“Did it ever strike you,” an old gentleman was saying just opposite, in a loud, well-modulated voice that sounded as if it had been designed to control traffic—“did it ever strike you, Filmore, what a very singular thing it is that dogs should bark when they are in pursuit of their prey? Very much as if Nature intended that they should be given warning of their enemy’s approach. Doesn’t work, you know, from the evolution point of view; in a Darwinian world the dog which barks lowest ought to catch the most rabbits, and so the bark ought to disappear, don’t you see? There was a man reading a very interesting paper about that at one of these congresses the other day; and he said, you know, he thought the bark of the dog was intended to drown the squealing of the rabbit, so that the other rabbits shouldn’t know anything disastrous was happening. A most singular idea.”
“Is he a scientist?” asked Bredon in a low voice.
“No. Ancient history,” returned his Uncle. “Man called Carmichael. Always full of odd ideas. Never stops talking.”
The man next Bredon on the other side was now heard to say, in answer to some question, “Yes, Magus men, both of them. The younger one only just going down. Good riddance.” Bredon had the instinct we all sometimes have, that the subject of the conversation would interest him. He stole a look at his neighbour, and suddenly realized why there had been something reminiscent about his appearance. There was only a touch of the Lechlade gargoyle about his face, but it was perfectly unmistakable. This, then, must be the Dean of Simon Magus, and his topic, obviously, the Burtell cousins.
“Suicide, I suppose?” asked a voice from beyond him.
“I don’t think so. Burtell hadn’t enough instinct of tidiness to finish up in that way. No, I think it was a genuine accident, but of course there are any amount of possibilities. Loss of memory, for example—they say he drugged, and I should think it’s possible to bring on loss of memory in that way. He may be anywhere by now; and I don’t think it’s for the College to put on detectives to find him.”
“Talking of detectives,” broke in Mr. Carmichael from the other side of the table, “I had a very curious experience myself once in connection with a murder case.” (As this story has already been told at greater length, even, than Mr. Carmichael used in telling it, I will not even give an abstract of it here.) “Which just shows,” he concluded, “how one’s judgments are apt to go astray. If it wasn’t for that warning, I should be inclined to say that there is no difficulty in solving this Burtell business, no difficulty at all.”
“Oh, good, Carmichael,” chuckled a junior Fellow. “This is in your best form. Tell us all about it.”
“I was wrong. I should have said, it is very easy to see why the Thames watermen have failed to recover the body. Whether the young man is the victim of accident, murder, suicide, or disappearance I don’t know at all. But it’s quite easy to see why the body hasn’t been found. They are looking in the wrong place for it.”
“Oh, come on; where ought they to be looking?”
“Above Shipcote Lock, not below it. They must have found the body by now, if there was a body to find. Yet, if the young fellow had been wandering about between Shipcote and Eaton Bridge, somebody must have come across him. I say, then, his disappearance, whatever its cause, must have taken place above, not below the lock.”
Bredon broke in in spite of himself. “But the elder Burtell was in the canoe when it left the lock. The lock-keeper saw him.”
“I saw the lock-keeper. I make a hobby of these things, you know. I asked the lock-keeper, ‘Could you take your oath in a court of law that the gentleman in the canoe moved?’ And of course he couldn’t. All he saw was the figure of a man, with the hat well drawn down over the face. Very well, then, the figure in the boat was a dummy. Consider, the hole in the canoe shows that the boat was intended to sink, or at least to overbalance, and discharge its load. Why? If there was a dead body in the boat, why not let it be dragged up? Unless of course it was the wrong body, but I dismiss that suggestion as too fantastic. The face, the hands, would no doubt be made of soap. What the clothes were made of I don’t know. But it must have been a dummy. Otherwise there was no motive for letting it sink.”
Bredon excused himself early on the ground that the lights of his car were deficient. “No,” he said to himself as he settled down at the wheel, “Mr. Carmichael has still something to learn about the possibilities of life. But I like his negative criticism. Why did they want the boat to sink, after all?”
IX
Nigel Goes Down
Angela came down to breakfast to find her husband bending over a map, on which he seemed to be underlining in pencil various inns or villages along the river, and measuring the distances between them with a halfpenny. “It’s a good game,” she said, “but rather early in the morning for it.”
“What game?”
“Thought you might be playing shove-halfpenny. What are you
