Tired of reading? Add this page to your Bookmarks or Favorites and finish it later.
|
|
"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.
|