to round it off, and this man had much the air of
being one, when the mysterious stranger himself said suddenly:

"Well, I think I'd better show you the work I'm doing down here."

He had his knapsack before him on the table, and he smiled rather grimly
as he began to unstrap it. Paynter looked on with polite expressions of
interest, but was considerably surprised when the artist unpacked and
placed on the table, not any recognizable works of art, even of the most
Cubist description, but (first) a quire of foolscap closely written
with notes in black and red ink, and (second), to the American's extreme
amazement, the old woodman's ax with the linen wrapper, which he had
himself found in the well long ago.

"Sorry to give you a start, sir," said the Russian artist, with a
marked London accent. "But I'd better explain straight off that I'm a
policeman."

"You don't look it," said Paynter.

"I'm not supposed to," replied the other. "Mr. Ashe brought me down here
from the Yard to investigate; but he told me to report to you when I'd
got anything to go on. Would you like to go into the matter now?

"When I took this matter up," explained the detective, "I did it at Mr.
Ashe's request, and largely, of course, on Mr. Ashe's lines. Mr. Ashe
is a great criminal lawyer; with a beautiful brain, sir, as full as the
Newgate Calendar. I took, as a working notion, his view that only you
five gentlemen round the table in the Squire's garden were acquainted
with the Squire's movements. But you gentlemen, if I may say so, have
a way of forgetting certain other things and other people which we are
rather taught to look for first. And as I followed Mr. Ashe's inquiries
through the stages you know already, through certain suspicions I
needn't discuss because they've been dropped, I found the thing shaping
after all toward something, in the end, which I think we should have
considered at the beginning. Now, to begin with, it is not true that
there were five men round the table. There were six."

The creepy conditions of that garden vigil vaguely returned upon
Paynter; and he thought of a ghost, or something more nameless than a
ghost. But the deliberate speech of the detective soon enlightened him.

"There were six men and five gentlemen, if you like to put it so," he
proceeded. "That man Miles, the butler, saw the Squire vanish as plainly
as you did; and I soon found that Miles was a man worthy of a good deal
of attention."

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