeks and three days from December 29th, but this time the angels, six in number, were nailed to the front door.

'On March 24th came the third and last appearance, exactly six weeks after the second. The dreaded herald of death, again nine in number, but now without inscrip­tion, lay on the very platter of the master of Abbotstanding.

'As I listened to Miss Ferrers' voice and calculated the dates rapidly in mind, I was dismayed by the discovery that the final nine of the Dark Angels, assuming them to represent the same period of time as the first, brought the date to May 7th. Today!

'I knew then that I was too late. But, if I could not save her father, I might avenge him and, with that object, I attacked the problem from a different angle.

'The face at the window was typical, of course, of perhaps the most barbarous trait in the vengeance of secret societies, the desire to strike horror not only into the victim himself but into his family. But the man had been careful to cover his features with his hands, despite the fact that he was looking not at Josua Ferrers but at his daughter, thereby suggesting to my mind that he feared recognition by Miss Ferrers as much as by her father.

'Next, it seemed to me that the cold, deadly approach of the fatal prints from tree to door, from door to breakfast-table, inferred an intimate knowledge of Josua Ferrers' circumscribed habits, possibly an unchallenged right to enter the house and thereby place the card on the table without the necessity for forced windows and smashed locks.

'From the first, certain features in Miss Ferrers' singu­lar narrative stirred some vague chord in my memory, but it was not until your remark, Watson, about a foot in the open grave that a flood of light burst suddenly into my consciousness.'

As Sherlock Holmes paused for a moment to draw something from his cape pocket, I glanced at the others. Though the old room was rapidly deepening into dusk, a sullen red light from the last rays of the sun glimmering through the window illumined the absorbed expres­sions of Dr. Nordham and the constable. Tonston stood in the shadows, his arms still folded across his chest and his pale, glittering eyes fixed immovably upon Holmes.

'It was to certain passages in this book, a fore-runner of Heckenthorn's Secret Societies, that my memory was recalled by. Dr. Watson's words.' My friend continued. 'Here is what the author has to say on a certain secret society which was first introduced into Sicily some three centuries ago. 'This formidable organization,' he writes, aptly named the Mala Vita, communicates with its members through a variety of signs including Angels, Demons and the Winged Lion. The candidate for mem­bership, if successful in his trials of initiation which frequently include that of murder, takes oath of fealty with one foot in an open grave. Punishment for infraction of the society's rules is relentless and, where death is the price, three separate warnings are given of the approach­ing doom, the second following six weeks and three days after the first, and the third six weeks after the second. Following the final warning, a further period of six weeks and three days are allowed to pass before the blow falls. Any member failing to carry out the punitive orders of the society becomes himself liable to the same punishment.' There follows a list of rules of the Mala Vita, together with the penalties for breaking them.

'That Josua Ferrers was a member of this dread society there can now be little doubt,' Holmes added solemnly, as he closed the book. 'What was his offense, we shall probably never know, and yet one may hazard a pretty shrewd guess. Article 16 is surely among the Mala Vita's most singular rules, for it states simply that the penalty for any member who discovers the identity of the Grand Master is death. I would remind you, Watson, that Ferrers laid emphatic instructions on his daughter that her answer to all enquiries must be that she knew nothing of his affairs, adding only that the name of the maker was in the butt of the gun. Not a gun, mark you, but the gun, which clearly indicated that the person re­ceiving the message might be expected to recognize some specific weapon to which the words must refer. It is suffi­cient to add that the gun found beside the body of Josua Ferrers is unique to the members of the Sicilian secret societies.

'When he went to the assignation Ferrers carried the gun with him, not as a weapon but as a peace-offering valuable only for what it contained rolled up in the butt. Bearing in mind what we now know, I am in no doubt that it was a paper or document that named the Grand Master of the Mala Vita and which by some unhappy chance had fallen into his hands during his Sicilian membership. To destroy it was useless. He had seen the name and he was