ten-year-old newspaper story is as dead as if it were written on
parchment, and since the part Terry played was rather remarkable, and
many of the details were at the time suppressed, I think it deserves a
more permanent form.

It was through the Patterson-Pratt business by a roundabout way that I
got mixed up in the Four-Pools affair. I had been working very hard over
the forgery case; I spent every day on it for nine weeks--and nearly
every night. I got into the way of lying awake, puzzling over the
details, when I should have been sleeping, and that is the sort of work
which finishes a man. By the middle of April, when the strain was over,
I was as near being a nervous wreck as an ordinarily healthy chap can
get.

At this stage my doctor stepped in and ordered a rest in some quiet
place out of reach of the New York papers; he suggested a fishing
expedition to Cape Cod. I apathetically fell in with the idea, and
invited Terry to join me. But he jeered at the notion of finding either
pleasure or profit in any such trip. It was too far from the center of
crime to contain any interest for Terry.

"Heavens, man! I'd as lief spend a vacation in the middle of the Sahara
Desert."

"Oh, the fishing would keep things going," I said.

"Fishing! We'd die of ennui before we had a bite. I'd be murdering you
at the end of the first week just for some excitement. If you need a
rest--and you are rather seedy--forget all about this Patterson business
and plunge into something new. The best rest in the world is a
counter-irritant."

This was Terry all over; he himself was utterly devoid of nerves, and he
could not appreciate the part they played in a man of normal make-up. My
being threatened with nervous prostration he regarded as a joke. His
pleasantries rather damped my interest in deep-sea fishing, however, and
I cast about for something else. It was at this juncture that I thought
of Four-Pools Plantation. "Four-Pools" was the somewhat fantastic name
of a stock farm in the Shenandoah Valley, belonging to a great-uncle
whom I had not seen since I was a boy.

A few months before, I had had occasion to settle a little legal matter
for Colonel Gaylord (he was a colonel by courtesy; so far as I could
discover he had never had his hands on a gun except for rabbit shooting)
and in the exchange of amenities which followed, he had given me a
standing invitation to make the plantation my home whenever I should
have occasion to co