Mike and Psmith

by P. G. Wodehouse

  19

  THE SLEUTH-HOUND

  For the Doctor Watsons of this world, as opposed to the SherlockHolmeses, success in the province of detective work must be, to a verylarge extent, the result of luck. Sherlock Holmes can extract a cluefrom a wisp of straw or a flake of cigar ash. But Doctor Watson has gotto have it taken out for him, and dusted, and exhibited clearly, with alabel attached.

  The average man is a Doctor Watson. We are wont to scoff in apatronizing manner at that humbler follower of the great investigator,but, as a matter of fact, we should have been just as dull ourselves. Weshould not even have risen to the modest level of a Scotland Yardbungler. We should simply have hung around, saying: "My dear Holmes,how...?" and all the rest of it, just as the downtrodden medico did.

  It is not often that the ordinary person has any need to see what he cando in the way of detection. He gets along very comfortably in thehumdrum round of life without having to measure footprints and smilequiet, tight-lipped smiles. But if ever the emergency does arise, hethinks naturally of Sherlock Holmes, and his methods.

  Mr. Downing had read all the Holmes stories with great attention, andhad thought many times what an incompetent ass Doctor Watson was; but,now that he had started to handle his own first case, he was compelledto admit that there was a good deal to be said in extenuation ofWatson's inability to unravel tangles. It certainly was uncommonly hard,he thought, as he paced the cricket field after leaving SergeantCollard, to detect anybody, unless you knew who had really done thecrime. As he brooded over the case in hand, his sympathy for DoctorWatson increased with every minute, and he began to feel a certainresentment against Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was all very well for SirArthur to be so shrewd and infallible about tracing a mystery to itssource, but he knew perfectly well who had done the thing beforehe started!

  Now that he began really to look into this matter of the alarm bell andthe painting of Sammy, the conviction was creeping over him that theproblem was more difficult than a casual observer might imagine. He hadgot as far as finding that his quarry of the previous night was a boy inMr. Outwood's house, but how was he to get any further? That was thething. There was, of course, only a limited number of boys in Mr.Outwood's house as tall as the one he had pursued; but even if there hadbeen only one other, it would have complicated matters. If you go to aboy and say, "Either you or Jones were out of your house last night attwelve o'clock," the boy does not reply, "Sir, I cannot tell a lie--Iwas out of my house last night at twelve o'clock." He simply assumes theanimated expression of a stuffed fish, and leaves the next move to you.It is practically stalemate.

  All these things passed through Mr. Downing's mind as he walked up anddown the cricket field that afternoon.

  What he wanted was a clue. But it is so hard for the novice to tell whatis a clue and what isn't. Probably, if he only knew, there were clueslying all over the place, shouting to him to pick them up.

  What with the oppressive heat of the day and the fatigue of hardthinking, Mr. Downing was working up for a brainstorm when Fate oncemore intervened, this time in the shape of Riglett, a junior member ofhis house.

  Riglett slunk up in the shamefaced way peculiar to some boys, even whenthey have done nothing wrong, and, having "capped" Mr. Downing with theair of one who had been caught in the act of doing somethingparticularly shady, requested that he might be allowed to fetch hisbicycle from the shed.

  "Your bicycle?" snapped Mr. Downing. Much thinking had made himirritable. "What do you want with your bicycle?"

  Riglett shuffled, stood first on his left foot, then on his right,blushed, and finally remarked, as if it were not so much a sound reasonas a sort of feeble excuse for the low and blackguardly fact that hewanted his bicycle, that he had got leave for tea that afternoon.

  Then Mr. Downing remembered. Riglett had an aunt resident about threemiles from the school, whom he was accustomed to visit occasionally onSunday afternoons during the term.

  He felt for his bunch of keys, and made his way to the shed, Riglettshambling behind at an interval of two yards.

  Mr. Downing unlocked the door, and there on the floor was the Clue!

  A clue that even Doctor Watson could not have overlooked.

  Mr. Downing saw it, but did not immediately recognize it for what itwas. What he saw at first was not a clue, but just a mess. He had a tidysoul and abhorred messes. And this was a particularly messy mess. Thegreater part of the flooring in the neighborhood of the door was a seaof red paint. The tin from which it had flowed was lying on its side inthe middle of the shed. The air was full of the pungent scent.

  "Pah!" said Mr. Downing.

  Then suddenly, beneath the disguise of the mess, he saw the clue. Afootmark! No less. A crimson footmark on the gray concrete!

  Riglett, who had been waiting patiently two yards away, now coughedplaintively. The sound recalled Mr. Downing to mundane matters.

  "Get your bicycle, Riglett," he said, "and be careful where you tread.Somebody has upset a pot of paint on the floor."

  Riglett, walking delicately through dry places, extracted his bicyclefrom the rack, and presently departed to gladden the heart of his aunt,leaving Mr. Downing, his brain fizzing with the enthusiasm of thedetective, to lock the door and resume his perambulation of thecricket field.

  Give Doctor Watson a fair start, and he is a demon at the game. Mr.Downing's brain was now working with a rapidity and clearness which aprofessional sleuth might have envied.

  Paint. Red paint. Obviously the same paint with which Sammy had beendecorated. A footmark. Whose footmark? Plainly that of the criminal whohad done the deed of decoration.

  Yoicks!

  There were two things, however, to be considered. Your careful detectivemust consider everything. In the first place, the paint might have beenupset by the groundsman. It was the groundsman's paint. He had beengiving a fresh coating to the woodwork in front of the pavilion scoringbox at the conclusion of yesterday's match. (A labor of love which wasthe direct outcome of the enthusiasm for work which Adair had instilledinto him.) In that case the footmark might be his.

  _Note one_: Interview the groundsman on this point.

  In the second place Adair might have upset the tin and trodden in itscontents when he went to get his bicycle in order to fetch the doctorfor the suffering MacPhee. This was the more probable of the twocontingencies, for it would have been dark in the shed when Adairwent into it.

  _Note two_: Interview Adair as to whether he found, on returning to thehouse, that there was paint on his shoes.

  Things were moving.

  * * * * *

  He resolved to take Adair first. He could get the groundsman's addressfrom him.

  Passing by the trees under whose shade Mike and Psmith and Dunster hadwatched the match on the previous day, he came upon the Head of hishouse in a deck chair reading a book. A summer Sunday afternoon is thetime for reading in deck chairs.

  "Oh, Adair," he said. "No, don't get up. I merely wished to ask you ifyou found any paint on your shoes when you returned to the houselast night."

  "Paint, sir?" Adair was plainly puzzled. His book had been interesting,and had driven the Sammy incident out of his head.

  "I see somebody has spilled some paint on the floor of the bicycle shed.You did not do that, I suppose, when you went to fetch your bicycle?"

  "No, sir."

  "It is spilled all over the floor. I wondered whether you had happenedto tread in it. But you say you found no paint on your shoesthis morning?"

  "No, sir, my bicycle is always quite near the door of the shed. I didn'tgo into the shed at all."

  "I see. Quite so. Thank you, Adair. Oh, by the way, Adair, where doesMarkby live?"

  "I forget the name of his cottage, sir, but I could show you in asecond. It's one of those cottages just past the school gates, on theright as you turn out into the road. There are three in a row. His isthe first you come to. There's a barn just before you get to them."

&n
bsp; "Thank you. I shall be able to find them. I should like to speak toMarkby for a moment on a small matter."

  A sharp walk took him to the cottages Adair had mentioned. He rapped atthe door of the first, and the groundsman came out in his shirt sleeves,blinking as if he had just waked up, as was indeed the case.

  "Oh, Markby!"

  "Sir?"

  "You remember that you were painting the scoring box in the pavilionlast night after the match?"

  "Yes, sir. It wanted a lick of paint bad. The young gentlemen willscramble about and get through the window. Makes it look shabby, sir. SoI thought I'd better give it a coating so as to look shipshape when theMarylebone come down."

  "Just so. An excellent idea. Tell me, Markby, what did you do with thepot of paint when you had finished?"

  "Put it in the bicycle shed, sir."

  "On the floor?"

  "On the floor, sir? No. On the shelf at the far end, with the can ofwhitening what I use for marking out the wickets, sir."

  "Of course, yes. Quite so. Just as I thought."

  "Do you want it, sir?"

  "No, thank you, Markby, no, thank you. The fact is, somebody who had nobusiness to do so has moved the pot of paint from the shelf to thefloor, with the result that it has been kicked over and spilled. You hadbetter get some more tomorrow. Thank you, Markby. That is all Iwished to know."

  Mr. Downing walked back to the school thoroughly excited. He was hot onthe scent now. The only other possible theories had been tested andsuccessfully exploded. The thing had become simple to a degree. All hehad to do was to go to Mr. Outwood's house--the idea of searching afellow master's house did not appear to him at all a delicate task;somehow one grew unconsciously to feel that Mr. Outwood did not reallyexist as a man capable of resenting liberties--find the paint-splashedshoe, ascertain its owner, and denounce him to the headmaster. Therecould be no doubt that a paint-splashed shoe must be in Mr. Outwood'shouse somewhere. A boy cannot tread in a pool of paint without showingsome signs of having done so. It was Sunday, too, so that the shoe wouldnot yet have been cleaned. Yoicks! Also tally-ho! This really wasbeginning to be something like business.

  Regardless of the heat, the sleuth-hound hurried across to Outwood's asfast as he could walk.