The body had stiffened in the way rather peculiar to poisons of a certain Asiatic sort. Then Iexamined the coffee cups, and I knew enough chemistry to find poison in the dregs of one of them. Now, the General went straight to the bookcase, leaving his cup of coffee on the bookstand in the middle of the room. While his back was turned, and Boyle was pretending to examine the bookstand, he was left alone with the coffee cup. The poison takes about ten minutes to act, and ten minutes' walk would bring them to the bottomless well.""Yes," remarked Fisher, "and what about the bottomless well?""What has the bottomless well got to do with it?"asked his friend.
"It has nothing to do with it," replied Fisher. "That is what I find utterly confounding and incredible.""And why should that particular hole in the ground have anything to do with it?""It is a particular hole in your case," said Fisher.
"But I won't insist on that just now. By the way, there is another thing I ought to tell you. I said I sent Boyle away in charge of Travers. It would be just as true to say I sent Travers in charge of Boyle.""You don't mean to say you suspect Tom Travers?" cried the other. her.
"He was a deal bitterer against the general than Boyle ever was," observed Horne Fisher, with a curious indifference.
"Man, you're not saying what you mean," cried Grayne. "I tell you I found the poison in one of the coffee cups.""There was always Said, of course," added Fisher, "either for hatred or hire. We agreed he was capable of almost anything.""And we agreed he was incapable of hurting his master," retorted Grayne.
"Well, well," said Fisher, amiably, "I dare say you are right; but I should just like to have a look at the library and the coffee cups."He passed inside, while Grayne turned to the policeman in attendance and handed him a scribbled note, to be telegraphed from headquarters. The man saluted and hurried off; and Grayne, following his friend into the library, found him beside the bookstand in the middle of the room, on which were the empty cups.
"This is where Boyle looked for Budge, or pretended to look for him, according to your account," he said.
As Fisher spoke he bent down in a half-crouching attitude, to look at the volumes in the low, revolving shelf, for the whole bookstand was not much higher than an ordinary table. The next moment he sprang up as if he had been stung.
"Oh, my God!" he cried.
Very few people, if any, had ever seen Mr.
Horne Fisher behave as he behaved just then. He flashed a glance at the door, saw that the open window was nearer, went out of it with a flying leap, as if over a hurdle, and went racing across the turf, in the track of the disappearing policeman. Grayne, who stood staring after him, soon saw his tall, loose figure, returning, restored to all its normal limpness and air of leisure. He was fanning himself slowly with a piece of paper, the telegram he had so violently intercepted.
"Lucky I stopped that," he observed. "We must keep this affair as quiet as death. Hastings must die of apoplexy or heart disease.""What on earth is the trouble?" demanded the other investigator.
"The trouble is," said Fisher, "that in a few days we should have had a very agreeable alternative--of hanging an innocent man or knocking the British Empire to hell.""Do you mean to say," asked Grayne, "that this infernal crime is not to be punished?"Fisher looked at him steadily.
"It is already punished," he said.
After a moment's pause he went on. "You reconstructed the crime with admirable skill, old chap, and nearly all you said was true. Two men with two coffee cups did go into the library and did put their cups on the bookstand and did go together to the well, and one of them was a murderer and had put poison in the other's cup. But it was not done while Boyle was looking at the revolving bookcase. He did look at it, though, searching for the Budge book with the note in it, but Ifancy that Hastings had already moved it to the shelves on the wall. It was part of that grim game that he should find it first.
"Now, how does a man search a revolving bookcase? He does not generally hop all round it in a squatting attitude, like a frog. He simply gives it a touch and makes it revolve."He was frowning at the floor as he spoke, and there was a light under his heavy lids that was not often seen there. The mysticism that was buried deep under all the cynicism of his experience was awake and moving in the depths. His voice took unexpected turns and inflections, almost as if two men were speaking.
"That was what Boyle did; he barely touched the thing, and it went round as elasily as the world goes round. Yes, very much as the world goes round, for the hand that turned it was not his. God, who turns the wheel of all the stars, touched that wheel and brought it full circle, that His dreadful justice might return.""I am beginning," said Grayne, slowly, "to have some hazy and horrible idea of what you mean.""It is very simple," said Fisher, "when Boyle straightened himself from his stooping posture, something had happened which he had not noticed, which his enemy had not noticed, which nobody had noticed. The two coffee cups had exactly changed places."The rocky face of Grayne seemed to have sustained a shock in silence; not a line of it altered, but his voice when it came was unexpectedly weakened.
