This site is full of FREE ebooks - Project Gutenberg Australia

Title:      The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926)
Author:     G. K. Chesterton
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0201021.txt
Edition:    1
Language:   English
Character set encoding:     Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit
Date first posted:          December 2002
Date most recently updated: December 2002

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Incredulity of Father Brown
Author:     G. K. Chesterton, (1926)




ONE: The Resurrection of Father Brown

THERE was a brief period during which Father Brown enjoyed, or rather
did not enjoy, something like fame. He was a nine days' wonder in the
newspapers; he was even a common topic of controversy in the weekly
reviews; his exploits were narrated eagerly and inaccurately in any
number of clubs and drawing - rooms, especially in America. Incongruous
and indeed incredible as it may seem to any one who knew him, his
adventures as a detective were even made the subject of short stories
appearing in magazines.

Strangely enough, this wandering limelight struck him in the most
obscure, or at least the most remote, of his many places of residence.
He had been sent out to officiate, as something between a missionary and
a parish priest, in one of those sections of the northern coast of South
America, where strips of country still cling insecurely to European
powers, or are continually threatening to become independent republics,
under the gigantic shadow of President Monroe. The population was red
and brown with pink spots; that is, it was Spanish - American, and
largely Spanish - American - Indian, but there was a considerable and
increasing infiltration of Americans of the northern sort - Englishmen,
Germans, and the rest. And the trouble seems to have begun when one of
these visitors, very recently landed and very much annoyed at having
lost one of his bags, approached the first building of which he came in
sight - which happened to be the mission - house and chapel attached to
it, in front of which ran a long veranda and a long row of stakes, up
which were trained the black twisted vines, their square leaves red with
autumn. Behind them, also in a row, a number of human beings sat almost
as rigid as the stakes, and coloured in some fashion like the vines. For
while their broad - brimmed hats were as black as their unblinking eyes,
the complexions of many of them might have been made out of the dark red
timber of those transatlantic forests. Many of them were smoking very
long, thin black cigars; and in all that group the smoke was almost the
only moving thing. The visitor would probably have described them as
natives, though some of them were very proud of Spanish blood. But he
was not one to draw any fine distinction between Spaniards and Red
Indians, being rather disposed to dismiss people from the scene when
once he had convicted them of being native to it.

He was a newspaper man from Kansas City, a lean, light - haired man with
what Meredith called an adventurous nose; one could almost fancy it
found its way by feeling its way and moved like the proboscis of an ant
- eater. His name was Snaith, and his parents, after some obscure
meditation, had called him Saul, a fact which he had the good feeling to
conceal as far as possible. Indeed, he had ultimately compromised by
calling himself Paul, though by no means for the same reason that had
affected the Apostle of the Gentiles. On the contrary, so far as he had
any views on such things, the name of the persecutor would have been
more appropriate; for he regarded organized religion with the
conventional contempt which can be learnt more easily from Ingersoll
than from Voltaire. And this was, as it happened, the not very important
side of his character which he turned towards the mission - station and
the groups in front of the veranda. Something in their shameless repose
and indifference inflamed his own fury of efficiency; and, as he could
get no particular answer to his first questions, he began to do all the
talking himself.

Standing out there in the strong sunshine, a spick - and - span figure
in his Panama hat and neat clothes, his grip - sack held m a steely
grip, he began to shout at the people in the shadow. He began to explain
to them very loudly why they were lazy and filthy, and bestially
ignorant and lower than the beasts that perish, in case this problem
should have previously exercised their minds. In his opinion it was the
deleterious influence of priests that had made them so miserably poor
and so hopelessly oppressed that they were able to sit in the shade and
smoke and do nothing.

'And a mighty soft crowd you must be at that,' he said, 'to be bullied
by these stuck - up josses because they walk about in their mitres and
their tiaras and their gold copes and other glad rags, looking down on
everybody else like dirt - being bamboozled by crowns and canopies and
sacred umbrellas like a kid at a pantomime; just because a pompous old
High Priest of Mumbo - Jumbo looks as if he was the lord of the earth.
What about you? What do you look like, you poor simps? I tell you,
that's why you're way - back in barbarism and can't read or write and -
'

At this point the High Priest of Mumbo - Jumbo came in an undignified
hurry out of the door of the mission - house, not looking very like a
lord of the earth, but rather like a bundle of black second - hand
clothes buttoned round a short bolster in the semblance of a guy. He was
not wearing his tiara, supposing him to possess one, but a shabby broad
hat not very dissimilar from those of the Spanish Indians, and it was
thrust to the back of his head with a gesture of botheration. He seemed
just about to speak to the motionless natives when he caught sight of
the stranger and said quickly:

'Oh, can I be of any assistance? Would you like to come inside?'

Mr Paul Snaith came inside; and it was the beginning of a considerable
increase of that journalist's information on many things. Presumably his
journalistic instinct was stronger than his prejudices, as, indeed, it
often is in clever journalists; and he asked a good many questions, the
answers to which interested and surprised him. He discovered that the
Indians could read and write, for the simple reason that the priest had
taught them; but that they did not read or write any more than they
could help, from a natural preference for more direct communications. He
learned that these strange people, who sat about in heaps on the veranda
without stirring a hair, could work quite hard on their own patches of
land; especially those of them who were more than half Spanish; and he
learned with still more astonishment that they all had patches of land
that were really their own. That much was part of a stubborn tradition
that seemed quite native to natives. But in that also the priest had
played a certain part, and by doing so had taken perhaps what was his
first and last part in politics, if it was only local politics.

There had recently swept through that region one of those fevers of
atheist and almost anarchist Radicalism which break out periodically in
countries of the Latin culture, generally beginning in a secret society
and generally ending in a civil war and in very little else. The local
leader of the iconoclastic party was a certain Alvarez, a rather
picturesque adventurer of Portuguese nationality but, as his enemies
said, of partly Negro origin, the head of any number of lodges and
temples of initiation of the sort that in such places clothe even
atheism with something mystical. The leader on the more conservative
side was a much more commonplace person, a very wealthy man named
Mendoza, the owner of many factories and quite respectable, but not very
exciting. It was the general opinion that the cause of law and order
would have been entirely lost if it had not adopted a more popular
policy of its own, in the form of securing land for the peasants; and
this movement had mainly originated from the little mission - station of
Father Brown.

While he was talking to the journalist, Mendoza, the Conservative
leader, came in. He was a stout, dark man, with a bald head like a pear
and a round body also like a pear; he was smoking a very fragrant cigar,
but he threw it away, perhaps a little theatrically, when he came into
the presence of the priest, as if he had been entering church; and bowed
with a curve that in so corpulent a gentleman seemed quite improbable.
He was always exceedingly serious in his social gestures, especially
towards religious institutions. He was one of those laymen who are much
more ecclesiastical than ecclesiastics. It embarrassed Father Brown a
good deal, especially when carried thus into private life.

'I think I am an anti - clerical,' Father Brown would say with a faint
smile; 'but there wouldn't be half so much clericalism if they would
only leave things to the clerics.'

'Why Mr Mendoza,' exclaimed the journalist with a new animation,' I
think we have met before. Weren't you at the Trade Congress in Mexico
last year?'

The heavy eyelids of Mr Mendoza showed a flutter of recognition, and he
smiled in his slow way. 'I remember.'

'Pretty big business done there in an hour or two,' said Snaith with
relish.' Made a good deal of difference to you, too, I guess.'

'I have been very fortunate,' said Mendoza modestly.

'Don't you believe it!' cried the enthusiastic Snaith.' Good fortune
comes to the people who know when to catch hold; and you caught hold
good and sure. But I hope I'm not interrupting your business?'

'Not at all,' said the other. 'I often have the honour of calling on the
padre for a little talk. Merely for a little talk.'

It seemed as if this familiarity between Father Brown and a successful
and even famous man of business completed the reconciliation between the
priest and the practical Mr Snaith. He felt, it might be supposed, a new
respectability clothe the station and the mission, and was ready to
overlook such occasional reminders of the existence of religion as a
chapel and a presbytery can seldom wholly avoid. He became quite
enthusiastic about the priest's programme - at least on its secular and
social side - and announced himself ready at any moment to act in the
capacity of a live wire for its communication to the world at large. And
it was at this point that Father Brown began to find the journalist
rather more troublesome in his sympathy than in his hostility.

Mr Paul Snaith set out vigorously to feature Father Brown. He sent long
and loud eulogies on him across the continent to his newspaper in the
Middle West. He took snapshots of the unfortunate cleric in the most
commonplace occupations, and exhibited them in gigantic photographs in
the gigantic Sunday papers of the United States. He turned his sayings
into slogans, and was continually presenting the world with 'A message'
from the reverend gentleman in South America. Any stock less strong and
strenuously receptive than the American race would have become very much
bored with Father Brown. As it was, he received handsome and eager
offers to go on a lecturing tour in the States; and when he declined,
the terms were raised with expressions of respectful wonder. A series of
stories about him, like the stories of Sherlock Holmes, were, by the
instrumentality of Mr Snaith, planned out and put before the hero with
requests for his assistance and encouragement. As the priest found they
had started, he could offer no suggestion except that they should stop.
And this in turn was taken by Mr Snaith as the text for a discussion on
whether Father Brown should disappear temporarily over a cliff, in the
manner of Dr Watson's hero. To all these demands the priest had
patiently to reply in writing, saying that he would consent on such
terms to the temporary cessation of the stories and begging that a
considerable interval might occur before they began again. The notes he
wrote grew shorter and shorter; and as he wrote the last of them, he
sighed.

Needless to say, this strange boom in the North reacted on the little
outpost in the South where he had expected to live in so lonely an
exile. The considerable English and American population already on the
spot began to be proud of possessing so widely advertised a person.
American tourists, of the sort who land with a loud demand for
Westminster Abbey, landed on that distant coast with a loud demand for
Father Brown. They were within measurable distance of running excursion
trains named after him, and bringing crowds to see him as if he were a
public monument. He was especially troubled by the active and ambitious
new traders and shopkeepers of the place, who were perpetually pestering
him to try their wares and to give them testimonials. Even if the
testimonials were not forthcoming, they would prolong the correspondence
for the purpose of collecting autographs. As he was a good - natured
person they got a good deal of what they wanted out of him; and it was
in answer to a particular request from a Frankfort wine - merchant named
Eckstein that he wrote hastily a few words on a card, which were to
prove a terrible turning - point in his life.

Eckstein was a fussy little man with fuzzy hair and pince - nez, who was
wildly anxious that the priest should not only try some of his
celebrated medicinal port, but should let him know where and when he
would drink it, in acknowledging its receipt. The priest was not
particularly surprised at the request, for he was long past surprise at
the lunacies of advertisement. So he scribbled something down and turned
to other business which seemed a little more sensible. He was again
interrupted, by a note from no less a person than his political enemy
Alvarez, asking him to come to a conference at which it was hoped that a
compromise on an outstanding question might be reached; and suggesting
an appointment that evening at a cafe just outside the walls of the
little town. To this also he sent a message of acceptance by the rather
florid and military messenger who was waiting for it; and then, having
an hour or two before him, sat down to attempt to get through a little
of his own legitimate business. At the end of the time he poured himself
out a glass of Mr Eckstein's remarkable wine and, glancing at the clock
with a humorous expression, drank it and went out into the night.

Strong moonlight lay on the little Spanish town, so that when he came to
the picturesque gateway, with its rather rococo arch and the fantastic
fringe of palms beyond it, it looked rather like a scene in a Spanish
opera. One long leaf of palm with jagged edges, black against the moon,
hung down on the other side of the arch, visible through the archway,
and had something of the look of the jaw of a black crocodile. The fancy
would not have lingered in his imagination but for something else that
caught his naturally alert eye. The air was deathly still, and there was
not a stir of wind; but he distinctly saw the pendent palm - leaf move.

He looked around him and realized that he was alone. He had left behind
the last houses, which were mostly closed and shuttered, and was walking
between two long blank walls built of large and shapeless but flattened
stones, tufted here and there with the queer prickly weeds of that
region - walls which ran parallel all the way to the gateway. He could
not see the lights of the cafe outside the gate; probably it was too far
away. Nothing could be seen under the arch but a wider expanse of large
- flagged pavement, pale in the moon, with the straggling prickly pear
here and there. He had a strong sense of the smell of evil; he felt
queer physical oppression; but he did not think of stopping. His
courage, which was considerable, was perhaps even less strong a part of
him than his curiosity. All his life he had been led by an intellectual
hunger for the truth, even of trifles. He often controlled it in the
name of proportion; but it was always there. He walked straight through
the gateway, and on the other side a man sprang like a monkey out of the
tree - top and struck at him with a knife. At the same moment another
man came crawling swiftly along the wall and, whirling a cudgel round
his head, brought it down. Father Brown turned, staggered, and sank in a
heap, but as he sank there dawned on his round face an expression of
mild and immense surprise.

There was living in the same little town at this time another young
American, particularly different from Mr Paul Snaith. His name was John
Adams Race, and he was an electrical engineer, employed by Mendoza to
fit out the old town with all the new conveniences. He was a figure far
less familiar in satire and international gossip than that of the
American journalist. Yet, as a matter of fact, America contains a
million men of the moral type of Race to one of the moral type of
Snaith. He was exceptional in being exceptionally good at his job, but
in every other way he was very simple. He had begun life as a druggist's
assistant in a Western village, and risen by sheer work and merit; but
he still regarded his home town as the natural heart of the habitable
world. He had been taught a very Puritan, or purely Evangelical, sort of
Christianity from the Family Bible at his mother's knee; and in so far
as he had time to have any religion, that was still his religion. Amid
all the dazzling lights of the latest and even wildest discoveries, when
he was at the very edge and extreme of experiment, working miracles of
light and sound like a god creating new stars and solar systems, he
never for a moment doubted that the things 'back home' were the best
things in the world; his mother and the Family Bible and the quiet and
quaint morality of his village. He had as serious and noble a sense of
the sacredness of his mother as if he had been a frivolous Frenchman. He
was quite sure the Bible religion was really the right thing; only he
vaguely missed it wherever he went in the modern world. He could hardly
be expected to sympathize with the religious externals of Catholic
countries; and in a dislike of mitres and croziers he sympathized with
Mr Snaith, though not in so cocksure a fashion. He had no liking for the
public bowings and scrapings of Mendoza and certainly no temptation to
the masonic mysticism of the atheist Alvarez. Perhaps all that semi -
tropical life was too coloured for him, shot with Indian red and Spanish
gold. Anyhow, when he said there was nothing to touch his home town, he
was not boasting. He really meant that there was somewhere something
plain and unpretentious and touching, which he really respected more
than anything else in the world. Such being the mental attitude of John
Adams Race in a South American station, there had been growing on him
for some time a curious feeling, which contradicted all his prejudices
and for which he could not account. For the truth was this: that the
only thing he had ever met in his travels that in the least reminded him
of the old wood - pile and the provincial proprieties and the Bible on
his mother's knee was (for some inscrutable reason) the round face and
black clumsy umbrella of Father Brown.

He found himself insensibly watching that commonplace and even comic
black figure as it went bustling about; watching it with an almost
morbid fascination, as if it were a walking riddle or contradiction. He
had found something he could not help liking in the heart of everything
he hated; it was as if he had been horribly tormented by lesser demons
and then found that the Devil was quite an ordinary person.

Thus it happened that, looking out of his window on that moonlit night,
he saw the Devil go by, the demon of unaccountable blamelessness, in his
broad black hat and long black coat, shuffling along the street towards
the gateway, and saw it with an interest which he could not himself
understand. He wondered where the priest was going, and what he was
really up to; and remained gazing out into the moonlit street long after
the little black figure had passed. And then he saw something else that
intrigued him further. Two other men whom he recognized passed across
his window as across a lighted stage. A sort of blue limelight of the
moon ran in a spectral halo round the big bush of hair that stood erect
on the head of little Eckstein, the wine - seller, and it outlined a
taller and darker figure with an eagle profile and a queer old -
fashioned and very top - heavy black hat, which seemed to make the whole
outline still more bizarre, like a shape in a shadow pantomime. Race
rebuked himself for allowing the moon to play such tricks with his
fancy; for on a second glance he recognized the black Spanish
sidewhiskers and high - featured face of Dr Calderon, a worthy medical
man of the town, whom he had once found attending professionally on
Mendoza. Still, there was something in the way the men were whispering
to each other and peering up the street that struck him as peculiar. On
a sudden impulse he leapt over the low window - sill and himself went
bareheaded up the road, following their trail. He saw them disappear
under the dark archway, and a moment after there came a dreadful cry
from beyond; curiously loud and piercing, and all the more blood -
curdling to Race because it said something very distinctly in some
tongue that he did not know.

The next moment there was a rushing of feet, more cries, and then a
confused roar of rage or grief that shook the turrets and tall palm
trees of the place; there was a movement in the mob that had gathered,
as if they were sweeping backwards through the gateway. And then the
dark archway resounded with a new voice, this time intelligible to him
and falling with the note of doom, as someone shouted through the
gateway:

'Father Brown is dead!'

He never knew what prop gave way in his mind, or why something on which
he had been counting suddenly failed him; but he ran towards the gateway
and was just in time to meet his countryman, the journalist Snaith,
coming out of the dark entrance, deadly pale and snapping his fingers
nervously.

'It's quite true,' said Snaith, with something which for him approached
to reverence. 'He's a goner. The doctor's been looking at him, and
there's no hope. Some of these damned Dagos clubbed him as he came
through the gate - God knows why. It'll be a great loss to the place.'

Race did not or perhaps could not reply, but ran on under the arch to
the scene beyond. The small black figure lay where it had fallen on the
wilderness of wide stones starred here and there with green thorn; and
the great crowd was being kept back, chiefly by the mere gestures of one
gigantic figure in the foreground. For there were many there who swayed
hither and thither at the mere movement of his hand, as if he had been a
magician.

Alvarez, the dictator and demagogue, was a tall, swaggering figure,
always rather flamboyantly clad, and on this occasion he wore a green
uniform with embroideries like silver snakes crawling all over it, with
an order round his neck hung on a very vivid maroon ribbon. His close
curling hair was already grey, and in contrast his complexion, which his
friends called olive and his foes octoroon, looked almost literally
golden, as if it were a mask moulded in gold. But his large - featured
face, which was powerful and humorous, was at this moment properly grave
and grim. He had been waiting, he explained, for Father Brown at the
cafe when he had heard a rustle and a fall and, coming out, had found
the corpse lying on the flagstones.

'I know what some of you are thinking,' he said, looking round proudly,
'and if you are afraid of me - as you are - I will say it for you. I am
an atheist; I have no god to call on for those who will not take my
word. But I tell you in the name of every root of honour that may be
left to a soldier and a man, that I had no part in this. If I had the
men here that did it, I would rejoice to hang them on that tree.'

'Naturally we are glad to hear you say so,' said old Mendoza stiffly and
solemnly, standing by the body of his fallen coadjutor. 'This blow has
been too appalling for us to say what else we feel at present. I suggest
that it will be more decent and proper if we remove my friend's body and
break up this irregular meeting. I understand,' he added gravely to the
doctor, 'that there is unfortunately no doubt.'

'There is no doubt,' said Dr Calderon.

John Race went back to his lodgings sad and with a singular sense of
emptiness. It seemed impossible that he should miss a man whom he never
knew. He learned that the funeral was to take place next day; for all
felt that the crisis should be past as quickly as possible, for fear of
riots that were hourly growing more probable. When Snaith had seen the
row of Red Indians sitting on the veranda, they might have been a row of
ancient Aztec images carved in red wood. But he had not seen them as
they were when they heard that the priest was dead.

Indeed they would certainly have risen in revolution and lynched the
republican leader, if they had not been immediately blocked by the
direct necessity of behaving respectfully to the coffin of their own
religious leader. The actual assassins, whom it would have been most
natural to lynch, seemed to have vanished into thin air. Nobody knew
their names; and nobody would ever know whether the dying man had even
seen their faces. That strange look of surprise that was apparently his
last look on earth might have been the recognition of their faces.
Alvarez repeated violently that it was no work of his, and attended the
funeral, walking behind the coffin in his splendid silver and green
uniform with a sort of bravado of reverence.

Behind the veranda a flight of stone steps scaled a very steep green
bank, fenced by a cactus - hedge, and up this the coffin was laboriously
lifted to the ground above, and placed temporarily at the foot of the
great gaunt crucifix that dominated the road and guarded the consecrated
ground. Below in the road were great seas of people lamenting and
telling their beads - an orphan population that had lost a father.
Despite all these symbols that were provocative enough to him, Alvarez
behaved with restraint and respect; and all would have gone well - as
Race told himself - had the others only let him alone.

Race told himself bitterly that old Mendoza had always looked like an
old fool and had now very conspicuously and completely behaved like an
old fool. By a custom common in simpler societies, the coffin was left
open and the face uncovered, bringing the pathos to the point of agony
for all those simple people. This, being consonant to tradition, need
have done no harm; but some officious person had added to it the custom
of the French freethinkers, of having speeches by the graveside. Mendoza
proceeded to make a speech - a rather long speech, and the longer it
was, the longer and lower sank John Race's spirits and sympathies with
the religious ritual involved. A list of saintly attributes, apparently
of the most antiquated sort, was rolled out with the dilatory dullness
of an after - dinner speaker who does not know how to sit down. That was
bad enough; but Mendoza had also the ineffable stupidity to start
reproaching and even taunting his political opponents. In three minutes
he had succeeded in making a scene, and a very extraordinary scene it
was.

'We may well ask,' he said, looking around him pompously; 'we may well
ask where such virtues can be found among those who have madly abandoned
the creed of their fathers. It is when we have atheists among us,
atheist leaders, nay sometimes even atheist rulers, that we find their
infamous philosophy bearing fruit in crimes like this. If we ask who
murdered this holy man, we shall assuredly find - '

Africa of the forests looked out of the eyes of Alvarez the hybrid
adventurer; and Race fancied he could see suddenly that the man was
after all a barbarian, who could not control himself to the end; one
might guess that all his 'illuminated' transcendentalism had a touch of
Voodoo. Anyhow, Mendoza could not continue, for Alvarez had sprung up
and was shouting back at him and shouting him down, with infinitely
superior lungs.

'Who murdered him?' he roared. 'Your God murdered him! His own God
murdered him! According to you, he murders all his faithful and foolish
servants - as he murdered that one,' and he made a violent gesture, not
towards the coffin but the crucifix. Seeming to control himself a
little, he went on in a tone still angry but more argumentative: 'I
don't believe it, but you do. Isn't it better to have no God than one
that robs you in this fashion? I, at least, am not afraid to say that
there is none. There is no power in all this blind and brainless
universe that can hear your prayer or return your friend. Though you beg
Heaven to raise him, he will not rise. Though I dare Heaven to raise
him, he will not rise. Here and now I will put it to the test - I defy
the God who is not there to waken the man who sleeps for ever.'

There was a shock of silence, and the demagogue had made his sensation.

'We might have known,' cried Mendoza in a thick gobbling voice, 'when we
allowed such men as you - '

A new voice cut into his speech; a high and shrill voice with a Yankee
accent.

'Stop! Stop!' cried Snaith the journalist; 'something's up! I swear I
saw him move.'

He went racing up the steps and rushed to the coffin, while the mob
below swayed with indescribable frenzies. The next moment he had turned
a face of amazement over his shoulder and made a signal with his finger
to Dr Calderon, who hastened forward to confer with him. When the two
men stepped away again from the coffin, all could see that the position
of the head had altered. A roar of excitement rose from the crowd and
seemed to stop suddenly, as if cut off in mid - air; for the priest in
the coffin gave a groan and raised himself on one elbow, looking with
bleared and blinking eyes at the crowd.

John Adams Race, who had hitherto known only miracles of science, never
found himself able in after - years to describe the topsy - turvydom of
the next few days. He seemed to have burst out of the world of time and
space, and to be living in the impossible. In half an hour the whole of
that town and district had been transformed into something never known
for a thousand years; a medieval people turned to a mob of monks by a
staggering miracle; a Greek city where the god had descended among men.
Thousands prostrated themselves in the road; hundreds took vows on the
spot; and even the outsiders, like the two Americans, were able to think
and speak of nothing but the prodigy. Alvarez himself was shaken, as
well he might be; and sat down, with his head upon his hands.

And in the midst of all this tornado of beatitude was a little man
struggling to be heard. His voice was small and faint, and the noise was
deafening. He made weak little gestures that seemed more those of
irritation than anything else. He came to the edge of the parapet above
the crowd, waving it to be quiet, with movements rather like the flap of
the short wings of a penguin. There was something a little more like a
lull in the noise; and then Father Brown for the first time reached the
utmost stretch of the indignation that he could launch against his
children.

'Oh, you silly people,' he said in a high and quavering voice; 'Oh, you
silly, silly people.'

Then he suddenly seemed to pull himself together, made a bolt for the
steps with his more normal gait, and began hurriedly to descend.

'Where are you going, Father?' said Mendoza, with more than his usual
veneration.

'To the telegraph office,' said Father Brown hastily. 'What? No; of
course it's not a miracle. Why should there be a miracle? Miracles are
not so cheap as all that.'

And he came tumbling down the steps, the people flinging themselves
before him to implore his blessing.

'Bless you, bless you,' said Father Brown hastily. 'God bless you all
and give you more sense.'

And he scuttled away with extraordinary rapidity to the telegraph
office, where he wired to his Bishop's secretary: 'There is some mad
story about a miracle here; hope his lordship not give authority.
Nothing in it.'

As he turned away from his effort, he tottered a little with the
reaction, and John Race caught him by the arm.

'Let me see you home,' he said; 'you deserve more than these people are
giving you.'

John Race and the priest were seated in the presbytery; the table was
still piled up with the papers with which the latter had been wrestling
the day before; the bottle of wine and the emptied wine - glass still
stood where he had left them.

'And now,' said Father Brown almost grimly, 'I can begin to think.'

'I shouldn't think too hard just yet,' said the American. 'You must be
wanting a rest. Besides, what are you going to think about?'

'I have pretty often had the task of investigating murders, as it
happens,' said Father Brown. 'Now I have got to investigate my own
murder.'

'If I were you,' said Race, 'I should take a little wine first.'

Father Brown stood up and filled himself another glass, lifted it,
looked thoughtfully into vacancy, and put it down again. Then he sat
down once more and said:

'Do you know what I felt like when I died? You may not believe it, but
my feeling was one of overwhelming astonishment.'

'Well,' answered Race, 'I suppose you were astonished at being knocked
on the head.'

Father Brown leaned over to him and said in a low voice, 'I was
astonished at not being knocked on the head.'

Race looked at him for a moment as if he thought the knock on the head
had been only too effective; but he only said: 'What do you mean?'

'I mean that when that man brought his bludgeon down with a great swipe,
it stopped at my head and did not even touch it. In the same way, the
other fellow made as if to strike me with a knife, but he never gave me
a scratch. It was just like play - acting. I think it was. But then
followed the extraordinary thing.'

He looked thoughtfully at the papers on the table for a moment and then
went on:

'Though I had not even been touched with knife or stick, I began to feel
my legs doubling up under me and my very life failing. I knew I was
being struck down by something, but it was not by those weapons. Do you
know what I think it was?' And he pointed to the wine on the table.

Race picked up the wine - glass and looked at it and smelt it.

'I think you are right,' he said. 'I began as a druggist and studied
chemistry. I couldn't say for certain without an analysis; but I think
there's something very unusual in this stuff. There are drugs by which
the Asiatics produce a temporary sleep that looks like death.'

'Quite so,' said the priest calmly.' The whole of this miracle was
faked, for some reason or other. That funeral scene was staged - and
timed. I think it is part of that raving madness of publicity that has
got hold of Snaith; but I can hardly believe he would go quite so far,
merely for that. After all, it's one thing to make copy out of me and
run me as a sort of sham Sherlock Holmes, and - '

Even as the priest spoke his face altered. His blinking eyelids shut
suddenly and he stood up as if he were choking. Then he put one wavering
hand as if groping his way towards the door.

'Where are you going?' asked the other in some wonder.

'If you ask me,' said Father Brown, who was quite white, 'I was going to
pray. Or rather, to praise.'

'I'm not sure I understand. What is the matter with you?'

'I was going to praise God for having so strangely and so incredibly
saved me - saved me by an inch.'

'Of course,' said Race, 'I am not of your religion; but believe me, I
have religion enough to understand that. Of course, you would thank God
for saving you from death.'

'No,' said the priest. 'Not from death. From disgrace.'

The other sat staring; and the priest's next words broke out of him with
a sort of cry. 'And if it had only been my disgrace! But it was the
disgrace of all I stand for; the disgrace of the Faith that they went
about to encompass. What it might have been! The most huge and horrible
scandal ever launched against us since the last lie was choked in the
throat of Titus Oates.'

'What on earth are you talking about?' demanded his companion.

'Well, I had better tell you at once,' said the priest; and sitting
down, he went on more composedly: 'It came to me in a flash when I
happened to mention Snaith and Sherlock Holmes. Now I happen to remember
what I wrote about his absurd scheme; it was the natural thing to write,
and yet I think they had ingeniously manoeuvred me into writing just
those words. They were something like 'I am ready to die and come to
life again like Sherlock Holmes, if that is the best way.' And the
moment I thought of that, I realized that I had been made to write all
sorts of things of that kind, all pointing to the same idea. I wrote, as
if to an accomplice, saying that I would drink the drugged wine at a
particular time. Now, don't you see?'

Race sprang to his feet still staring: 'Yes,' he said, 'I think I began
to see.'

'They would have boomed the miracle. Then they would have bust up the
miracle. And what is the worst, they would have proved that I was in the
conspiracy. It would have been our sham miracle. That's all there is to
it; and about as near hell as you and I will ever be, I hope.'

Then he said, after a pause, in quite a mild voice: 'They certainly
would have got quite a lot of good copy out of me.'

Race looked at the table and said darkly: 'How many of these brutes were
in it?'

Father Brown shook his head. 'More than I like to think of,' he said;
'but I hope some of them were only tools. Alvarez might think that all's
fair in war, perhaps; he has a queer mind. I'm very much afraid that
Mendoza is an old hypocrite; I never trusted him, and he hated my action
in an industrial matter. But all that will wait; I have only got to
thank God for the escape. And especially that I wired at once to the
Bishop.'

John Race appeared to be very thoughtful. 'You've told me a lot I didn't
know,' he said at last, 'and I feel inclined to tell you the only thing
you don't know. I can imagine how those fellows calculated well enough.
They thought any man alive, waking up in a coffin to find himself
canonized like a saint, and made into a walking miracle for everyone to
admire, would be swept along with his worshippers and accept the crown
of glory that fell on him out the sky. And I reckon their calculation
was pretty practical psychology, as men go. I've seen all sorts of men
in all sorts of places; and I tell you frankly I don't believe there's
one man in a thousand who could wake up like that with all his wits
about him; and while he was still almost talking in his sleep, would
have the sanity and the simplicity and the humility to - ' He was much
surprised to find himself moved, and his level voice wavering.

Father Brown was gazing abstractedly, and in a rather cockeyed fashion,
at the bottle on the table. 'Look here,' he said, ' what about a bottle
of real wine?'

TWO: The Arrow of Heaven

IT is to be feared that about a hundred detective stories have begun
with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered; an
event which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity. This
story, I am happy to say, has to begin with a murdered millionaire; in
one sense, indeed, it has to begin with three murdered millionaires,
which some may regard as an cmbarras de richesse. But it was chiefly
this coincidence or continuity of criminal policy that took the whole
affair out of the ordinary run of criminal cases and made it the
extraordinary problem that it was.

It was very generally said that they had all fallen victims to some
vendetta or curse attaching to the possession of a relic of great value
both intrinsically and historically: a sort of chalice inlaid with
precious stones and commonly called the Coptic Cup. Its origin was
obscure, but its use was conjectured to be religious; and some
attributed the fate that followed its possessors to the fanaticism of
some Oriental Christian horrified at its passing through such
materialistic hands. But the mysterious slayer, whether or no he was
such a fanatic, was already a figure of lurid and sensational interest
in the world of journalism and gossip. The nameless being was provided
with a name, or a nickname. But it is only with the story of the third
victim that we are now concerned; for it was only in this case that a
certain Father Brown, who is the subject of these sketches, had an
opportunity of making his presence felt.

When Father Brown first stepped off an Atlantic liner on to American
soil, he discovered as many other Englishman has done, that he was a
much more important person than he had ever supposed. His short figure,
his short - sighted and undistinguished countenance, his rather rusty -
black clerical clothes, could pass through any crowd in his own country
without being noticed as anything unusual, except perhaps unusually
insignificant. But America has a genius for the encouragement of fame;
and his appearance in one or two curious criminal problems, together
with his long association with Flambeau, the ex - criminal and
detective, had consolidated a reputation in America out of what was
little more than a rumour in England. His round face was blank with
surprise when he found himself held up on the quay by a group of
journalists, as by a gang of brigands, who asked him questions about all
the subjects on which he was least likely to regard himself as an
authority, such as the details of female dress and the criminal
statistics of the country that he had only that moment clapped his eyes
on. Perhaps it was the contrast with the black embattled solidarity of
this group that made more vivid another figure that stood apart from it,
equally black against the burning white daylight of that brilliant place
and season, but entirely solitary; a tall, rather yellow - faced man in
great goggles, who arrested him with a gesture when the journalists had
finished and said: 'Excuse me, but maybe you are looking for Captain
Wain.'

Some apology may be made for Father Brown; for he himself would have
been sincerely apologetic. It must be remembered that he had never seen
America before, and more especially that he had never seen that sort of
tortoise - shell spectacles before; for the fashion at this time had not
spread to England. His first sensation was that of gazing at some
goggling sea - monster with a faint suggestion of a diver's helmet.
Otherwise the man was exquisitely dressed; and to Brown, in his
innocence, the spectacles seemed the queerest disfigurement for a dandy.
It was as if a dandy had adorned himself with a wooden leg as an extra
touch of elegance. The question also embarrassed him. An American
aviator of the name of Wain, a friend of some friends of his own in
France, was indeed one of a long list of people he had some hope of
seeing during his American visit; but he had never expected to hear of
him so soon.

'I beg your pardon,' he said doubtfully, 'are you Captain Wain? Do you -
do you know him?'

'Well, I'm pretty confident I'm not Captain Wain,' said the man in
goggles, with a face of wood. 'I was pretty clear about that when I saw
him waiting for you over there in the car. But the other question's a
bit more problematical. I reckon I know Wain and his uncle, and old man
Merton, too. I know old man Merton, but old man Merton don't know me.
And he thinks he has the advantage, and I think I have the advantage.
See?'

Father Brown did not quite see. He blinked at the glittering seascape
and the pinnacles of the city, and then at the man in goggles. It was
not only the masking of the man's eyes that produced the impression of
something impenetrable. Something in his yellow face was almost Asiatic,
even Chinese; and his conversation seemed to consist of stratified
layers of irony. He was a type to be found here and there in that hearty
and sociable population; he was the inscrutable American.

'My name's Drage,' he said, 'Norman Drage, and I'm an American citizen,
which explains everything. At least I imagine your friend Wain would
like to explain the rest; so we'll postpone The Fourth of July till
another date.'

Father Brown was dragged in a somewhat dazed condition towards a car at
some little distance, in which a young man with tufts of untidy yellow
hair and a rather harassed and haggard expression, hailed him from afar,
and presented himself as Peter Wain. Before he knew where he was he was
stowed in the car and travelling with considerable speed through and
beyond the city. He was unused to the impetuous practicality of such
American action, and felt about as bewildered as if a chariot drawn by
dragons had carried him away into fairyland. It was under these
disconcerting conditions that he heard for the first time, in long
monologues from Wain, and short sentences from Drage, the story of the
Coptic Cup and the two crimes already connected with it.

It seemed that Wain had an uncle named Crake who had a partner named
Merton, who was number three in the series of rich business men to whom
the cup had belonged. The first of them, Titus P. Trant, the Copper
King, had received threatening letters from somebody signing himself
Daniel Doom. The name was presumably a pseudonym, but it had come to
stand for a very public if not a very popular character; for somebody as
well known as Robin Hood and Jack the Ripper combined. For it soon
became clear that the writer of the threatening letter did not confine
himself to threatening. Anyhow, the upshot was that old Trant was found
one morning with his head in his own lily - pond, and there was not the
shadow of a clue. The cup was, fortunately, safe in the bank; and it
passed with the rest of Trant's property to his cousin, Brian Horder,
who was also a man of great wealth and who was also threatened by the
nameless enemy. Brian Horder was picked up dead at the foot of a cliff
outside his seaside residence, at which there was a burglary, this time
on a large scale. For though the cup apparently again escaped, enough
bonds and securities were stolen to leave Horder's financial affairs in
confusion.

'Brian Horder's widow,' explained Wain, 'had to sell most of his
valuables, I believe, and Brander Merton must have purchased the cup at
that time, for he had it when I first knew him. But you can guess for
yourself that it's not a very comfortable thing to have.'

'Has Mr Merton ever had any of the threatening letters?' asked Father
Brown, after a pause.

'I imagine he has,' said Mr Drage; and something in his voice made the
priest look at him curiously, until he realized that the man in goggles
was laughing silently, in a fashion that gave the newcomer something of
a chill.

'I'm pretty sure he has,' said Peter Wain, frowning. 'I've not seen the
letters, only his secretary sees any of his letters, for he is pretty
reticent about business matters, as big business men have to be. But
I've seen him real upset and annoyed with letters; and letters that he
tore up, too, before even his secretary saw them. The secretary himself
is getting nervous and says he is sure somebody is laying for the old
man; and the long and the short of it is, that we'd be very grateful for
a little advice in the matter. Everybody knows your great reputation.
Father Brown, and the secretary asked me to see if you'd mind coming
straight out to the Merton house at once.'

'Oh, I see,' said Father Brown, on whom the meaning of this apparent
kidnapping began to dawn at last. 'But, really, I don't see that I can
do any more than you can. You're on the spot, and must have a hundred
times more data for a scientific conclusion than a chance visitor.'

'Yes,' said Mr Drage dryly; 'our conclusions are much too scientific to
be true. I reckon if anything hit a man like Titus P. Trant, it just
came out of the sky without waiting for any scientific explanation. What
they call a bolt from the blue.'

'You can't possibly mean,' cried Wain, 'that it was supernatural!'

But it was by no means easy at any time to discover what Mr Drage could
possibly mean; except that if he said somebody was a real smart man, he
very probably meant he was a fool. Mr Drage maintained an Oriental
immobility until the car stopped, a little while after, at what was
obviously their destination. It was rather a singular place. They had
been driving through a thinly - wooded country that opened into a wide
plain, and just in front of them was a building consisting of a single
wall or very high fence, round, like a Roman camp, and having rather the
appearance of an aerodrome. The barrier did not look like wood or stone,
and closer inspection proved it to be of metal.

They all alighted from the car, and one small door in the wall was slid
open with considerable caution, after manipulations resembling the
opening of a safe. But, much to Father Brown's surprise, the man called
Norman Drage showed no disposition to enter, but took leave of them with
sinister gaiety.

'I won't come in,' he said. 'It 'ud be too much pleasurable excitement
for old man Merton, I reckon. He loves the sight of me so much that he'd
die of joy.'

And he strode away, while Father Brown, with increasing wonder, was
admitted through the steel door which instantly clicked behind him.
Inside was a large and elaborate garden of gay and varied colours, but
entirely without any trees or tall shrubs or flowers. In the centre of
it rose a house of handsome and even striking architecture, but so high
and narrow as rather to resemble a tower. The burning sunlight gleamed
on glass roofing here and there at the top, but there seemed to be no
windows at all in the lower part of it. Over everything was that
spotless and sparkling cleanliness that seemed so native to the clear
American air. When they came inside the portal, they stood amid
resplendent marble and metals and enamels of brilliant colours, but
there was no staircase. Nothing but a single shaft for a lift went up
the centre between the solid walls, and the approach to it was guarded
by heavy, powerful men like plain - clothes policemen.

'Pretty elaborate protection, I know,' said Wain. 'Maybe it makes you
smile a little, Father Brown, to find Merton has to live in a fortress
like this without even a tree in the garden for anyone to hide behind.
But you don't know what sort of proposition we're up against in this
country. And perhaps you don't know just what the name of Brander Merton
means. He's a quiet - looking man enough, and anybody might pass him in
the street; not that they get much chance nowadays, for he can only go
out now and then in a closed car. But if anything happened to Brander
Merton there'd be earthquakes from Alaska to the Cannibal Islands. I
fancy there was never a king or emperor who had such power over the
nations as he has. After all, I suppose if you'd been asked to visit the
tsar, or the king of England, you'd have had the curiosity to go. You
mayn't care much for tsars or millionaires; but it just means that power
like that is always interesting. And I hope it's not against your
principles to visit a modern sort of emperor like Merton.'

'Not at all,' said Father Brown, quietly. 'It is my duty to visit
prisoners and all miserable men in captivity.'

There was a silence, and the young man frowned with a strange and almost
shifty look on his lean face. Then he said, abruptly:

'Well, you've got to remember it isn't only common crooks or the Black
Hand that's against him. This Daniel Doom is pretty much like the devil.
Look how he dropped Trant in his own gardens and Horder outside his
house, and got away with it.'

The top floor of the mansion, inside the enormously thick walls,
consisted of two rooms; an outer room which they entered, and an inner
room that was the great millionaire's sanctum. They entered the outer
room just as two other visitors were coming out of the inner one. One
was hailed by Peter Wain as his uncle - a small but very stalwart and
active man with a shaven head that looked bald, and a brown face that
looked almost too brown to have ever been white. This was old Crake,
commonly called Hickory Crake in reminiscence of the more famous Old
Hickory, because of his fame in the last Red Indian wars. His companion
was a singular contrast - a very dapper gentleman with dark hair like a
black varnish and a broad, black ribbon to his monocle: Barnard Blake,
who was old Merton's lawyer and had been discussing with the partners
the business of the firm. The four men met in the middle of the outer
room and paused for a little polite conversation, in the act of
respectively going and coming. And through all goings and comings
another figure sat at the back of the room near the inner door, massive
and motionless in the half - light from the inner window; a man with a
Negro face and enormous shoulders. This was what the humorous self -
criticism of America playfully calls the Bad Man; whom his friends might
call a bodyguard and his enemies a bravo.

This man never moved or stirred to greet anybody; but the sight of him
in the outer room seemed to move Peter Wain to his first nervous query.

'Is anybody with the chief?' he asked.

'Don't get rattled, Peter,' chuckled his uncle. 'Wilton the secretary is
with him, and I hope that's enough for anybody. I don't believe Wilton
ever sleeps for watching Merton. He is better than twenty bodyguards.
And he's quick and quiet as an Indian.'

'Well, you ought to know,' said his nephew, laughing. 'I remember the
Red Indian tricks you used to teach me when I was a boy and liked to
read Red Indian stories. But in my Red Indian stories Red Indians seemed
always to have the worst of it.'

'They didn't in real life,' said the old frontiersman grimly.

'Indeed?' inquired the bland Mr Blake. 'I should have thought they could
do very little against our firearms.'

'I've seen an Indian stand under a hundred guns with nothing but a
little scalping - knife and kill a white man standing on the top of a
fort,' said Crake.

'Why, what did he do with it?' asked the other.

'Threw it,' replied Crake, 'threw it in a flash before a shot could be
fired. I don't know where he learnt the trick.'

'Well, I hope you didn't learn it,' said his nephew, laughing.

'It seems to me,' said Father Brown, thoughtfully, 'that the story might
have a moral.'

While they were speaking Mr Wilton, the secretary, had come out of the
inner room and stood waiting; a pale, fair - haired man with a square
chin and steady eyes with a look like a dog's; it was not difficult to
believe that he had the single - eye of a watchdog.

He only said, 'Mr Merton can see you in about ten minutes,' but it
served for a signal to break up the gossiping group. Old Crake said he
must be off, and his nephew went out with him and his legal companion,
leaving Father Brown for the moment alone with his secretary; for the
negroid giant at the other end of the room could hardly be felt as if he
were human or alive; he sat so motionless with his broad back to them,
staring towards the inner room.

'Arrangements rather elaborate here, I'm afraid,' said the secretary.
'You've probably heard all about this Daniel Doom, and why it isn't safe
to leave the boss very much alone.'

'But he is alone just now, isn't he?' said Father Brown.

The secretary looked at him with grave, grey eyes. 'For fifteen
minutes,' he said. 'For fifteen minutes out of the twenty - four hours.
That is all the real solitude he has; and that he insists on, for a
pretty remarkable reason.'

'And what is the reason?' inquired the visitor. Wilton, the secretary,
continued his steady gaze, but his mouth, that had been merely grave,
became grim.

'The Coptic Cup,' he said. 'Perhaps you've forgotten the Coptic Cup; but
he hasn't forgotten that or anything else. He doesn't trust any of us
about the Coptic Cup. It's locked up somewhere and somehow in that room
so that only he can find it; and he won't take it out till we're all out
of the way. So we have to risk that quarter of an hour while he sits and
worships it; I reckon it's the only worshipping he does. Not that
there's any risk really; for I've turned all this place into a trap I
don't believe the devil himself could get into - or at any rate, get out
of. If this infernal Daniel Doom pays us a visit, he'll stay to dinner
and a good bit later, by God! I sit here on hot bricks for the fifteen
minutes, and the instant I heard a shot or a sound of struggle I'd press
this button and an electrocuting current would run in a ring round that
garden wall, so that it 'ud be death to cross or climb it. Of course,
there couldn't be a shot, for this is the only way in; and the only
window he sits at is away up on the top of a tower as smooth as a greasy
pole. But, anyhow, we're all armed here, of course; and if Doom did get
into that room he'd be dead before he got out.'

Father Brown was blinking at the carpet in a brown study. Then he said
suddenly, with something like a jerk: 'I hope you won't mind my
mentioning it, but a kind of a notion came into my head just this
minute. It's about you.'

'Indeed,' remarked Wilton, 'and what about me?'

'I think you are a man of one idea,' said Father Brown, 'and you will
forgive me for saying that it seems to be even more the idea of catching
Daniel Doom than of defending Brander Merton.'

Wilton started a little and continued to stare at his companion; then
very slowly his grim mouth took on a rather curious smile. 'How did you
- what makes you think that?' he asked.

'You said that if you heard a shot you could instantly electrocute the
escaping enemy,' remarked the priest. 'I suppose it occurred to you that
the shot might be fatal to your employer before the shock was fatal to
his foe. I don't mean that you wouldn't protect Mr Merton if you could,
but it seems to come rather second in your thoughts. The arrangements
are very elaborate, as you say, and you seem to have elaborated them.
But they seem even more designed to catch a murderer than to save a
man.'

'Father Brown,' said the secretary, who had recovered his quiet tone,
'you're very smart, but there's something more to you than smartness.
Somehow you're the sort of man to whom one wants to tell the truth; and
besides, you'll probably hear it, anyhow, for in one way it's a joke
against me already. They all say I'm a monomaniac about running down
this big crook, and perhaps I am. But I'll tell you one thing that none
of them know. My full name is John Wilton Border.' Father Brown nodded
as if he were completely enlightened, but the other went on.

'This fellow who calls himself Doom killed my father and uncle and
ruined my mother. When Merton wanted a secretary I took the job, because
I thought that where the cup was the criminal might sooner or later be.
But I didn't know who the criminal was and could only wait for him; and
I meant to serve Merton faithfully.'

'I understand,' said Father Brown gently; 'and, by the way, isn't it
time that we attended on him?'

'Why, yes,' answered Wilton, again starting a little out of his brooding
so that the priest concluded that his vindictive mania had again
absorbed him for a moment.' Go in now by all means.'

Father Brown walked straight into the inner room. No sound of greetings
followed, but only a dead silence; and a moment after the priest
reappeared in the doorway.

At the same moment the silent bodyguard sitting near the door moved
suddenly; and it was as if a huge piece of furniture had come to life.
It seemed as though something in the very attitude of the priest had
been a signal; for his head was against the light from the inner window
and his face was in shadow.

'I suppose you will press that button,' he said with a sort of sigh.

Wilton seemed to awake from his savage brooding with a bound and leapt
up with a catch in his voice.

'There was no shot,' he cried.

'Well,' said Father Brown, 'it depends what you mean by a shot.'

Wilton rushed forward, and they plunged into the inner room together. It
was a comparatively small room and simply though elegantly furnished.
Opposite to them one wide window stood open, over - looking the garden
and the wooded plain. Close up against the window stood a chair and a
small table, as if the captive desired as much air and light as was
allowed him during his brief luxury of loneliness.

On the little table under the window stood the Coptic Cup; its owner had
evidently been looking at it in the best light. It was well worth
looking at, for that white and brilliant daylight turned its precious
stones to many - coloured flames so that it might have been a model of
the Holy Grail. It was well worth looking at; but Brander Merton was not
looking at it. For his head had fallen back over his chair, his mane of
white hair hanging towards the floor, and his spike of grizzled beard
thrust up towards the ceiling, and out of his throat stood a long, brown
- painted arrow with red leathers at the other end.

'A silent shot,' said Father Brown, in a low voice; 'I was just
wondering about those new inventions for silencing firearms. But this is
a very old invention, and quite as silent.'

Then, after a moment, he added: 'I'm afraid he is dead. What are you
going to do?'

The pale secretary roused himself with abrupt resolution. 'I'm going to
press that button, of course,' he said, 'and if that doesn't do for
Daniel Doom, I'm going to hunt him through the world till I find him.'

'Take care it doesn't do for any of our friends,' observed Father Brown;
'they can hardly be far off; we'd better call them.'

'That lot know all about the wall,' answered Wilton. 'None of them will
try to climb it, unless one of them ... is in a great hurry.'

Father Brown went to the window by which the arrow had evidently entered
and looked out. The garden, with its flat flower - beds, lay far below
like a delicately coloured map of the world. The whole vista seemed so
vast and empty, the tower seemed set so far up in the sky that as he
stared out a strange phrase came back to his memory.

'A bolt from the blue,' he said. 'What was that somebody said about a
bolt from the blue and death coming out of the sky? Look how far away
everything looks; it seems extraordinary that an arrow could come so
far, unless it were an arrow from heaven.'

Wilton had returned, but did not reply, and the priest went on as in
soliloquy. 'One thinks of aviation. We must ask young Wain ... about
aviation.'

'There's a lot of it round here,' said the secretary.

'Case of very old or very new weapons,' observed Father Brown. 'Some
would be quite familiar to his old uncle, I suppose; we must ask him
about arrows. This looks rather like a Red Indian arrow. I don't know
where the Red Indian shot it from; but you remember the story the old
man told. I said it had a moral.'

'If it had a moral,' said Wilton warmly, 'it was only that a real 'Red
Indian might shoot a thing farther than you'd fancy. It's nonsense your
suggesting a parallel.'

'I don't think you've got the moral quite right,' said Father Brown.

Although the little priest appeared to melt into the millions of New
York next day, without any apparent attempt to be anything but a number
in a numbered street, he was, in fact, unobtrusively busy for the next
fortnight with the commission that had been given him, for he was filled
with profound fear about a possible miscarriage of justice. Without
having any particular air of singling them out from his other new
acquaintances, he found it easy to fall into talk with the two or three
men recently involved in the mystery; and with old Hickory Crake
especially he had a curious and interesting conversation. It took place
on a seat in Central Park, where the veteran sat with his bony hands and
hatchet face resting on the oddly - shaped head of a walking - stick of
dark red wood, possibly modelled on a tomahawk.

'Well, it may be a long shot,' he said, wagging his head, 'but I
wouldn't advise you to be too positive about how far an Indian arrow
could go. I've known some bow - shots that seemed to go straighter than
any bullets, and hit the mark to amazement, considering how long they
had been travelling. Of course, you practically never hear now of a Red
Indian with a bow and arrows, still less of a Red Indian hanging about
here. But if by any chance there were one of the old Indian marksmen,
with one of the old Indian bows, hiding in those trees hundreds of yards
beyond the Merton outer wall - why, then I wouldn't put it past the
noble savage to be able to send an arrow over the wall and into the top
window of Merton's house; no, nor into Merton, either. I've seen things
quite as wonderful as that done in the old days.'

'No doubt,' said the priest, 'you have done things quite as wonderful,
as well as seen them.'

Old Crake chuckled, and then said gruffly: 'Oh, that's all ancient
history.'

'Some people have a way of studying ancient history,' the priest said.
'I suppose we may take it there is nothing in your old record In make
people talk unpleasantly about this affair.'

'What do you mean?' demanded Crake, his eyes shifting sharply for the
first time, in his red, wooden face, that was rather like I he head of a
tomahawk.

'Well, since you were so well acquainted with all the arts and crafts of
the Redskin - ' began Father Brown slowly.

Crake had had a hunched and almost shrunken appearance as he sat with
his chin propped on its queer - shaped crutch. But the next instant he
stood erect in the path like a fighting bravo with the crutch clutched
like a cudgel.

'What?' he cried - in something like a raucous screech - 'what the hell!
Are you standing up to me to tell me I might happen to have murdered my
own brother - in - law?'

From a dozen seats dotted about the path people looked to - wards the
disputants, as they stood facing each other in the middle of the path,
the bald - headed energetic little man brandishing his outlandish stick
like a club, and the black, dumpy figure of the little cleric looking at
him without moving a muscle, save for his hinging eyelids. For a moment
it looked as if the black, dumpy figure would be knocked on the head,
and laid out with true Red Indian promptitude and dispatch; and the
large form of an Irish policeman could be seen heaving up in the
distance and bearing down on the group. But the priest only said, quite
placidly, like one answering an ordinary query:

'I have formed certain conclusions about it, but I do not think I will
mention them till I make my report.'

Whether under the influence of the footsteps of the policeman or of the
eyes of the priest, old Hickory tucked his stick under his arm and put
his hat on again, grunting. The priest bade him a placid good morning,
and passed in an unhurried fashion out of the park, making his way to
the lounge of the hotel where he knew that young Wain was to be found.
The young man sprang up with a greeting; he looked even more haggard and
harassed than before, as if some worry were eating him away; and the
priest had a suspicion that his young friend had recently been engaged,
with only too conspicuous success, in evading the last Amendment to the
American Constitution. But at the first word about his hobby or
favourite science he was vigilant and concentrated enough. For Father
Brown had asked, in an idle and conversational fashion, whether much
flying was done in that district, and had told how he had at first
mistaken Mr Merton's circular wall for an aerodrome.

'It's a wonder you didn't see any while we were there,' answered Captain
Wain. 'Sometimes they're as thick as flies; that open plain is a great
place for them, and I shouldn't wonder if it were the chief breeding -
ground, so to speak, for my sort of birds in the future. I've flown a
good deal there myself, of course, and I know most of the fellows about
here who flew in the war; but there are a whole lot of people taking to
it out there now whom I never heard of in my life. I suppose it will be
like motoring soon, and every man in the States will have one.'

'Being endowed by his Creator,' said Father Brown with a smile, 'with
the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of motoring - not to mention
aviation. So I suppose we may take it that one strange aeroplane passing
over that house, at certain times, wouldn't be noticed much.'

'No,' replied the young man; 'I don't suppose it would.'

'Or even if the man were known,' went on the other, 'I suppose he might
get hold of a machine that wouldn't be recognized as his. If you, for
instance, flew in the ordinary way, Mr Merton and his friends might
recognize the rig - out, perhaps; but you might pass pretty near that
window on a different pattern of plane, or whatever you call it; near
enough for practical purposes.'

'Well, yes,' began the young man, almost automatically, and then ceased,
and remained staring at the cleric with an open mouth and eyes standing
out of his head.

'My God!' he said, in a low voice;' my God!'

Then he rose from the lounge seat, pale and shaking from head to foot
and still staring at the priest.

'Are you mad?' he said;' are you raving mad?'

There was a silence and then he spoke again in a swift hissing fashion.
'You positively come here to suggest - '

'No; only to collect suggestions,' said Father Brown, rising. 'I may
have formed some conclusions provisionally, but I had better reserve
them for the present.'

And then saluting the other with the same stiff civility, he passed out
of the hotel to continue his curious peregrinations.

By the dusk of that day they had led him down the dingy streets and
steps that straggled and tumbled towards the river in the the oldest and
most irregular part of the city. Immediately under the coloured lantern
that marked the entrance to a rather low Chinese restaurant he
encountered a figure he had seen before, though by no means presenting
itself to the eye as he had seen it.

Mr Norman Drage still confronted the world grimly behind his great
goggles, which seemed somehow to cover his face like a dark musk of
glass. But except for the goggles, his appearance had undergone a
strange transformation in the month that had elapsed since the murder.
He had then, as Father Brown had noted, been dressed up to the nines -
up to that point, indeed, where there begins to be too fine a
distinction between the dandy and the dummy outside a tailor's shop. But
now all those externals were mysteriously altered for the worse; as if
the tailor's dummy had been turned into a scarecrow. His top hat still
existed, but it was battered and shabby; his clothes were dilapidated;
his watch - chain and minor ornaments were gone. Father Brown, however,
addressed him as if they had met yesterday, and made no demur to silting
down with him on a bench in the cheap eating - house whither he was
bound. It was not he, however, who began the conversation.

'Well?' growled Drage, 'and have you succeeded in avenging your holy and
sainted millionaire? We know all millionaires are holy and sainted; you
can find it all in the papers next day, about how they lived by the
light of the Family Bible they read at their mother's knee. Gee! if
they'd only read out some of the things there are in the Family Bible,
the mother might have been startled some. And the millionaire, too, I
reckon. The old Book's full of a lot of grand fierce old notions they
don't grow nowadays; sort of wisdom of the Stone Age and buried under
the Pyramids. Suppose somebody had flung old man Merton from the top of
that tower of his, and let him be eaten by dogs at the bottom, it would
be no worse than what happened to Jezebel. Wasn't Agag hacked into
little pieces, for all he went walking delicately? Merton walked
delicately all his life, damn him - until he got too delicate to walk at
all. But the shaft of the Lord found him out, as it might have done in
the old Book, and struck him dead on the top of his tower to be a
spectacle to the people.

'The shaft was material, at least,' said his companion.

'The Pyramids are mighty material, and they hold down the dead kings all
right,' grinned the man in the goggles. 'I think there's a lot to be
said for these old material religions. There's old carvings that have
lasted for thousands of years, showing their gods and emperors with
bended bows; with hands that look as if they could really bend bows of
stone. Material, perhaps - but what materials! Don't you sometimes stand
staring at those old Eastern patterns and things, till you have a hunch
that old Lord God is still driving like a dark Apollo, and shooting
black rays of death?'

'If he is,' replied Father Brown, 'I might call him by another name. But
I doubt whether Merton died by a dark ray or even a stone arrow.'

'I guess you think he's St Sebastian,' sneered Drage, 'killed with an
arrow. A millionaire must be a martyr. How do you know he didn't deserve
it? You don't know much about your millionaire, I fancy. Well, let me
tell you he deserved it a hundred times over.'

'Well,' asked Father Brown gently, 'why didn't you murder him?'

'You want to know why I didn't?' said the other, staring. 'Well, you're
a nice sort of clergyman.'

'Not at all,' said the other, as if waving away a compliment.

'I suppose it's your way of saying I did,' snarled Drage. 'Well, prove
it, that's all. As for him, I reckon he was no loss.'

'Yes, he was,' said Father Brown, sharply. 'He was a loss to you. That's
why you didn't kill him.'

And he walked out of the room, leaving the man in goggles gaping after
him.

It was nearly a month later that Father Brown revisited the house where
the third millionaire had suffered from the vendetta of Daniel Doom. A
sort of council was held of the persons most interested. Old Crake sat
at the head of the table with his nephew at his right hand, the lawyer
on his left; the big man with the African features, whose name appeared
to be Harris, was ponderously present, if only as a material witness; a
red - haired, sharp -nosed individual addressed as Dixon seemed to be
the representative of Pinkerton's or some such private agency; and
Father Brown slipped unobtrusively into an empty seat beside him.

Every newspaper in the world was full of the catastrophe of the colossus
of finance, of the great organizer of the Big Business that bestrides
the modern world; but from the tiny group that had been nearest to him
at the very instant of his death very little could be learned. The
uncle, nephew, and attendant solicitor declared they were well outside
the outer wall before the alarm was raised; and inquiries of the
official guardians at both barriers brought answers that were rather
confused, but on the whole confirmatory. Only one other complication
seemed to call for consideration. It seemed that round about the time of
the death, before or after, a stranger had been found hanging
mysteriously round the entrance and asking to see Mr Merton. The
servants had some difficulty in understanding what he meant, for his
language was very obscure; but it was afterwards considered to be also
very suspicious, since he had said something about a wicked man being
destroyed by a word out of the sky.

Peter Wain leaned forward, the eyes bright in his haggard face, and
said:

'I'll bet on that, anyhow. Norman Drage.'

'And who in the world is Norman Drage?' asked his uncle.

'That's what I want to know,' replied the young man. 'I practically
asked him, but he has got a wonderful trick of twisting every straight
question crooked; it's like lunging at a fencer. He hooked on to me with
hints about the flying - ship of the future; but I never trusted him
much.'

'But what sort of a man is he?' asked Crake.

'He's a mystagogue,' said Father Brown, with innocent promptitude.
'There are quite a lot of them about; the sort of men about town who
hint to you in Paris cafes and cabarets that they've lifted the veil of
Isis or know the secret of Stonehenge. In a case like this they're sure
to have some sort of mystical explanations.'

The smooth, dark head of Mr Barnard Blake, the lawyer, was inclined
politely towards the speaker, but his smile was faintly hostile.

'I should hardly have thought, sir,' he said, 'that you had any quarrel
with mystical explanations.'

'On the contrary,' replied Father Brown, blinking amiably at him.
'That's just why I can quarrel with 'em. Any sham lawyer could bamboozle
me, but he couldn't bamboozle you; because you're a lawyer yourself. Any
fool could dress up as a Red Indian and I'd swallow him whole as the
only original Hiawatha; but Mr Crake would see through him at once. A
swindler could pretend to me that he knew all about aeroplanes, but not
to Captain Wain. And it's just the same with the other, don't you see?
It's just because I have picked up a little about mystics that I have no
use for mystagogues. Real mystics don't hide mysteries, they reveal
them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you've seen it
it's still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and
secrecy, and when you find it, it's a platitude. But in the case of
Drage, I admit he had also another and more practical notion in talking
about fire from heaven or bolts from the blue.'

'And what was his notion?' asked Wain. 'I think it wants watching
whatever it is.'

'Well,' replied the priest, slowly, 'he wanted us to think the murders
were miracles because . . . well, because he knew they weren't.'

'Ah,' said Wain, with a sort of hiss, 'I was waiting for that. In plain
words, he is the criminal.'

'In plain words, he is the criminal who didn't commit the crime,'
answered Father Brown calmly.

'Is that your conception of plain words?' inquired Blake politely.

'You'll be saying I'm the mystagogue now,' said Father Brown somewhat
abashed, but with a broad smile, 'but it was really quite accidental.
Drage didn't commit the crime - I mean this crime. His only crime was
blackmailing somebody, and he hung about here to do it; but he wasn't
likely to want the secret to be public property or the whole business to
be cut short by death. We can talk about him afterwards. Just at the
moment, I only want him cleared out of the way.'

'Out of the way of what?' asked the other.

'Out of the way of the truth,' replied the priest, looking at him
tranquilly, with level eyelids.

'Do you mean,' faltered the other, 'that you know the truth?'

'I rather think so,' said Father Brown modestly.

There was an abrupt silence, after which Crake cried out suddenly and
irrelevantly in a rasping voice:

'Why, where is that secretary fellow? Wilton! He ought to be here.'

'I am in communication with Mr Wilton,' said Father Brown gravely; 'in
fact, I asked him to ring me up here in a few minutes from now. I may
say that we've worked the thing out together, in a manner of speaking.'

'If you're working together, I suppose it's all right,' grumbled Crake.
'I know he was always a sort of bloodhound on the trail of his vanishing
crook, so perhaps it was well to hunt in couples with him. But if you
know the truth about this, where the devil did you get it from?'

'I got it from you,' answered the priest, quietly, and continued to gaze
mildly at the glaring veteran.' I mean I made the first guess from a
hint in a story of yours about an Indian who threw a knife and hit a man
on the top of a fortress.'

'You've said that several times,' said Wain, with a puzzled air; 'but I
can't see any inference, except that this murderer threw an arrow and
hit a man on the top of a house very like a fortress. But of course the
arrow wasn't thrown but shot, and would go much further. Certainly it
went uncommonly far; but I don't see how it brings us any farther.'

'I'm afraid you missed the point of the story,' said Father Brown. 'It
isn't that if one thing cap go far another can go farther. It is that
the wrong use of a tool can cut both ways. The men on Crake's fort
thought of a knife as a thing for a hand - to - hand fight and forgot
that it could be a missile like a javelin. Some other people I know
thought of a thing as a missile like a javelin and forgot that, after
all, it could be used hand - to - hand as a spear. In short, the moral
of the story is that since a dagger can be turned into an arrow, so can
an arrow be turned into a dagger.'

They were all looking at him now; but he continued in the same casual
and unconscious tone: 'Naturally we wondered and worried a good deal
about who shot that arrow through the window and whether it came from
far away, and so on. But the truth is that nobody shot the arrow at all.
It never came in at the window at all.'

'Then how did it come there?' asked the swarthy lawyer, with a rather
lowering face.

'Somebody brought it with him, I suppose,' said Father Brown; 'it
wouldn't be hard to carry or conceal. Somebody had it in his hand as he
stood with Merton in Merton's own room. Somebody thrust it into Merton's
throat like a poignard, and then had the highly intelligent idea of
placing the whole thing at such a place and angle that we all assumed in
a flash that it had flown in at the window like a bird.'

'Somebody,' said old Crake, in a voice as heavy as stone.

The telephone bell rang with a strident and horrible clamour of
insistence. It was in the adjoining room, and Father Brown had darted
there before anybody else could move.

'What the devil is it all about?' cried Peter Wain, who seemed all
shaken and distracted.

'He said he expected to be rung up by Wilton, the secretary,' replied
his uncle in the same dead voice.

'I suppose it is Wilton?' observed the lawyer, like one speaking to fill
up a silence. But nobody answered the question until Father Brown
reappeared suddenly and silently in the room, bringing the answer.

'Gentlemen,' he said, when he had resumed his seat,' it was you who
asked me to look into the truth about this puzzle; and having found the
truth, I must tell it, without any pretence of softening the shock. I'm
afraid anybody who pokes his nose into things like this can't afford to
be a respecter of persons.'

'I suppose,' said Crake, breaking the silence that followed, 'that means
that some of us are accused, or suspected.'

'All of us are suspected,' answered Father Brown. 'I may be suspected
myself, for I found the body.'

'Of course we're suspected,' snapped Wain. 'Father Brown kindly
explained to me how I could have besieged the tower in a flying -
machine.'

'No,' replied the priest, with a smile; 'you described to me how you
could have done it. That was just the interesting part of it.'

'He seemed to think it likely,' growled Crake, 'that I killed him myself
with a Red Indian arrow.'

'I thought it most unlikely,' said Father Brown, making rather a wry
face. I'm sorry if I did wrong, but I couldn't think of any other way of
testing the matter. I can hardly think of anything more improbable than
the notion that Captain Wain went careering in a huge machine past the
window, at the very moment of the murder, and nobody noticed it; unless,
perhaps, it were the notion that a respectable old gentleman should play
at Red Indians with a bow and arrow behind the bushes, to kill somebody
he could have killed in twenty much simpler ways. But I had to find out
if they had had anything to do with it; and so I had to accuse them in
order to prove their innocence.'

'And how have you proved their innocence?' asked Blake the lawyer,
leaning forward eagerly.

'Only by the agitation they showed when they were accused,' answered the
other.

'What do you mean, exactly?'

'If you will permit me to say so,' remarked Father Brown, composedly
enough, 'I did undoubtedly think it my duty to suspect them and
everybody else. I did suspect Mr Crake and I did suspect Captain Wain,
in the sense that I considered the possibility or probability of their
guilt. I told them I had formed conclusions about it; and I will now
tell them what those conclusions were. I was sure they were innocent,
because of the manner and the moment in which they passed from
unconsciousness to indignation. So long as they never thought they were
accused, they went on giving me materials to support the accusation.
They practically explained to me how they might have committed the
crime. Then they suddenly realized with a shock and a shout of rage that
they were accused; they realized it long after they might well have
expected to be accused, but long before I had accused them. Now no
guilty person could possibly do that. He might be snappy and suspicious
from the first; or he might simulate unconsciousness and innocence up to
the end. But he wouldn't begin by making things worse for himself and
then give a great jump and begin furiously denying the notion he had
himself helped to suggest. That could only come by his having really
failed to realize what he was suggesting. The self - consciousness of a
murderer would always be at least morbidly vivid enough to prevent him
first forgetting his relation with the thing and then remembering to
deny it. So I ruled you both out and others for other reasons I needn't
discuss now. For instance, there was the secretary -

'But I'm not talking about that just now. Look here, I've just heard
from Wilton on the phone, and he's given me permission to tell you some
rather serious news. Now I suppose you all know by this time who Wilton
was, and what he was after.'

'I know he was after Daniel Doom and wouldn't be happy till he got him,'
answered Peter Wain; 'and I've heard the story that he's the son of old
Horder, and that's why he's the avenger of blood. Anyhow, he's certainly
looking for the man called Doom.'

'Well,' said Father Brown, 'he has found him.'

Peter Wain sprang to his feet in excitement.

'The murderer!' he cried. 'Is the murderer in the lock - up already?'

'No,' said Father Brown, gravely; 'I said the news was serious, and it's
more serious than that. I'm afraid poor Wilton has taken a terrible
responsibility. I'm afraid he's going to put a terrible responsibility
on us. He hunted the criminal down, and just when he had him cornered at
last - well, he has taken the law into his own hands.'

'You mean that Daniel Doom - ' began the lawyer.

'I mean that Daniel Doom is dead,' said the priest. 'There was some sort
of wild struggle, and Wilton killed him.'

'Serve him right,' growled Mr Hickory Crake.

'Can't blame Wilton for downing a crook like that, especially
considering the feud,' assented Wain; 'it was like stepping on a viper.'

'I don't agree with you,' said Father Brown. 'I suppose we all talk
romantic stuff at random in defence of lynching and lawlessness; but I
have a suspicion that if we lose our laws and liberties we shall regret
it. Besides, it seems to me illogical to say there is something to be
said for Wilton committing murder, without even inquiring whether there
was anything to be said for Doom committing it. I rather doubt whether
Doom was merely a vulgar assassin; he may have been a sort of outlaw
with a mania about the cup, demanding it with threats and only killing
after a struggle; both victims were thrown down just outside their
houses. The objection to Wilton's way of doing it is that we shall never
hear Doom's side of the case.'

'Oh, I've no patience with all this sentimental whitewashing of
worthless, murderous blackguards,' cried Wain, heatedly. 'If Wilton
croaked the criminal he did a jolly good day's work, and there's an end
of it.'

'Quite so, quite so,' said his uncle, nodding vigorously.

Father Brown's face had a yet heavier gravity as he looked slowly round
the semicircle effaces. 'Is that really what you all think?' he asked.
Even as he did so he realized that he was an Englishman and an exile. He
realized that he was among foreigners, even if he was among friends.
Around that ring of foreigners ran a restless fire that was not native
to his own breed; the fiercer spirit of the western nation that can
rebel and lynch, and above all, combine. He knew that they had already
combined.

'Well,' said Father Brown, with a sigh, 'I am to understand, then, that
you do definitely condone this unfortunate man's crime, or act of
private justice, or whatever you call it. In that case it will not hurt
him if I tell you a little more about it.'

He rose suddenly to his feet; and though they saw no meaning in his
movement, it seemed in some way to change or chill the very air in the
room.

'Wilton killed Doom in a rather curious way,' he began.

'How did Wilton kill him?' asked Crake, abruptly.

'With an arrow,' said Father Brown.

Twilight was gathering in the long room, and daylight dwindling to a
gleam from the great window in the inner room, where the great
millionaire had died. Almost automatically the eyes of the group turned
slowly towards it, but as yet there was no sound. Then the voice of
Crake came cracked and high and senile in a sort of crowing gabble.

'What you mean? What you mean? Brander Merton killed by an arrow. This
crook killed by an arrow - '

'By the same arrow,' said the priest, 'and at the same moment.'

Again there was a sort of strangled and yet swollen and bursting
silence, and young Wain began: 'You mean - '

'I mean that your friend Merton was Daniel Doom,' said Father Brown
firmly;' and the only Daniel Doom you'll ever find. Your friend Merton
was always crazy after that Coptic Cup that he used to worship like an
idol every day; and in his wild youth he had really killed two men to
get it, though I still think the deaths may have been in a sense
accidents of the robbery. Anyhow, he had it; and that man Drage knew the
story and was blackmailing him. But Wilton was after him for a very
different purpose; I fancy he only discovered the truth when he'd got
into this house. But anyhow, it was in this house, and in that room,
that this hunt ended, and he slew the slayer of his father.'

For a long time nobody answered. Then old Crake could be heard drumming
with his fingers on the table and muttering:

'Brander must have been mad. He must have been mad.'

'But, good Lord!' burst out Peter Wain;' what are we to do? What are we
to say? Oh, it's all quite different! What about the papers and the big
business people? Brander Merton is a thing like the President or the
Pope of Rome.'

'I certainly think it is rather different,' began Barnard Blake, the
lawyer, in a low voice. 'The difference involves a whole - '

Father Brown struck the table so that the glasses on it rang; and they
could almost fancy a ghostly echo from the mysterious chalice that still
stood in the room beyond.

'No!' he cried, in a voice like a pistol - shot. 'There shall be no
difference. I gave you your chance of pitying the poor devil when you
thought he was a common criminal. You wouldn't listen then; you were all
for private vengeance then. You were all for letting him be butchered
like a wild beast without a hearing or a public trial, and said he had
only got his deserts. Very well then, if Daniel Doom has got his
deserts, Brander Merton has got his deserts. If that was good enough for
Doom, by all that is holy it is good enough for Merton. Take your wild
justice or our dull legality; but in the name of Almighty God, let there
be an equal lawlessness or an equal law.'

Nobody answered except the lawyer, and he answered with something like a
snarl: 'What will the police say if we tell them we mean to condone a
crime?'

'What will they say if I tell them you did condone it?' replied Father
Brown. 'Your respect for the law comes rather late, Mr Barnard Blake.'

After a pause he resumed in a milder tone: 'I, for one, am ready to tell
the truth if the proper authorities ask me; and the rest of you can do
as you like. But as a fact, it will make very little difference. Wilton
only rang me up to tell me that I was now free to lay his confession
before you; for when you heard it, he would be beyond pursuit.'

He walked slowly into the inner room and stood there by the little table
beside which the millionaire had died. The Coptic Cup still stood in the
same place, and he remained there for a space staring at its cluster of
all the colours of the rainbow, and beyond it into a blue abyss of sky.

THREE: The Oracle of the Dog

'YES,' said Father Brown, 'I always like a dog, so long as he isn't
spelt backwards.'

Those who are quick in talking are not always quick in listening.
Sometimes even their brilliancy produces a sort of stupidity. Father
Brown's friend and companion was a young man with a stream of ideas and
stories, an enthusiastic young man named Fiennes, with eager blue eyes
and blond hair that seemed to be brushed back, not merely with a hair -
brush but with the wind of the world as be rushed through it. But he
stopped in the torrent of his talk in a momentary bewilderment before he
saw the priest's very simple meaning.

'You mean that people make too much of them?' he said. 'Well, I don't
know. They're marvellous creatures. Sometimes I think they know a lot
more than we do.'

Father Brown said nothing, but continued to stroke the head of the big
retriever in a half - abstracted but apparently soothing fashion.

'Why,' said Fiennes, warming again to his monologue, 'there was a dog in
the case I've come to see you about: what they call the 'Invisible
Murder Case', you know. It's a strange story, but from my point of view
the dog is about the strangest thing in it. Of course, there's the
mystery of the crime itself, and how old Druce can have been killed by
somebody else when he was all alone in the summer - house - '

The hand stroking the dog stopped for a moment in its rhythmic movement,
and Father Brown said calmly: 'Oh, it was a summer - house, was it?'

'I thought you'd read all about it in the papers,' answered Fiennes.'
Stop a minute; I believe I've got a cutting that will give you all the
particulars.' He produced a strip of newspaper from his pocket and
handed it to the priest, who began to read it, holding it close to his
blinking eyes with one hand while the other continued its half -
conscious caresses of the dog. It looked like the parable of a man not
letting his right hand know what his left hand did.

-------------

Many mystery stories, about men murdered behind locked doors and
windows, and murderers escaping without means of entrance and exit, have
come true in the course of the extraordinary events at Cranston on the
coast of Yorkshire, where Colonel Druce was found stabbed from behind by
a dagger that has entirely disappeared from the scene, and apparently
even from the neighbourhood.

The summer - house in which he died was indeed accessible at one
entrance, the ordinary doorway which looked down the central walk of the
garden towards the house. But, by a combination of events almost to be
called a coincidence, it appears that both the path and the entrance
were watched during the crucial time, and there is a chain of witnesses
who confirm each other. The summer - house stands at the extreme end of
the garden, where there is no exit or entrance of any kind. The central
garden path is a lane between two ranks of tall delphiniums, planted so
close that any stray step off the path would leave its traces; and both
path and plants run right up to the very mouth of the summer - house, so
that no straying from that straight path could fail to be observed, and
no other mode of entrance can be imagined.

Patrick Floyd, secretary of the murdered man, testified that he had been
in a position to overlook the whole garden from the time when Colonel
Druce last appeared alive in the doorway to the time when he was found
dead; as he, Floyd, had been on the top of a step - ladder clipping the
garden hedge. Janet Druce, the dead man's daughter, confirmed this,
saying that she had sat on the terrace of the house throughout that time
and had seen Floyd at his work. Touching some part of the time, this is
again supported by Donald Druce, her brother - who overlooked the garden
- standing at his bedroom window in his dressing - gown, for he had
risen late. Lastly, the account is consistent with that given by Dr
Valentine, a neighbour, who called for a time to talk with Miss Druce on
the terrace, and by the Colonel's solicitor, Mr Aubrey Traill, who was
apparently the last to see the murdered man alive - presumably with the
exception of the murderer.

All are agreed that the course of events was as follows: About half past
three in the afternoon, Miss Druce went down the path to ask her father
when he would like tea; but he said he did not want any and was waiting
to see Traill, his lawyer, who was to be sent to him in the summer -
house. The girl then came away and met Traill coming down the path; she
directed him to her father and he went in as directed. About half an
hour afterwards he came out again, the Colonel coming with him to the
door and showing himself to all appearance in health and even high
spirits. He had been somewhat annoyed earlier in the day by his son's
irregular hours, but seemed to recover his temper in a perfectly normal
fashion, and had been rather markedly genial in receiving other
visitors, including two of his nephews, who came over for the day. But
as these were out walking during the whole period of the tragedy, they
had no evidence to give. It is said, indeed, that the Colonel was not on
very good terms with Dr Valentine, but that gentleman only had a brief
interview with the daughter of the house, to whom he is supposed to be
paying serious attentions.

Trail, the solicitor, says he left the Colonel entirely alone in the
summer - house, and this is confirmed by Floyd's bird's - eye view of
the garden, which showed nobody else passing the only entrance. Ten
minutes later. Miss Druce again went down the garden and had not reached
the end of the path when she saw her father, who was conspicuous by his
white linen coat, lying in a heap on the floor. She uttered a scream
which brought others to the spot, and on entering the place they found
the Colonel lying dead beside his basket - chair, which was also upset.
Dr Valentine, who was still in the immediate neighbourhood, testified
that the wound was made by some sort of stiletto, entering under the
shoulder - blade and piercing the heart. The police have searched the
neighbourhood for such a weapon, but no trace of it can be found.

'So Colonel Druce wore a white coat, did he?' said Father Brown as he
put down the paper.

'Trick he learnt in the tropics,' replied Fiennes, with some wonder.
'He'd had some queer adventures there, by his own account; and I fancy
his dislike of Valentine was connected with the doctor coming from the
tropics, too. But it's all an infernal puzzle. The account there is
pretty accurate. I didn't see the tragedy, in the sense of the
discovery; I was out walking with the young nephews and the dog - the
dog I wanted to tell you about. But I saw the stage set for it as
described; the straight lane between the blue flowers right up to the
dark entrance, and the lawyer going down it in his blacks and his silk
hat, and the red head of the secretary showing high above the green
hedge as he worked on it with his shears. Nobody could have mistaken
that red head at any distance; and if people say they saw it there all
the time, you may be sure they did.

This red - haired secretary, Floyd, is quite a character; a breathless
bounding sort of fellow, always doing everybody's work as he was doing
the gardener's. I think he is an American; he's certainly got the
American view of life - what they call the view - point, bless 'em.'

'What about the lawyer?' asked Father Brown. There was a silence and
then Fiennes spoke quite slowly for him. 'Traill struck me as a singular
man. In his fine black clothes he was almost foppish, yet you can hardly
call him fashionable. For he wore a pair of long, luxuriant black
whiskers such as haven't been seen since Victorian times. He had rather
a fine grave face and a fine grave manner, but every now and then he
seemed to remember to smile. And when he showed his white teeth he
seemed to lose a little of his dignity, and there was something faintly
fawning about him. It may have been only embarrassment, for he would
also fidget with his cravat and his tie - pin, which were at once
handsome and unusual, like himself. If I could think of anybody - but
what's the good, when the whole thing's impossible? Nobody knows who did
it. Nobody knows how it could be done. At least there's only one
exception I'd make, and that's why I really mentioned the whole thing.
The dog knows.'

Father Brown sighed and then said absently: 'You were there as a friend
of young Donald, weren't you? He didn't go on your walk with you?'

'No,' replied Fiennes smiling. 'The young scoundrel had gone to bed that
morning and got up that afternoon. I went with his cousins, two young
officers from India, and our conversation was trivial enough. I remember
the elder, whose name I think is Herbert Druce and who is an authority
on horse - breeding, talked about nothing but a mare he had bought and
the moral character of the man who sold her; while his brother Harry
seemed to be brooding on his bad luck at Monte Carlo. I only mention it
to show you, in the light of what happened on our walk, that there was
nothing psychic about us. The dog was the only mystic in our company.'

'What sort of a dog was he?' asked the priest.

'Same breed as that one,' answered Fiennes. 'That's what started me off
on the story, your saying you didn't believe in believing in a dog. He's
a big black retriever, named Nox, and a suggestive name, too; for I
think what he did a darker mystery than the murder. You know Druce's
house and garden are by the sea; we walked about a mile from it along
the sands and then turned back, going the other way. We passed a rather
curious rock called the Rock of Fortune, famous in the neighbourhood
because it's one of those examples of one stone barely balanced on
another, so that a touch would knock it over. It is not really very high
but the hanging outline of it makes it look a little wild and sinister;
at least it made it look so to me, for I don't imagine my jolly young
companions were afflicted with the picturesque. But it may be that I was
beginning to feel an atmosphere; for just then the question arose of
whether it was time to go back to tea, and even then I think I had a
premonition that time counted for a good deal in the business. Neither
Herbert Druce nor I had a watch, so we called out to his brother, who
was some paces behind, having stopped to light his pipe under the hedge.
Hence it happened that he shouted out the hour, which was twenty past
four, in his big voice through the growing twilight; and somehow the
loudness of it made it sound like the proclamation of something
tremendous. His unconsciousness seemed to make it all the more so; but
that was always the way with omens; and particular ticks of the clock
were really very ominous things that afternoon. According to Dr
Valentine's testimony, poor Druce had actually died just about half past
four.

'Well, they said we needn't go home for ten minutes, and we walked a
little farther along the sands, doing nothing in particular - throwing
stones for the dog and throwing sticks into the sea for, him to swim
after. But to me the twilight seemed to grow oddly oppressive, and the
very shadow of the top - heavy Rock of Fortune lay on me like a load.
And then the curious thing happened. Nox had just brought back Herbert's
walking - stick out of the sea and his brother had thrown his in also.
The dog swam out again, but just about what must have been the stroke of
the half - hour, he stopped swimming. He came back again on to the shore
and stood in front of us. Then he suddenly threw up his head and sent up
a howl or wail of woe - if ever I heard one in the world.

''What the devil's the matter with the dog?' asked Herbert; but none of
us could answer. There was a long silence after the brute's wailing and
whining died away on the desolate shore; and then the silence was
broken. As I live, it was broken by a faint and far - off shriek, like
the shriek of a woman from beyond the hedges inland. We didn't know what
it was then; but we knew afterwards. It was the cry the girl gave when
she first saw the body of her father.'

'You went back, I suppose,' said Father Brown patiently. 'What happened
then?'

'I'll tell you what happened then,' said Fiennes with a grim emphasis.
'When we got back into that garden the first thing we saw was Traill,
the lawyer; I can see him now with his black hat and black whiskers
relieved against the perspective of the blue flowers stretching down to
the summer - house, with the sunset and the strange outline of the Rock
of Fortune in the distance. His face and figure were in shadow against
the sunset; but I swear the white teeth were showing in his head and he
was smiling. The moment Nox saw that man the dog dashed forward and
stood in the middle of the path barking at him madly, murderously,
volleying out curses that were almost verbal in their dreadful
distinctness of hatred. And the man doubled up and fled, along the path
between the flowers.'

Father Brown sprang to his feet with a startling impatience. 'So the dog
denounced him, did he?' he cried. 'The oracle of the dog condemned him.
Did you see what birds were flying, and are you sure whether they were
on the right hand or the left? Did you consult the augurs about the
sacrifices? Surely you didn't omit to cut open the dog and examine his
entrails. That is the sort of scientific test you heathen humanitarians
seem to trust when you are thinking of taking away the life and honour
of a man.'

Fiennes sat gaping for an instant before he found breath to say: 'Why,
what's the matter with you? What have I done now?' A sort of anxiety
came back into the priest's eyes - the anxiety of a man who has run
against a post in the dark and wonders for a moment whether he has hurt
it.

'I'm most awfully sorry,' he said with sincere distress. 'I beg your
pardon for being so rude; pray forgive me.'

Fiennes looked at him curiously. 'I sometimes think you are more of a
mystery than any of the mysteries,' he said. 'But anyhow, if you don't
believe in the mystery of the dog, at least you can't get over the
mystery of the man. You can't deny that at the very moment when the
beast came back from the sea and bellowed, his master's soul was driven
out of his body by the blow of some unseen power that no mortal man can
trace or even imagine. And as for the lawyer - I don't go only by the
dog - there are other curious details, too. He struck me as a smooth,
smiling, equivocal sort of person; and one of his tricks seemed like a
sort of hint. You know the doctor and the police were on the spot very
quickly; Valentine was brought back when walking away from the house,
and he telephoned instantly. That, with the secluded house, small
numbers, and enclosed space, made it pretty possible to search everybody
who could have been near; and everybody was thoroughly searched - for a
weapon. The whole house, garden, and shore were combed for a weapon. The
disappearance of the dagger is almost as crazy as the disappearance of
the man.'

'The disappearance of the dagger,' said Father Brown, nodding. He seemed
to have become suddenly attentive.

'Well,' continued Fiennes, 'I told you that man Traill had a trick of
fidgeting with his tie and tie - pin - especially his tie - pin. His
pin, like himself, was at once showy and old - fashioned. It had one of
those stones with concentric coloured rings that look like an eye; and
his own concentration on it got on my nerves, as if he had been a
Cyclops with one eye in the middle of his body. But the pin was not only
large but long; and it occurred to me that his anxiety about its
adjustment was because it was even longer than it looked; as long as a
stiletto in fact.'

Father Brown nodded thoughtfully. 'Was any other instrument ever
suggested?' he asked.

'There was another suggestion,' answered Fiennes, 'from one of the young
Druces - the cousins, I mean. Neither Herbert nor Harry Druce would have
struck one at first as likely to be of assistance in scientific
detection; but while Herbert was really the traditional type of heavy
Dragoon, caring for nothing but horses and being an ornament to the
Horse Guards, his younger brother Harry had been in the Indian Police
and knew something about such things. Indeed, in his own way he was
quite clever; and I rather fancy he had been too clever; I mean he had
left the police through breaking some red - tape regulations and taking
some sort of risk and responsibility of his own. Anyhow, he was in some
sense a detective out of work, and threw himself into this business with
more than the ardour of an amateur. And it was with him that I had an
argument about the weapon - an argument that led - to something new. It
began by his countering my description of the dog barking at Traill; and
he said that a dog at his worst didn't bark, but growled.'

'He was quite right there,' observed the priest.

'This young fellow went on to say that, if it came to that, he'd heard
Nox growling at other people before then; and among others at Floyd, the
secretary. I retorted that his own argument answered itself; for the
crime couldn't be brought home to two or three people, and least of all
to Floyd, who was as innocent as a harum - scarum schoolboy, and had
been seen by everybody all the time perched above the garden hedge with
his fan of red hair as conspicuous as a scarlet cockatoo.

'I know there's difficulties anyhow,' said my colleague, 'but I wish
you'd come with me down the garden a minute. I want to show you
something I don't think any one else has seen.' This was on the very day
of the discovery, and the garden was just as it had been. The step -
ladder was still standing by the hedge, and just under the hedge my
guide stopped and disentangled something from the deep grass. It was the
sheers used for clipping the hedge, and on the point of one of them was
a smear of blood.'

There was a short silence, and then Father Brown said suddenly; 'What
was the lawyer there for?'

'He fold us the Colonel sent for him to alter his will,' answered
Fiennes. 'And, by the way, there was another thing about the business of
the will that I ought to mention. You see, the will wasn't actually
signed in the summer - house that afternoon.'

'I suppose not,' said Father Brown; 'there would have to be two
witnesses.'

'The lawyer actually came down the day before and it was signed then;
but he was sent for again next day because the old man had a doubt about
one of the witnesses and had to be reassured.'

'Who were the witnesses?' asked Father Brown.

'That's just the point,' replied his informant eagerly, 'the witnesses
were Floyd, the secretary, and this Dr Valentine, the foreign sort of
surgeon or whatever he is; and the two had a quarrel. Now I'm bound to
say that the secretary is something of a busybody. He's one of those hot
and headlong people whose warmth of temperament has unfortunately turned
mostly to pugnacity and bristling suspicion; to distrusting people
instead of to trusting them. That sort of red - haired red - hot fellow
is always either universally credulous or universally incredulous; and
sometimes both. He was not only a Jack - of - all - trades, but he knew
better than all tradesmen. He not only knew everything, but he warned
everybody against everybody. All that must be taken into account in his
suspicions about Valentine; but in that particular case there seems to
have been something behind it. He said the name of Valentine was not
really Valentine. He said he had seen him elsewhere known by the name of
De Villon. He said it would invalidate the will; of course he was kind
enough to explain to the lawyer what the law was on that point. They
were both in a frightful wax.'

Father Brown laughed. 'People often are when they are to witness a
will,' he said; 'for one thing, it means that they can't have any legacy
under it. But what did Dr Valentine say? No doubt the universal
secretary knew more about the doctor's name than the doctor did. But
even the doctor might have some information about his own name.'

Fiennes paused a moment before he replied. 'Dr Valentine took it in a
curious way. Dr Valentine is a curious man. His appearance is rather
striking but very foreign. He is young but wears a beard cut square; and
his face is very pale, dreadfully pale - and dreadfully serious. His
eyes have a sort of ache in them, as if he ought to wear glasses, or had
given himself a headache with thinking; but he is quite handsome and
always very formally dressed, with a top hat and a dark coat and a
little red rosette. His manner is rather cold and haughty, and he has a
way of staring at you which is very disconcerting. When thus charged
with having changed his name, he merely stared like a sphinx and then
said with a little laugh that he supposed Americans had no names to
change. At that I think the Colonel also got into a fuss and said all
sorts of angry things to the doctor; all the more angry because of the
doctor's pretensions to a future place in his family. But I shouldn't
have thought much of that but for a few words that I happened to hear
later, early in the afternoon of the tragedy. I don't want to make a lot
of them, for they weren't the sort of words on which one would like, in
the ordinary way, to play the eavesdropper. As I was passing out towards
the front gate with my two companions and the dog, I heard voices which
told me that Dr Valentine and Miss Druce had withdrawn for a moment in
the shadow of the house, in an angle behind a row of flowering plants,
and were talking to each other in passionate whisperings - sometimes
almost like hissings; for it was something of a lovers' quarrel as well
as a lovers' tryst. Nobody repeats the sort of things they said for the
most part; but in an unfortunate business like this I'm bound to say
that there was repeated more than once a phrase about killing somebody.
In fact, the girl seemed to be begging him not to kill somebody, or
saying that no provocation could justify killing anybody; which seems an
unusual sort of talk to address to a gentleman who has dropped in to
tea.'

'Do you know,' asked the priest, 'whether Dr Valentine seemed to be very
angry after the scene with the secretary and the Colonel - I mean about
witnessing the will?'

'By all accounts,' replied the other, 'he wasn't half so angry as the
secretary was. It was the secretary who went away raging after
witnessing the will.'

'And now,' said Father Brown,' what about the will itself?'

'The Colonel was a very wealthy man, and his will was important. Traill
wouldn't tell us the alteration at that stage, but I have since heard
only this morning in fact - that most of the money was transferred from
the son to the daughter. I told you that Druce was wild with my friend
Donald over his dissipated hours.'

'The question of motive has been rather over - shadowed by the question
of method,' observed Father Brown thoughtfully. 'At that moment,
apparently, Miss Druce was the immediate gainer by the death.'

'Good God! What a cold - blooded way of talking,' cried Fiennes, staring
at him. 'You don't really mean to hint that she - '

'Is she going to marry that Dr Valentine?' asked the other.

'Some people are against it,' answered his friend. 'But he is liked and
respected in the place and is a skilled and devoted surgeon.'

'So devoted a surgeon,' said Father Brown, 'that he had surgical
instruments with him when he went to call on the young lady at teatime.
For he must have used a lancet or something, and he never seems to have
gone home.'

Fiennes sprang to his feet and looked at him in a heat of inquiry. 'You
suggest he might have used the very same lancet - '

Father Brown shook his head. 'All these suggestions are fancies just
now,' he said. 'The problem is not who did it or what did it, but how it
was done. We might find many men and even many tools - pins and shears
and lancets. But how did a man get into the room? How did even a pin get
into it?'

He was staring reflectively at the ceiling as he spoke, but as he said
the last words his eye cocked in an alert fashion as if he had suddenly
seen a curious fly on the ceiling.

'Well, what would you do about it?' asked the young man. 'You have a lot
of experience; what would you advise now?'

'I'm afraid I'm not much use,' said Father Brown with a sigh. 'I can't
suggest very much without having ever been near the place or the people.
For the moment you can only go on with local inquiries. I gather that
your friend from the Indian Police is more or less in charge of your
inquiry down there. I should run down and see how he is getting on. See
what he's been doing in the way of amateur detection. There may be news
already.'

As his guests, the biped and the quadruped, disappeared, Father Brown
took up his pen and went back to his interrupted occupation of planning
a course of lectures on the Encyclical Rerum Novarum. The subject was a
large one and he had to recast it more than once, so that he was
somewhat similarly employed some two days later when the big black dog
again came bounding into the room and sprawled all over him with
enthusiasm and excitement. The master who followed the dog shared the
excitement if not the enthusiasm. He had been excited in a less pleasant
fashion, for his blue eyes seemed to start from his head and his eager
face was even a little pale.

'You told me,' he said abruptly and without preface, 'to find out what
Harry Druce was doing. Do you know what he's done?' The priest did not
reply, and the young man went on in jerky tones: I'll tell you what he's
done. He's killed himself.'

Father Brown's lips moved only faintly, and there was nothing practical
about what he was saying - nothing that has anything to do with this
story or this world.

'You give me the creeps sometimes,' said Fiennes. 'Did you - did you
expect this?'

'I thought it possible,' said Father Brown; 'that was why I asked you to
go and see what he was doing. I hoped you might not be too late.'

'It was I who found him,' said Fiennes rather huskily. 'It was the
ugliest and most uncanny thing fever knew. I went down that old garden
again, and I knew there was something new and unnatural about it besides
the murder. The flowers still tossed about in blue masses on each side
of the black entrance into the old grey summer - house; but to me the
blue flowers looked like blue devils dancing before some dark cavern of
the underworld. I looked all round, everything seemed to be in its
ordinary place. But the queer notion grew on me that there was something
wrong with the very shape of the sky. And then I saw what it was. The
Rock of Fortune always rose in the background beyond the garden hedge
and against the sea. The Rock of Fortune was gone.'

Father Brown had lifted his head and was listening intently.

'It was as if a mountain had walked away out of a landscape or a moon
fallen from the sky; though I knew, of course, that a touch at any time
would have tipped the thing over. Something possessed me and I rushed
down that garden path like the wind and went crashing through that hedge
as if it were a spider's web. It was a thin hedge really, though its
undisturbed trimness had made it serve all the purposes of a wall. On
the shore I found the loose rock fallen from its pedestal; and poor
Harry Druce lay like a wreck underneath it. One arm was thrown round it
in a sort of embrace as if he had pulled it down on himself; and on the
broad brown sands beside it, in large crazy lettering, he had scrawled
the words: 'The Rock of Fortune falls on the Fool'.' -

'It was the Colonel's will that did that,' observed Father Brown. 'The
young man had staked everything on profiting himself by Donald's
disgrace, especially when his uncle sent for him on the same day as the
lawyer, and welcomed him with so much warmth. Otherwise he was done;
he'd lost his police job; he was beggared at Monte Carlo. And he killed
himself when he found he'd killed his kinsman for nothing.'

'Here, stop a minute!' cried the staring Fiennes. 'You're going too fast
for me.'

'Talking about the will, by the way,' continued Father Brown calmly,'
before I forget it, or we go on to bigger things, there was a simple
explanation, I think, of all that business about the doctor's name. I
rather fancy I have heard both names before somewhere. The doctor is
really a French nobleman with the title of the Marquis de Villon. But he
is also an ardent Republican and has abandoned his title and fallen back
on the forgotten family surname. 'With your Citizen Riquetti you have
puzzled Europe for ten days.'

'What is that?' asked the young man blankly.

'Never mind,' said the priest. 'Nine times out of ten it is a rascally
thing to change one's name; but this was a piece of fine fanaticism.
That's the point of his sarcasm about Americans having no names - that
is, no titles. Now in England the Marquis of Hartington is never called
Mr Hartington; but in France the Marquis de Villon is called M. de
Villon. So it might well look like a change of name. As for the talk
about killing, I fancy that also was a point of French etiquette. The
doctor was talking about challenging Floyd to a duel, and the girl was
trying to dissuade him.'

'Oh, I see,' cried Fiennes slowly. 'Now I understand what she meant.'

'And what is that about?' asked his companion, smiling.

'Well,' said the young man, 'it was something that happened to me just
before I found that poor fellow's body; only the catastrophe drove it
out of my head. I suppose it's hard to remember a little romantic idyll
when you've just come on top of a tragedy. But as I went down the lanes
leading to the Colonel's old place I met his daughter walking with Dr
Valentine. She was in mourning, of course, and he always wore black as
if he were going to a funeral; but I can't say that their faces were
very funereal. Never have I seen two people looking in their own way
more respectably radiant and cheerful. They stopped and saluted me, and
then she told me they were married and living in a little house on the
outskirts of the town, where the doctor was continuing his practice.
This rather surprised me, because I knew that her old father's will had
left her his property; and I hinted at it delicately by saying I was
going along to her father's old place and had half expected to meet her
there. But she only laughed and said: 'Oh, we've given up all that. My
husband doesn't like heiresses.' And I discovered with some astonishment
they really had insisted on restoring the property to poor Donald; so I
hope he's had a healthy shock and will treat it sensibly. There was
never much really the matter with him; he was very young and his father
was not very wise. But it was in connexion with that that she said
something I didn't understand at the time; but now I'm sure it must be
as you say. She said with a sort of sudden and splendid arrogance that
was entirely altruistic:

''I hope it'll stop that red - haired fool from fussing any more about
the will. Does he think my husband, who has given up a crest and a
coronet as old as the Crusades for his principles, would kill an old man
in a summer - house for a legacy like that?' Then she laughed again and
said, 'My husband isn't killing anybody except in the way of business.
Why, he didn't even ask his friends to call on the secretary.' Now, of
course, I see what she meant.'

'I see part of what she meant, of course,' said Father Brown. 'What did
she mean exactly by the secretary fussing about the will?'

Fiennes smiled as he answered, 'I wish you knew the secretary, Father
Brown. It would be a joy to you to watch him make things hum, as he
calls it. He made the house of mourning hum. He filled the funeral with
all the snap and zip of the brightest sporting event. There was no
holding him, after something had really happened. I've told you how he
used to oversee the gardener as he did the garden, and how he instructed
the lawyer in the law. Needless to say, he also instructed the surgeon
in the practice of surgery; and as the surgeon was Dr Valentine, you may
be sure it ended in accusing him of something worse than bad surgery.
The secretary got it fixed in his red head that the doctor had committed
the crime, and when the police arrived he was perfectly sublime. Need I
say that he became, on the spot, the greatest of all amateur detectives?
Sherlock Holmes never towered over Scotland Yard with more Titanic
intellectual pride and scorn than Colonel Druce's private secretary over
the police investigating Colonel Druce's death. I tell you it was a joy
to see him. He strode about with an abstracted air, tossing his scarlet
crest of hair and giving curt impatient replies. Of course it was his
demeanour during these days that made Druce's daughter so wild with him.
Of course he had a theory. It's just the sort of theory a man would have
in a book; and Floyd is the sort of man who ought to be in a book. He'd
be better fun and less bother in a book.'

'What was his theory?' asked the other.

'Oh, it was full of pep,' replied Fiennes gloomily. 'It would have been
glorious copy if it could have held together for ten minutes longer. He
said the Colonel was still alive when they found him in the summer -
house, and the doctor killed him with the surgical instrument on
pretence of cutting the clothes.'

'I see,' said the priest. 'I suppose he was lying flat on his face on
the mud floor as a form of siesta.'

'It's wonderful what hustle will do,' continued his informant. ' I
believe Floyd would have got his great theory into the papers at any
rate, and perhaps had the doctor attested, when all these things were
blown sky high as if by dynamite by the discovery of that dead body
lying under the Rock of Fortune. And that's what we come back to after
all. I suppose the suicide is almost a confession. But nobody will ever
know the whole story.'

There was a silence, and then the priest said modestly: 'I rather think
I know the whole story.'

Fiennes stared. 'But look here,' he cried; 'how do you come to know the
whole story, or to be sure it's the true story? You've been sitting here
a hundred miles away writing a sermon; do you mean to tell me you really
know what happened already? If you've really come to the end, where in
the world do you begin? What started you off with your own story?'

Father Brown jumped up with a very unusual excitement and his first
exclamation was like an explosion.

'The dog!' he cried. 'The dog, of course! You had the whole story in
your hands in the business of the dog on the beach, if you'd only
noticed the dog properly.'

Fiennes stared still more. 'But you told me before that my feelings
about the dog were all