Alike in Essentials

“Mr. Gryce, I am either a fool or the luckiest fellow going. You must decide which.”

The aged detective, thus addressed, laid down his evening paper and endeavoured to make out the dim form he could just faintly discern standing between him and the library door.

“Sweetwater, is that you?”

“No one else. Sweetwater, the fool, or Sweetwater, much too wise for his own good. I don’t know which. Perhaps you can find out and tell me.”

A grunt from the region of the library table, then the sarcastic remark:

“I’m just in the mood to settle that question. This last failure to my account ought to make me an excellent judge of another’s folly. I’ve meddled with the old business for the last time, Sweetwater. You’ll have to go it lone from now on. The Department has no more work for Ebenezar Gryce, or rather Ebenezar Gryce will make no more fool attempts to please them. Strange that a man don’t know when his time has come to quit. I remember how I once scored Yeardsley for hanging on after he had lost his grip; and here am I doing the same thing. But what’s the matter with you? Speak out, my boy. Something new in the wind?”

“No, Mr. Gryce; nothing new. It’s the same old business. But, if what I suspect is true, this same old business offers opportunities for some very interesting and unusual effort. You’re not satisfied with the coroner’s verdict in the Challoner case?

“No. I’m satisfied with nothing that leaves all ends dangling. Suicide was not proved. It seemed the only presumption possible, but it was not proved. There was no blood-stain on that cutter-point.”

“Nor any evidence that it had ever been there.”

“No. I’m not proud of the chain which lacks a link where it should be strongest.”

“We shall never supply that link.”

“I quite agree with you.”

“That chain we must throw away.”

“And forge another?”

Sweetwater approached and sat down.

“Yes; I believe we can do it; yet I have only one indisputable fact for a starter. That is why I want you to tell me whether I’m growing daft or simply adventurous. Mr. Gryce, I don’t trust Brotherson. He has pulled the wool over Dr. Heath’s eyes and almost over those of Mr. Challoner. But he can’t pull it over mine. Though he should tell a story ten times more plausible than the one with which he has satisfied the coroner’s jury, I would still listen to him with more misgiving than confidence. Yet I have caught him in no misstatement, and his eye is steadier than my own. Perhaps it is simply a deeply rooted antipathy on my part, or the rage one feels at finding he has placed his finger on the wrong man. Again it may be —”

“What, Sweetwater?”

“A well-founded distrust. Mr. Gryce, I’m going to ask you a question.”

“Ask away. Ask fifty if you want to.”

“No; the one may involve fifty, but it is big enough in itself to hold our attention for a while. Did you ever hear of a case before, that in some of its details was similar to this?

“No, it stands alone. That’s why it is so puzzling.”

“You forget. The wealth, beauty and social consequence of the present victim has blinded you to the strong resemblance which her case bears to one you know, in which the sufferer had none of the worldly advantages of Miss Challoner. I allude to —”

“Wait! the washerwoman in Hicks Street! Sweetwater, what have you got up your sleeve? You do mean that Brooklyn washerwoman, don’t you?”

“The same. The Department may have forgotten it, but I haven’t. Mr. Gryce, there’s a startling similarity in the two cases if you study the essential features only. Startling, I assure you.”

“Yes, you are right there. But what if there is? We were no more successful in solving that case than we have been in solving this. Yet you look and act like a hound which has struck a hot scent. The young man smoothed his features with an embarrassed laugh.

“I shall never learn,” said he, “not to give tongue till the hunt is fairly started. If you will excuse me we’ll first make sure of the similarity I have mentioned. Then I’ll explain myself. I have some notes here, made at the time it was decided to drop the Hicks Street case as a wholly inexplicable one. As you know, I never can bear to say ‘die,’ and I sometimes keep such notes as a possible help in case any such unfinished matter should come up again. Shall I read them?”

“Do. Twenty years ago it would not have been necessary. I should have remembered every detail of an affair so puzzling. But my memory is no longer entirely reliable. So fire away, my boy, though I hardly see your purpose or what real bearing the affair in Hicks Street has upon the Clermont one. A poor washerwoman and the wealthy Miss Challoner! True, they were not unlike in their end.”

“The connection will come later,” smiled the young detective, with that strange softening of his features which made one at times forget his extreme plainness. “I’m sure you will not consider the time lost if I ask you to consider the comparison I am about to make, if only as a curiosity in criminal annals.”

And he read:

“‘On the afternoon of December Fourth, 1910, the strong and persistent screaming of a young child in one of the rooms of a rear tenement in Hicks Street, Brooklyn, drew the attention of some of the inmates and led them, after several ineffectual efforts to gain an entrance, to the breaking in of the door which had been fastened on the inside by an old-fashioned door-button.

“‘The tenant whom all knew for an honest, hard-working woman, had not infrequently fastened her door in this manner, in order to safeguard her child who was abnormally active and had a way of rattling the door open when it was not thus secured. But she had never refused to open before, and the child’s cries were pitiful.

“‘This was no longer a matter of wonder, when, the door having been wrenched from its hinges, they all rushed in. Across a tub of steaming clothes lifted upon a bench in the open window, they saw the body of this good woman, lying inert and seemingly dead; the frightened child tugging at her skirts. She was of a robust make, fleshy and fair, and had always been considered a model of health and energy, but at the sight of her helpless figure, thus stricken while at work, the one cry was ‘A stroke! till she had been lifted off and laid upon the floor. Then some discoloration in the water at the bottom of the tub led to a closer examination of her body, and the discovery of a bullet-hole in her breast directly over the heart.

“‘As she had been standing with face towards the window, all crowded that way to see where the shot had come from. As they were on the fourth storey it could not have come from the court upon which the room looked. It could only have come from the front tenement, towering up before them some twenty feet away. A single window of the innumerable ones confronting them stood open, and this was the one directly opposite.<............