Two days later I received a note appointing a meeting at his lodgings that night. That meeting, alas! was the one memorable occurrence of my life, and the last meeting I ever had with Hemlock Jones! I will try to set it down calmly, though my pulses still throb with the recollection of it.
I found him standing before the fire, with that look upon his face which I had seen only once or twice in our acquaintance--a look which I may call an absolute concatenation of inductive and deductive ratiocination--from which all that was human, tender, or sympathetic was absolutely discharged. He was simply an icy algebraic symbol! Indeed, his whole being was concentrated to that extent that his clothes fitted loosely, and his head was absolutely so much reduced in size by his mental compression that his hat tipped back from his forehead and literally hung on his massive ears.
After I had entered he locked the doors, fastened the windows, and even placed a chair before the chimney. As I watched these significant precautions with absorbing interest, he suddenly drew a revolver and, presenting it to my temple, said in low, icy tones:
"Hand over that cigar case!"
Even in my bewilderment my reply was truthful, spontaneous, and involuntary. "I haven't got it," I said.
He smiled bitterly, and threw down his revolver. "I expected that reply! Then let me now confront you with something more awful, more deadly, more relentless and convincing than that mere lethal weapon,--the damning inductive and deductive proofs of your guilt!" He drew from his pocket a roll of paper and a note-book.
"But surely," I gasped, "you are joking!You could not for a momentbelieve"--
"Silence!Sit down!"I obeyed.
"You have condemned yourself," he went on pitilessly. "Condemned yourself on my processes,--processes familiar to you, applauded by you, accepted by you for years! We will go back to the time when you first saw the cigar case. Your expressions," he said in cold, deliberate tones, consulting his paper, were, 'How beautiful! I wish it were mine.' This was your first step in crime--and my first indication. From 'I WISH it were mine' to 'I WILL have it mine,' and the mere detail, 'HOW CAN I make it mine?' the advance was obvious. Silence! But as in my methods it was necessary that there should be an overwhelming inducement to the crime, that unholy admiration of yours for the mere trinket itself was not enough. You are a smoker of cigars.""But," I burst out passionately, "I told you I had given up smoking cigars.""Fool!" he said coldly, "that is the SECOND time you have committed yourself. Of course you told me! What more natural than for you to blazon forth that prepared and unsolicited statement to PREVENT accusation. Yet, as I said before, even that wretched attempt to cover up your tracks was not enough. I still had to find that overwhelming, impelling motive necessary to affect a man like you. That motive I found in the strongest of all impulses--Love, I suppose you would call it," he added bitterly, "that night you called! You had brought the most conclusive proofs of it on your sleeve.""But--" I almost screamed.
"Silence!" he thundered. "I know what you would say. You would say that even if you had embraced some Young Person in a sealskin coat, what had that to do with the robbery? Let me tell you, then, that that sealskin coat represented the quality and character of your fatal entanglement! You bartered your honor for it--that stolen cigar case was the purchaser of the sealskin coat!