d Shakespeare, "that the unsmoked stub of
a cigar will suggest the story of him who smoked it to your mind?"

"I do," replied the stranger, with a confident smile. "Take this one, for
instance, that I have picked up here upon the wharf; it tells me the whole
story of the intentions of Captain Kidd at the moment when, in utter
disregard of your rights, he stepped aboard your House-boat, and, in his
usual piratical fashion, made off with it into unknown seas."

"But how do you know he smoked it?" asked Solomon, who deemed it the part
of wisdom to be suspicious of the stranger.

"There are two curious indentations in it which prove that. The marks of
two teeth, with a hiatus between, which you will see if you look closely,"
said the stranger, handing the small bit of tobacco to Sir Walter, "make
that point evident beyond peradventure. The Captain lost an eye-tooth in
one of his later raids; it was knocked out by a marline-spike which had
been hurled at him by one of the crew of the treasure-ship he and his
followers had attacked. The adjacent teeth were broken, but not removed.
The cigar end bears the marks of those two jagged molars, with the hiatus,
which, as I have indicated, is due to the destruction of the eye-tooth
between them. It is not likely that there was another man in the pirate's
crew with teeth exactly like the commander's, therefore I say there can be
no doubt that the cigar end was that of the Captain himself."

"Very interesting indeed," observed Blackstone, removing his wig and
fanning himself with it; "but I must confess, Mr. Chairman, that in any
properly constituted law court this evidence would long since have been
ruled out as irrelevant and absurd. The idea of two or three hundred
dignified spirits like ourselves, gathered together to devise a means for
the recovery of our property and the rescue of our wives, yielding the
floor to the delivering of a lecture by an entire stranger on 'Cigar Ends
He Has Met,' strikes me as ridiculous in the extreme. Of what earthly
interest is it to us to know that this or that cigar was smoked by Captain
Kidd?"

"Merely that it will help us on, your honor, to discover the whereabouts
of the said Kidd," interposed the stranger. "It is by trifles, seeming
trifles, that the greatest detective work is done. My friends Le Coq,
Hawkshaw, and Old Sleuth will bear me out in this, I think, however much
in other respects our methods may have differed. They left no stone