throwing open the door, yet there never was a man who deserved
punishment more. If the young lady has a brother or a friend, he ought
to lay a whip across your shoulders. By Jove! he continued, flushing
up at the sight of the bitter sneer upon the man s face, it is not
part of my duties to my client, but here s a hunting crop handy, and I
think I shall just treat myself to He took two swift steps to the
whip, but before he could grasp it there was a wild clatter of steps
upon the stairs, the heavy hall door banged, and from the window we
could see Mr. James Windibank running at the top of his speed down the
road.
There s a cold-blooded scoundrel! said Holmes, laughing, as he threw
himself down into his chair once more. That fellow will rise from
crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows.
The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of interest.
I cannot now entirely see all the steps of your reasoning, I
remarked.
Well, of course it was obvious from the first that this Mr. Hosmer
Angel must have some strong object for his curious conduct, and it was
equally clear that the only man who really profited by the incident, as
far as we could see, was the stepfather. Then the fact that the two men
were never together, but that the one always appeared when the other
was away, was suggestive. So were the tinted spectacles and the curious
voice, which both hinted at a disguise, as did the bushy whiskers. My
suspicions were all confirmed by his peculiar action in typewriting his
signature, which, of course, inferred that his handwriting was so
familiar to her that she would recognise even the smallest sample of
it. You see all these isolated facts, together with many minor ones,
all pointed in the same direction.
And how did you verify them?
Having once spotted my man, it was easy to get corroboration. I knew
the firm for which this man worked. Having taken the printed
description. I eliminated everything from it which could be the result
of a disguise the whiskers, the glasses, the voice, and I sent it to
the firm, with a request that they would inform me whether it answered
to the description of any of their travellers. I had already noticed
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