. He gets along very comfortably in the
humdrum round of life without having to measure footprints and smile
quiet, tight-lipped smiles. But if ever the emergency does arise, he
thinks naturally of Sherlock Holmes, and his methods.

Mr. Downing had read all the Holmes stories with great attention, and
had thought many times what an incompetent ass Doctor Watson was; but,
now that he had started to handle his own first case, he was compelled
to admit that there was a good deal to be said in extenuation of
Watson's inability to unravel tangles. It certainly was uncommonly hard,
he thought, as he paced the cricket field after leaving Sergeant
Collard, to detect anybody, unless you knew who had really done the
crime. As he brooded over the case in hand, his sympathy for Doctor
Watson increased with every minute, and he began to feel a certain
resentment against Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was all very well for Sir
Arthur to be so shrewd and infallible about tracing a mystery to its
source, but he knew perfectly well who had done the thing before
he started!

Now that he began really to look into this matter of the alarm bell and
the painting of Sammy, the conviction was creeping over him that the
problem was more difficult than a casual observer might imagine. He had
got as far as finding that his quarry of the previous night was a boy in
Mr. Outwood's house, but how was he to get any further? That was the
thing. There was, of course, only a limited number of boys in Mr.
Outwood's house as tall as the one he had pursued; but even if there had
been only one other, it would have complicated matters. If you go to a
boy and say, "Either you or Jones were out of your house last night at
twelve o'clock," the boy does not reply, "Sir, I cannot tell a lie--I
was out of my house last night at twelve o'clock." He simply assumes the
animated expression of a stuffed fish, and leaves the next move to you.
It is practically stalemate.

All these things passed through Mr. Downing's mind as he walked up and
down the cricket field that afternoon.

What he wanted was a clue. But it is so hard for the novice to tell what
is a clue and what isn't. Probably, if he only knew, there were clues
lying all over the place, shouting to him to pick them up.

What with the oppressive heat of the day and the fatigue of hard
thinking, Mr. Downing was working up for a brainstorm when Fate once
more intervened, this time in the shape of Riglett, a junio