It is not often that the ordinary person has any need to see what he can
do in the way of detection. He gets along very comfortably in the
humdrum round of life without having to measure footprints and smile
quiet, tight-lipped smiles. But if ever the emergency does arise, he
thinks naturally of Sherlock Holmes, and his methods.
Mr. Downing had read all the Holmes stories with great attention, and
had thought many times what an incompetent ass Doctor Watson was; but,
now that he had started to handle his own first case, he was compelled
to admit that there was a good deal to be said in extenuation of
Watson's inability to unravel tangles. It certainly was uncommonly hard,
he thought, as he paced the cricket field after leaving Sergeant
Collard, to detect anybody, unless you knew who had really done the
crime. As he brooded over the case in hand, his sympathy for Doctor
Watson increased with every minute, and he began to feel a certain
resentment against Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was all very well for Sir
Arthur to be so shrewd and infallible about tracing a mystery to its
source, but he knew perfectly well who had done the thing before
he started!
Now that he began really to look into this matter of the alarm bell and
the painting of Sammy, the conviction was creeping over him that the
problem was more difficult than a casual observer might imagine.
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