"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 recognize 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 travelers.
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