Adventures of Martin Hewitt (15 page)

But it was too late. Before Truscott could reach him Roofe had swallowed
the contents of the small bottle and, swaying once, dropped to the floor as
though shot.

Hewitt stooped over the man. “Dead,” he said, “dead as Abel Pullin. It is
prussic acid. He had arranged for instant action if by any chance the game
went against him.”

But Inspector Truscott was troubled. “This is a nice thing,” he said, “to
have a prisoner commit suicide in front of my eyes. But you can testify that
I hadn’t time to get near him, can’t you? Indeed he
wasn’t
a prisoner
at the time, for I hadn’t arrested him, in fact.”

It was late on a summer evening, two or three years back, that I drowsed
in my armchair over a particularly solid and ponderous volume of essays on
social economy. I was doing a good deal of reviewing at the time, and I
remember that this particular volume had a property of such exceeding
toughness that I had already made three successive attacks on it, on as many
successive evenings, each attack having been defeated in the end by sleep.
The weather was hot, my chair was very comfortable, and the book had
somewhere about its strings of polysyllables an essence as of laudanum. Still
something had been done on each evening, and now on the fourth I strenuously
endeavoured to finish the book. I was just beginning to feel that the words
before me were sliding about and losing their meanings, when a sudden crash
and a jingle of broken glass behind me woke me with a start, and I threw the
book down. A pane of glass in my window was smashed, and I hurried across and
threw up the sash to see, if I could, whence the damage had come.

The building in which my chambers (and Martin Hewitt’s office) were
situated was accessible—or rather visible, for there was no
entrance—from the rear. There was, in fact, a small courtyard, reached
by a passage from the street behind, and into this courtyard, my sitting-room
window looked.

“Hullo, there!” I shouted. But there came no reply. Nor could I
distinguish anybody in the courtyard. Some men had been at work during the
day on a drainpipe, and I reflected that probably their litter had provided
the stone with which my window had been smashed. As I looked, however, two
men came hurrying from the passage into the court, and going straight into
the deep shadow of one corner, presently appeared again in a less obscure
part, hauling forth a third man, who must have already been there in hiding.
The third man struggled fiercely, but without avail, and was dragged across
toward the passage leading to the street beyond. But the most remarkable
feature of the whole thing was the silence of all three men. No cry, no
exclamation, escaped any of them. In perfect silence the two hauled the third
across the courtyard, and in perfect silence he swung and struggled to resist
and escape. The matter astonished me not a little, and the men were entering
the passage before I found voice to shout at them. But they took no notice,
and disappeared. Soon after I heard cab wheels in the street beyond, and had
no doubt that the two men had carried off their prisoner.

I turned back into my room a little perplexed. It seemed probable that the
man who had been borne off had broken my window. But why? I looked about on
the floor, and presently found the missile. It was, as I had expected, a
piece of broken concrete, but it was wrapped up in a worn piece of paper,
which had partly opened out as it lay on my carpet, thus indicating that it
had just been crumpled round the stone.

I disengaged the paper and spread it out. Then I saw it to be a rather
hastily written piece of manuscript music, whereof I append a reduced
facsimile:

This gave me no help. I turned the paper this way and that, but could make
nothing of it. There was not a mark on it that I could discover, except the
music and the scrawled title, “Flitterbat Lancers,” at the top.

The paper was old, dirty, and cracked. What did it all mean? One might
conceive of a person in certain circumstances sending a
message—possibly an appeal for help—through a friend’s window,
wrapped round a stone, but this seemed to be nothing of that sort.

Once more I picked up the paper, and with an idea to hear what the
Flitterbat Lancers sounded like, I turned to my little pianette and strummed
over the notes, making my own time and changing it as seemed likely. But I
could by no means extract from the notes anything resembling an air. I half
thought of trying Martin Hewitt’s office door, in case he might still be
there and offer a guess at the meaning of my smashed window and the scrap of
paper, when Hewitt himself came in. He had stayed late to examine a bundle of
papers in connection with a case just placed in his hands, and now, having
finished, came to find if I were disposed for an evening stroll before
turning in. I handed him the paper and the piece of concrete, observing,
“There’s a little job for you, Hewitt, instead of the stroll.” And I told him
the complete history of my smashed window.

Hewitt listened attentively, and examined both the paper and the fragment
of paving. “You say these people made absolutely no sound whatever?” he
asked.

“None but that of scuffling, and even that they seemed to do quietly.”

“Could you see whether or not the two men gagged the other, or placed
their hands over his mouth?”

“No, they certainly didn’t do that. It was dark, of course, but not so
dark as to prevent my seeing generally what they were doing.”

Hewitt stood for half a minute in thought, and then said, “There’s
something in this, Brett—what, I can’t guess at the moment, but
something deep, I fancy. Are you sure you won’t come out now?”

I told Hewitt that I was sure, and that I should stick to my work.

“Very well,” he said; “then perhaps you will lend me these articles?”
holding up the paper and the stone.

“Delighted,” I said. “If you get no more melody out of the clinker than I
did out of the paper, you won’t have a musical evening. Goodnight!”

Hewitt went away with the puzzle in his hand, and I turned once more to my
social economy, and, thanks to the gentleman who smashed my window,
conquered.

At this time my only regular daily work was on an evening paper so that I
left home at a quarter to eight on the morning following the adventure of my
broken window, in order, as usual, to be at the office at eight; consequently
it was not until lunchtime that I had an opportunity of seeing Hewitt. I went
to my own rooms first, however, and on the landing by my door I found the
housekeeper in conversation with a shortish, sun-browned man, whose accent at
once convinced me that he hailed from across the Atlantic. He had called, it
appeared, three or four times during the morning to see me, getting more
impatient each time. As he did not seem even to know my name, the housekeeper
had not considered it expedient to give him any information about me, and he
was growing irascible under the treatment. When I at last appeared, however,
he left her and approached me eagerly.

“See here, sir,” he said, “I’ve been stumpin’ these here durn stairs o’
yours half through the mornin’. I’m anxious to apologize, and fix up some
damage.”

He had followed me into my sitting-room, and was now standing with his
back to the fireplace, a dripping umbrella in one hand, and the forefinger of
the other held up boulder-high and pointing, in the manner of a pistol, to my
window, which, by the way, had been mended during the morning, in accordance
with my instructions to the housekeeper.

“Sir,” he continued, “last night I took the extreme liberty of smashin’
your winder.”

“Oh,” I said, “that was you, was it?”

“It was, sir—me. For that I hev come humbly to apologize. I trust
the draft has not discommoded you, sir. I regret the accident, and I wish to
pay for the fixin’ up and the general inconvenience.” He placed a sovereign
on the table. “I ‘low you’ll call that square now, sir, and fix things
friendly and comfortable as between gentlemen, an’ no ill will. Shake.”

And he formally extended his hand.

I took it at once. “Certainly,” I said. “As a matter of fact, you haven’t
inconvenienced me at all; indeed, there were some circumstances about the
affair that rather interested me.” And I pushed the sovereign toward him.

“Say now,” he said, looking a trifle disappointed at my unwillingness to
accept his money, “didn’t I startle your nerves?”

“Not a bit,” I answered, laughing. “In fact, you did me a service by
preventing me going to sleep just when I shouldn’t; so we’ll say no more of
that.”

“Well—there was one other little thing,” he pursued, looking at me
rather sharply as he pocketed the sovereign. “There was a bit o’ paper round
that pebble that came in here. Didn’t happen to notice that, did you?”

“Yes, I did. It was an old piece of manuscript music.”

“That was it—exactly. Might you happen to have it handy now?”

“Well,” I said, “as a matter of fact a friend of mine has it now. I tried
playing it over once or twice, as a matter of curiosity, but I couldn’t make
anything of it, and so I handed it to him.”

“Ah!” said my visitor, watching me narrowly, “that’s a puzzler, that
Flitterbat Lancers—a real puzzler. It whips ‘em all. Ha, ha’.” He
laughed suddenly—a laugh that seemed a little artificial. “There’s
music fellers as ‘lows to set right down and play off anything right away
that can’t make anything of the Flitterbat Lancers. That was two of ‘em that
was monkeyin’ with me last night. They never could make anythin’ of it at
all, and I was tantalizing them with it all along till they got real mad, and
reckoned to get it out o’ my pocket and learn it at home. Ha, ha! So I got
away for a bit, and just rolled it round a stone and heaved it through your
winder before they could come up, your winder being the nearest one with a
light in it. Ha, ha! I’ll be considerable obliged you’ll get it from your
friend right now. Is he stayin’ hereabout?”

The story was so ridiculously lame that I determined to confront my
visitor with Hewitt, and observe the result. If he had succeeded in making
any sense of the Flitterbat Lancers, the scene might be amusing. So I
answered at once, “Yes; his office is on the floor below; he will probably be
in at about this time. Come down with me.”

We went down, and found Hewitt in his outer office. “This gentleman,” I
told him with a solemn intonation, “has come to ask for his piece of
manuscript music, the Flitterbat Lancers. He is particularly proud of it,
because nobody who tries to play it can make any sort of tune out of it, and
it was entirely because two dear friends of his were anxious to drag it out
of his pocket and practice it over on the quiet that he flung it through my
windowpane last night, wrapped round a piece of concrete.”