The Incredulity of Father Brown

and his great goggles started a faint fear creeping up the journalist’s spine. Halket’s savage face might seem to have a snarl in its very silhouette, when seen sideways; but when seen face to face, the smouldering rage in his eyes had also something of anxiety, as if the ethical and economic riddle were after all a little too much for him; and Horne seemed even more hung on wires of worry and self-criticism. But about this third man with the goggles, who spoke so sensibly and simply, there was something uncanny; it was like a dead man talking at the table.

As Byrne went out with his message of defiance, and passed along the very narrow passage beside the grocery store, he found the end of it blocked by a strange though strangely familiar figure; short and sturdy and looking rather quaint when seen in dark outline with its round head and wide hat.

“Father Brown!” cried the astonished journalist. “I think you must have come into the wrong door. You’re not likely to be in this little conspiracy.”

“Mine is a rather older conspiracy,” replied Father Brown smiling, “but it is quite a widespread conspiracy.”

“Well,” replied Byrne, “you can’t imagine any of the people here being within a thousand miles of your concern.”

“It’s not always easy to tell,” replied the priest equably; “but as a matter of fact, there is one person here who’s within an inch of it.”

He disappeared into the dark entrance and the journalist went on his way very much puzzled. He was still more puzzled by a small incident that happened to him as he turned into the hotel to make his report to his capitalist clients. The bower of blossoms and birdcages in which those crabbed old gentlemen were enbosomed was approached by a flight of marble steps, flanked by gilded nymphs and tritons. Down these steps ran an active young man with black hair, a snub nose and a flower in his buttonhole, who seized him and drew him aside before he could ascend the stair.

“I say,” whispered the young man, “I’m Potter⁠—old Gid’s secretary, you know; now, between ourselves, there is a sort of a thunderbolt being forged, isn’t there, now?”

“I came to the conclusion,” replied Byrne cautiously, “that the Cyclops had something on the anvil. But always remember that the Cyclops is a giant, but he has only one eye. I think Bolshevism is⁠—”

While he was speaking the secretary listened with a face that had a certain almost Mongolian immobility, despite the liveliness of his legs and his attire. But when Byrne said the word “Bolshevism,” the young man’s sharp eyes shifted and he said quickly: “What has that⁠—oh yes, that sort of thunderbolt; so sorry, my mistake. So easy to say anvil when you mean icebox.”

With which the extraordinary young man disappeared down the steps and Byrne continued to mount them, more and more mystification clouding his mind.

He found the group of three augmented to four by the presence of a hatchet-faced person with very thin straw-coloured hair and a monocle, who appeared to be a sort of adviser to old Gallup, possibly his solicitor, though he was not definitely so called. His name was Nares, and the questions which he directed towards Byrne referred chiefly, for some reason or other, to the number of those probably enrolled in the revolutionary organization. Of this, as Byrne knew little, he said less; and the four men eventually rose from their seats, the last word being with the man who had been most silent.

“Thank you, Mr. Byrne,” said Stein, folding up his eyeglasses. “It only remains to say that everything is ready; on that point I quite agree with Mr. Elias. Tomorrow before noon the police will have arrested Mr. Elias, on evidence I shall by then have put before them, and those three at least will be in jail before night. As you know, I attempted to avoid this course. I think that is all, gentlemen.”

But Mr. Jacob P. Stein did not lay his formal information next day, for a reason that has often interrupted the activities of such industrious characters. He did not do it because he happened to be dead; and none of the rest of the programme was carried out, for a reason which Byrne found displayed in gigantic letters when he opened his morning paper: “Terrific Triple Murder: Three Millionaires Slain in One Night.” Other exclamatory phrases followed in smaller letters, only about four times the size of normal type, which insisted on the special feature of the mystery: the fact that the three men had been killed not only simultaneously but in three widely separated places⁠—Stein in his artistic and luxurious country seat a hundred miles inland, Wise outside the little bungalow on the coast where he lived on sea breezes and the simple life, and old Gallup in a thicket just outside the lodge-gates of his great house at the other end of the county. In all three cases there could be no doubt about the scenes of violence that had preceded death, though the actual body of Gallup was not found till the second day, where it hung huge and horrible amid the broken forks and branches of the little wood into which its weight had crashed, like a bison rushing on the spears: while Wise had clearly been flung over the cliff into the sea, not without a struggle, for his scraping and slipping footprints could still be traced upon the very brink. But the first signal of the tragedy had been the sight of his large limp straw hat, floating far out upon the waves and conspicuous from the cliffs above. Stein’s body also had at first eluded search, till a faint trail of blood led the investigators to a bath on the ancient Roman model he had been constructing in his garden; for he had been a man of an experimental turn of mind with a taste for antiquities.

Whatever he might think,