"'I am,' I replied.'Come in.You have come to see me about your stolen watch.It is a gold hunting-case watch with a Swiss movement;loses five minutes a day; stem-winder; and the back cover, which does not bear any inscription, has upon it the indentations made by the molars of your son Willie when that interesting youth was cutting his teeth upon it.'""Wonderful!" cried Johnson.
"May I ask how you knew all that?" asked Solomon, deeply impressed.
"Such penetration strikes me as marvellous.""I didn't know it," replied the stranger, with a smile."What I said was intended to be jocular, and to put Brokedale at his ease.The Americans present, with their usual astuteness, would term it bluff.
It was.I merely rattled on.I simply did not wish to offend the gentleman by letting him know that I had penetrated his disguise.
Imagine my surprise, however, when his eye brightened as I spoke, and he entered my room with such alacrity that half the powder which he thought disguised his beard was shaken off on to the floor.Sitting down in the chair I had just vacated, he quietly remarked:
"'You are a wonderful man, sir.How did you know that I had lost my watch?'
"For a moment I was nonplussed; more than that, I was completely staggered.I had expected him to say at once that he had not lost his watch, but had come to see me about the tiara; and to have him take my words seriously was entirely unexpected and overwhelmingly surprising.However, in view of his rank, I deemed it well to fall in with his humour.'Oh, as for that,' I replied, 'that is a part of my business.It is the detective's place to know everything; and generally, if he reveals the machinery by means of which he reaches his conclusions, he is a fool, since his method is his secret, and his secret his stock-in-trade.I do not mind telling you, however, that I knew your watch was stolen by your anxious glance at my clock, which showed that you wished to know the time.Now most rich Americans have watches for that purpose, and have no hesitation about showing them.If you'd had a watch, you'd have looked at it, not at my clock.'
"My visitor laughed, and repeated what he had said about my being a wonderful man.
"'And the dents which my son made cutting his teeth?' he added.
"'Invariably go with an American's watch.Rubber or ivory rings aren't good enough for American babies to chew on,' said I.'They must have gold watches or nothing.'
"'And finally, how did you know I was a rich American?' he asked.
"'Because no other can afford to stop at hotels like the Savoy in the height of the season,' I replied, thinking that the jest would end there, and that he would now reveal his identity and speak of the tiara.To my surprise, however, he did nothing of the sort.
"'You have an almost supernatural gift,' he said.'My name is Bunker.I am stopping at the Savoy.I AM an American.I WAS rich when I arrived here, but I'm not quite so bloated with wealth as Iwas, now that I have paid my first week's bill.I HAVE lost my watch; such a watch, too, as you describe, even to the dents.Your only mistake was that the dents were made by my son John, and not Willie; but even there I cannot but wonder at you, for John and Willie are twins, and so much alike that it sometimes baffles even their mother to tell them apart.The watch has no very great value intrinsically, but the associations are such that I want it back, and I will pay 200 pounds for its recovery.I have no clew as to who took it.It was numbered--'
"Here a happy thought struck me.In all my description of the watch I had merely described my own, a very cheap affair which I had won at a raffle.My visitor was deceiving me, though for what purpose I did not on the instant divine.No one would like to suspect him of having purloined his wife's tiara.Why should I not deceive him, and at the same time get rid of my poor chronometer for a sum that exceeded its value a hundredfold?""Good business!" cried Shylock.
The stranger smiled and bowed.
"Excellent," he said."I took the words right out of his mouth.'It was numbered 86507B!' I cried, giving, of course, the number of my own watch.
"He gazed at me narrowly for a moment, and then he smiled.'You grow more marvellous at every step.That was indeed the number.Are you a demon?'
"'No,' I replied.'Only something of a mind-reader.'
"Well, to be brief, the bargain was struck.I was to look for a watch that I knew he hadn't lost, and was to receive 200 pounds if Ifound it.It seemed to him to be a very good bargain, as, indeed, it was, from his point of view, feeling, as he did, that there never having been any such watch, it could not be recovered, and little suspecting that two could play at his little game of deception, and that under any circumstances I could foist a ten-shilling watch upon him for two hundred pounds.This business concluded, he started to go.