"There are, however, still one or two points that need clearing up. As to the blood, that offered no insurmountable difficulty to a physiologist; and, by Jove!"... He suddenly plunged his hand into the case.... "This rubber ring from a soda-water bottle, ingeniously mounted upon a cane handle, accounts for the mysterious tracks. The point to which I particularly allude is the object of the Professor's disappearance."
"I think," I said, "that I can offer a suggestion. He found, too late to withdraw, that his famous theory had a flaw in it, and could devise no less elaborate means of hiding the fact and at the same time of so destroying his apparatus as to leave no trace whereby his great reputation could be marred."
"That is my own idea," agreed Harborne. "For which reason I have carefully covered such very few tracks as he left, and have decided that this handsome case, with its tell-tale inscription--JBS--must be destroyed. My conclusions are not for the world, which is at perfect liberty to believe that Professor Brayme-Skepley was carried off by an unclassified aptera!"
And so, somewhere or other, Professor Brayme-Skepley is pursuing his distinguished career under a new name, while Harborne allows the world to persist in its opinion.
A. Sarsfield Ward, "The Green Spider," Pearson's Magazine (October 1904).