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“After I had said good-bye to the doctor, gone to my room, and locked the door, I confirmed my suspicion. It was a box very like the one I was using four days ago here. It's a specimen box which, of course, shuts hermetically. Inside was what I had also expected—an envelope and on it only one word: ‘Fur.' I took sufficient precautions, so it was right for me to give myself complete proof. Handling the envelope as I did yours here, I cut it open. Inside it was a little grayish fur to which still clung some skin. Most of the hair, too, I noticed, was stuck together. Mr. Intil was a thorough and, in his way, a daring man. He was not only content with getting an anthrax-infected animal. He had cut skin and hair, I feel certain, from the place nearest where the actual lesion had taken place. He was right to have only a small supply, for it was fully sufficient. It would have kept him from having to make another trip to the desert. There was enough ‘culture' there to have killed all of us—if he hadn't muddled his envelopes when he wrote to you. There was one other object in the box—a small round ruler. I was puzzled for a moment. Then I remembered. It must have been the little rod which Sanderson probably actually had on him and round which the spiral piece of code paper was wrapped to make it legible. That explained why Intil had hold of a complete reading of the code when he came to you. He kept the rod, I suppose, as a kind of trophy, together with the other ‘power,' the anthrax that he brought back from the desert. Well, I lit a small spirit lamp and held the envelope in it until it was ash. Thank Heaven, though fungus spores can resist the utmost cold they are as helpless as we before the universal purifier, fire.”

There was really nothing more to say or do. I must own I had listened to the old fellow's clean-up of the business with considerable interest and not a little admiration. He was silent now. Evidently I was meant to close the proceedings. I thought out rather a neat one.

“We're British, Mr. Mycroft,” I said, “so we're not effusive. We don't like it and we do like going our own ways, don't we? So I'll just say a simple ‘thank you,' and good wishes to your search, and good-bye.” I rose. He got up.

“Yet somehow,” he remarked, more to himself than to me, “we do run across one another. By the way, I suppose you wouldn't really like to know the real meaning of the code you were working on?” I hesitated. It was a clever cast. He continued, “I should certainly have told Miss Brown, as I owed the decipherment so largely to the curious visualizing intuitions of her subconscious. And I feel, in a way, now she is gone, that I owe it to you as the man who introduced me to her to tell you, if you still wish to know?”

If it hadn't been for Kerson and his visit I really believe I should have had the good sense to say no. But the fact that I was lying low about that visit, keeping the old man in the dark, both made me feel a little guilty and also rather anxious to get any further information on a puzzle which had aroused my specialized curiosity and on my “reading” which, at the back of my mind, I didn't feel was “the thing.”

“You are still sure I'm wrong!” I said, in what I felt was a challenging way, but which of course involved me in further conversation.

“As I say, I couldn't have been, but for our good friend, Miss Brown. I should like to give you, as a tribute to her, the proof of her powers.”

“Well, tell me what she said,” was the least I could say to that.

“You remember my hunch that Sanderson's being a Scotchman ought to give us a line as to the kind of code he'd construct? As an expert in code, you know that book codes are the easiest to make and the best for holding fast—the bigger the book the better, and best of all, a big book all divided up into chapters and verses.”

I wasn't so slow as not to get it now. “The Bible,” I said.

“Right: a book little known now, at least among the clever, but a mine for codes and clues to all who are familiar with it. I often wonder why people read detective novels when in all the last hundred years of ‘lower' and ‘higher' criticism of this set of books such beautiful studies in detection have gone on being made. But, you see, I myself had let myself become rusty there. Well, Sanderson makes his code out of the Bible—though perhaps I oughtn't to call it a code; rather, a mnemonic—a condensed, disguised set of readings to guide himself.”

“But friars are surely a little later than the Bible,” I rather smartly rejoined.

“That did puzzle me for a while,” he answered. “But the solution of that I ought to have understood. Do you recall that on our evening visit to the old Scotchman's house, we saw those books on archaeology? Prospectors are, I believe, often very largely unmercenary men. What drives them mainly is romance. They could make better money in a city. But they long to find, behind the veil of sand and dust, behind the site which busy men have left as being a waste-heap, the shining, forgotten treasure. In new lands that has to be ore and nuggets. Here you must work and look for what the earth's mysterious heart chooses to yield or the stars to cast down.” He paused.

“Those gifts may well make all Pharaohs' hoards look like tinsel. Still,” he resumed, “the prospector is a romancer wherever he is, looking to uncover some buried wonder. His real thrill is to dig, his spade to strike and there at his feet, at this moment, he is looking at some secret which ‘went to earth,' was lost to men since that undated moment when the long-forgotten man or race, or natural accident made the cache and left it. Epoch beckons right across history to epoch. He feels himself on a pinnacle of time raised for a moment above the generations. Sanderson was no exception. He cared for two puzzles. His book puzzle, his ‘literary' source, we now know—the Bible. His other riddle was nondocumentary history, history written not by the pen but by the spade.”

“Friars aren't spade history, I should have thought,” I interrupted. I knew enough history to know that.

His reply startled me. “That was a good reason for thinking your reading of the code—though ingenious—wrong. Don't think, though, I should myself have caught onto the right clue but for Miss Brown. Directly I asked her ‘control' about the passage beginning ‘Cloc' she began giving a description. Her mind saw some vague image which at once, for me, laid friars by the heels.”

“Did she give you the same fanciful description she gave to me and,” I hesitated, “to Intil?” He waited for me to go on. “When I was with her last, in trance she said she saw a sort of circle with prongs sticking up round it.” I didn't tell him how rude the idiotic little “control” had become. I thought he might suspect that Miss Brown's subconscious looked down on me as much as he did. “That image seemed to me unhelpful.”

“What more did she say?” he questioned.

“Only that outside the circle of prongs was another one, standing all by itself, and that was, of course, equally unhelpful.”

“Well,” he said, genially enough, “we can agree, at least, on how remarkable it is that the medium's subconscious ran so accurately along the same track with two different sitters. It does look as though she must have had some real hunch.”

“Perhaps so,” I allowed, “but mediums, once they get an idea into their heads, generally stick to it. And certainly it doesn't make any waking sense.”

“Are you sure? Certainly such a picture isn't of a monk or a monastery, but what about a megalithic ruin, a stone circle?”

“Why?” I asked, for this seemed the vaguest of fishing.

For answer he slipped his hand into one of the enormous pockets of his big, flapping gray alpaca dust coat—which made him look more than usually like a crane. Out came a small volume. He flicked a page open and extended it to me. I was looking at a drawing of Stonehenge, the British Druid monument.

“Sanderson, as I've said,” he went on, “was interested in archaeology. So, at one time, was I—perhaps all detectives would be, if they had time; it's right along our line and Time is the master trail-layer. His interest, Miss Brown's control's word-picture—well, I felt, it would be no waste of time to glance at some books on megalithic prehistoric stone-circles. Here was the first, perhaps naturally so, for it is about the most famous. It's beautifully done, this little piece of detection. It's Cunnington's
Stonehenge
. And it is helpful—this chart you are looking at, as far as it goes.” His long finger darted onto the page. “The circle with the prongs sticking up—the upright single stones in a circle and you see outside the ring one standing off by itself.”

“That's pretty vague,” I said. “The control's words would fit quite a number of other things; for example—as she said at my sitting—a birthday cake with its candles on it—and certainly that's a much more likely fancy for a child mind.”

“I own I wouldn't have depended simply on that,” he answered, quite uncrestfallen, “though, of course, birthday cakes don't have one candle standing out on the table all by itself and this circle emphatically has. No, that was simply a starter and made me read the book through. And it's in the print, not the pictures, that I picked up the real clue. After all, the clue here isn't what we called, a moment ago, a spade clue—something dug up. It's a pen clue or a word clue—something right in your line, Mr. Silchester.

“Listen to this,” he said, taking back the book. “I'll summarize as good a piece of word detection as ever I've come upon.” So, peering at the page and then over the top of it at me, he ran on: “Stonehenge: use and purpose of building not really known. Still—you see the true archaeological caution—a possible clue is given by the traditional name bestowed on one of the outstanding sarsens (the big monoliths) which stands at some distance east of the circle. A local story recounts that as the devil was building this lonely monument (all big stone circles were attributed to that hard-working liar, because they were the temples of pre-Christian peoples) there strolled up that ubiquitous gossiping ‘kibitzer' of the late Middle Ages—a friar.” I started. He went on. “As the old gossip wouldn't clear off, the devil seized one of the huge stones he was handling and hurled it at the nuisance who, while running away, was struck on the heel, and the stone still stands where it fell, outside the circle, pitched there by the devil's throw.”

Our eyes met. “What an absurd story,” I said, “but how odd those words coming in it, ‘friar's heel.'”

“Absurd stories often, as you know, conceal clues. Now, what does our detective of pre-history suggest? First, that the story is evidently a construction. I think we agree with that.” I nodded. “Something is being explained by someone who really has no idea what it is that he is explaining.” I felt this to be a dig at me, but I had to allow its general truth. “The words which have to be explained are ‘friar's heel,' and they are applied to an outstanding stone which is like neither a friar nor a heel. So, step two: Are these words really what they sound to be? The answer to that lies in another question, ‘Why should they be?' Surely, indeed, they
shouldn't
be! This place, Stonehenge, we don't know much about it, but we do know it was built long before any English was spoken, when, pretty certainly, some Keltic dialect was common speech in Britain. Now, as children say, we are getting quite warm, for ‘friar's heel' is none too badly recorded Keltic and in Keltic it has nothing to do with a monk's anatomy but with a celestial phenomenon.”

With the glee of a child—and I must say I couldn't help sharing a little of his glow, the clue was so neat—Mr. Mycroft enunciated, “
Freas Heol
in Keltic means ‘rising sun' and, final proof,
Cloc Freas Heol
means ‘stone of the rising sun.'”

“I must say,” I owned, “that is very neat, very.”

“Yes,” he replied complacently; “I think that with Miss Brown and this little book we have Sanderson's secret partly extracted.”

I took my defeat in good part; I was honestly interested; but I was not wholly unpleased to be able to add, “Of course we're not a step nearer the whole solution, ‘Twenty minutes to three,' which was my solution of the first part of the code, and now your fragment, ‘stone of the rising sun,' still leave all the letter and number part undecoded. We're not really a step nearer to an actual practical understanding of our mystery.”

“Right,” he said, “right. But it will take me some time to give you the rest. I have it all. But already I have taken a great deal of your day. My real excuse for coming to see you was to fulfill my promise—that in four days I would be able to tell you you were safe. You are. If you would like to hear the rest of my reading I could call tomorrow. You should, in any case, not have returned my check, for you had earned it. Matters of, literally, life and death have prevented us from coming down to economics. But I still hope to persuade you to see my point of view in that matter of the honorarium, and if you won't, on second thought, then at least to give me the pleasure of going through this case with a confrere to whom I owe its elucidation.”

Clever old fox! I was glad of the opportunity to reconsider that check, and besides, he had my interest roused, and knew it. All clues to a clue-hunter are hard to drop, and here was one which had coiled itself round my mind and feelings, had threatened my life, had killed a friend and killed my would-be murderer, had—and this was my secret—even wound itself round our desert trader. Quite apart from the fact that Mr. Mycroft had hinted at even bigger fates and issues back of the whole thing, I think it will be allowed that here was enough to make any decoder almost unable to refuse to hear more.

“Very well,” I said, trying to appear the concessioner and not the concessionee, “I would be very pleased to clear up the matter tomorrow. Today I ought to finish my work.”

“At ten tomorrow morning, then,” he replied, and went without another word.