“I can do no further good here,” Dunton said, forlornly.
“Sit there,” Daniel ordered, pointing to a place at the table next to me.
“Yes, join the prisoners at the gaol board,” Masham said with a sneer. “And answer the insulting questions put by this insolent usurper of authority.”
“Usurper!” Defoe cried. “The word comes easily to your lips, Mr. Masham, as it would naturally to any one who feared the pretender coming to the throne. Usurper is the word most frequently on the lips of Squadroni!”
Masham paled; his hand fluttered up to the lapel of his robe, then fell to his lap again.
“What do you have there?” Daniel demanded as Masham started pushing his chair back from the table. “Answer me!”
Masham rose as Daniel stepped forward and flipped the lapel so that the underside showed. I caught the glint of metal and knew what it was — the disk of the Squadroni.
“You are the one who tried to kill me!” Daniel cried as his hands shot out and seized Masham around the throat, crushing the wine-merchant’s beard, and bending the man backwards to his knees.
“No! No!” Masham struggled to speak. “I did not attack you!”
Suddenly Daniel released him; Masham fell to floor and sat there, fingering his bruised throat.
“Tell your miserable organization they misunderstood me,” Defoe said, his voice distant, as if another matter claimed his mind. “I do not and never have encouraged enthronement of the pretender. I am a Whig, pure and simple, one of the little business men of England who is loyal to His Majesty. Yes, tell them they have misunderstood!”
When he had finished speaking, Defoe stood looking with a queer expression at the fire; then he strode purposefully to the door of the landlord’s apartment, threw it open, and pulled the serving-maid into the room. She had been listening to all that had transpired.
Now she trembled in her thin robe and looked terrified at us.
“I shall take you at once to the constable for the murder of Mr. Rogers, if you do not tell me the truth,” Daniel thundered.
“No, no, not the police!” the girl moaned.
“Then tell us the truth!"
“He did it,” she cried, pointing at the prostrate McClain, whose eyelids were beginning to flutter. “He swore he’d kill the man who lured away his daughter, Nan. Although it wasn’t really Mr. Rogers’s fault. Nan followed him, and he spurned her, and Nan drowned herself in the Firth. But he blamed Mr. Rogers for it — only his name is not Rogers—”
“I know,” Daniel intervened. “Go on.”
She pointed again at McClain, who was half conscious now.
“He overheard Mr. Rogers agree to change rooms with you, Mr. Defoe, and thought this was his chance to kill the sailor without himself being suspected, for he told me you were a marked man. That’s why he was so eager to send for the constable — so the constable would look for your enemies... Then he came down and threatened to kill me if I ever spoke a word about what he’d done—”
McClain had heard her last words, and so great was the vitality of the man, he rose with a roar and would have killed the serving-maid upon the spot, had not four men held him back while he trumpeted and cursed and made his guilt plain to all of us.
Daniel and I jogged along side by side late the next morning, on our way back to London.
I said: “Why did you suddenly leave off throttling Masham and turn to McClain as the guilty one? How were you so sure it was not Masham after all, or Dunton, or McGregor that did the deed?”
“It was elementary,” Daniel said, fingering the mole on his chin. “When I put my hands around Masham’s throat, his beard scratched my hands. Well, my enemies know I am clean-shaven. They would not continue to strangle a man after feeling a beard — they would know it was not I. Yet Rogers, who had a beard, was strangled. That meant that his murderer knew whom he was strangling and did it deliberately.
“Now none of the lodgers had a grudge against Rogers. They couldn’t have — he was a non-political figure, just as I assured you. They were only after me. That left McClain, who, by the way, was the only one big enough to subdue a hearty fellow like Rogers. I remembered the innkeeper’s dirge about the lost Nan, recalled the look in the serving-girl’s eye when she first looked out from McClain’s room and saw him on the floor—”
“I see,” I said after a while. “But there is still another mystery, Daniel. Why did Rogers come to the inn under an assumed name? And who was he?”
“His coming to the inn was entirely my fault,” Defoe explained. “I insisted upon The White Swan as our meeting place, although he objected; but since I was paying his bill, he finally agreed. I didn’t know that he had experienced an unfavorable episode there until the serving-girl mentioned it. The beard was new, I think, but McClain recognized him nevertheless. And do you remember how aggressive Rogers was to the landlord when he first entered? Why, unless there existed bad blood between the two men already?”
“Who was Rogers?” I asked.
Daniel sighed.
“Remember I told you I wished to quit politics? I mean to do so. I have already bought a house in a quiet section of Stoke Newington, where I plan to retire and write novels instead of pamphlets. For my first novel I have chosen a theme dear to the hearts of the English public — the story of one man struggling alone against the forces of Nature. But before I began writing, I felt it was imperative that I should hear the true story from the lips of the one man in England who had actually experienced that struggle on an island, all alone — one Alexander Selkirk—”
“Then Rogers was Selkirk!” I cried.
“Yes, poor fellow. And although I cannot use his real name and have decided to call him Robinson Crusoe, my novel shall really be his epitaph. It’s the least I can do for the man.”
“It might even assure him a kind of immortality,” I said.
“Possibly,” said Defoe.
Lee Sheridan Cox
The Male Io Glasses
Remember “A Simple Incident; or, Andy Blair and Willie Perkins, Private Eyes” in EQMM’s June ’55 issue? Well, here is “The Truth About Ronald; or, The Second Case of Blair & Perkins, Boy Sleuths” — and utterly charming!
Ronald Pruitt is the kind of person that if a teacher wants to send a note to another teacher she picks Ronald to deliver it. He is also the type who not only reads the note but looks in everybody’s locker on the way down the hall. What I mean, Ronald Pruitt is a born creep.
I keep telling Willie Perkins how having Ronald to guard against all our lives has toughened us up and prepared us for the detective business. But lately Ronald has been making a certain remark about Willie, and Willie is getting so he can’t see the bright side any more. So he has been urging me to write up our second big case and let everybody know the truth about Ronald.
What has happened, we had an assignment in English last week to write A Simple Incident, and I turned in a story on Willie’s and my first big case as private eyes, which Miss Hawkins, our seventh grade English teacher as everybody knows, praised for three minutes and eight seconds. I know this for a fact because Willie, who is pretty scientific, timed it. It was the longest anyone was praised. Ronald was praised one minute and forty-seven seconds. So Ronald is mad and he has been going around saying about me that the reason I asked Miss Hawkins not to read my paper in class is that I’m the kind of writer who makes it up.
But this certain remark he is making about Willie is even worse.
To explain beforehand, so no one will get the wrong idea about Willie, when we entered Junior High School this year, everything was different from grade school. We didn’t know our way around the building, and we had a whole bunch of teachers’ dispositions to get used to instead of just one. The first day when we got to our last class, which was Health and Safety, the teacher wasn’t there when the bell rang. We were all walking around kind of getting the feel of the room when the teacher appeared in the doorway and yelled in her scary voice, “In your seats!”