leaving
it at became an absurd dream. Perhaps in Sherlock Holmes's hands it
would have provided a valuable clue. Fenwick said nothing further
about it; put it in a drawer until all inquiries about him had died
into the past.

Another little thing that might have helped was the cabman's number
written on his wristband. But here Fate threw investigation off her
guard. The ciphers were, as it chanced, 3,600; and an unfortunate
shrewdness of Scotland Yard, when Dr. Vereker communicated this clue,
spotted the date in it--the third day of the sixth month of 1900. So
no one dreamed of the cabby, who could at least have shown where the
hat was lost that might have had a name or address inside it, and
where he left its owner in the end. And there was absolutely no clue
to anything elsewhere among his clothes. The Panama hat might have
been bought anywhere; the suit of blue serge was ticketless inside the
collar, and the shirt unmarked--probably bought for the voyage only.
Fenwick had succeeded in forgetting himself just at a moment when he
was absolutely without a reminder. And it seemed there was nothing
for it but to wait for the revival of memory.

This, then, is how it came about that, within three months of his
extraordinary accident, Mr. Fenwick was comfortably settled in an
apartment within a few minutes' walk of Krakatoa Villa; and all the
incidents of his original appearance were getting merged in the
insoluble, and would soon, no doubt, under the influence of a steady
ever-present new routine of life, be completely absorbed in the actual
past.

CHAPTER V

THE CHRISTMAS AFTER. OF THE CHURCH OF ST. SATISFAX, AND A YOUNG IDIOT
WHO CAME THERE

When one is called away in the middle of a street-fight, and misses
seeing the end of it, how embittered one's existence is, and continues
for some time after! Think what our friend the cabman would have felt
had he missed the _denouement_! And when one finds oneself again
on its site--if that is the correct expression--how one wishes one
was not ashamed to inquire about its result from the permanent
officials on the spot--the waterman attached to the cab-rank, the
crossing-sweeper at the corner, the neolithographic artist who didn't
really draw that half-mackerel himself, but is there all day long, for
all that; or even the apothecary's shop over the way, on the chance
that the casualties went or were taken there for treatment after the
battle. One never does ask,