man in one of his rare moments of
animation, "why, because he's guilty of the other crimes! I don't know
what you people are made of. You seem to think that all sins are kept
together in a bag. You talk as if a miser on Monday were always a
spendthrift on Tuesday. You tell me this man you have here spent weeks
and months wheedling needy women out of small sums of money; that he
used a drug at the best, and a poison at the worst; that he turned up
afterwards as the lowest kind of moneylender, and cheated most poor
people in the same patient and pacific style. Let it be granted--let us
admit, for the sake of argument, that he did all this. If that is so, I
will tell you what he didn't do. He didn't storm a spiked wall against a
man with a loaded gun. He didn't write on the wall with his own hand, to
say he had done it. He didn't stop to state that his justification was
self-defence. He didn't explain that he had no quarrel with the poor
warder. He didn't name the house of the rich man to which he was going
with the gun. He didn't write his own, initials in a man's blood. Saints
alive! Can't you see the whole character is different, in good and evil?
Why, you don't seem to be like I am a bit. One would think you'd never
had any vices of your own."

The amazed American had already parted his lips in protest when the
door of his private and official room was hammered and rattled in an
unceremonious way to which he was totally unaccustomed.

The door flew open. The moment before Greywood Usher had been coming to
the conclusion that Father Brown might possibly be mad. The moment after
he began to think he was mad himself. There burst and fell into his
private room a man in the filthiest rags, with a greasy squash hat still
askew on his head, and a shabby green shade shoved up from one of his
eyes, both of which were glaring like a tiger's. The rest of his face
was almost undiscoverable, being masked with a matted beard and whiskers
through which the nose could barely thrust itself, and further buried in
a squalid red scarf or handkerchief. Mr Usher prided himself on having
seen most of the roughest specimens in the State, but he thought he had
never seen such a baboon dressed as a scarecrow as this. But, above all,
he had never in all his placid scientific existence heard a man like
that speak to him first.

"See here, old man Usher," shouted the being in the red handkerchief,
"I'm getting tired. Don't you try any of your hi