American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
“I will undertake your case, Mr. Meeks,” said Jolnes, finally. “The
disappearance of people in this city has always been an interesting
problem to me. I remember a case that I brought to a successful outcome
a year ago. A family bearing the name of Clark disappeared suddenly
from a small flat in which they were living. I watched the flat
building for two months for a clue. One day it struck me that a certain
milkman and a grocer’s boy always walked backward when they carried
their wares upstairs. Following out by induction the idea that this
observation gave me, I at once located the missing family. They had
moved into the flat across the hall and changed their name to Kralc.”
Shamrock Jolnes and his client went to the tenement house where Mary
Snyder had lived, and the detective demanded to be shown the room in
which she had lived. It had been occupied by no tenant since her
disappearance.
The room was small, dingy, and poorly furnished. Meeks seated himself
dejectedly on a broken chair, while the great detective searched the
walls and floor and the few sticks of old, rickety furniture for a
clue.
At the end of half an hour Jolnes had collected a few seemingly
unintelligible articles—a cheap black hat pin, a piece torn off a
theatre programme, and the end of a small torn card on which was the
word “left” and the characters “C 12.”
Shamrock Jolnes leaned against the mantel for ten minutes, with his
head resting upon his hand, and an absorbed look upon his intellectual
face. At the end of that time he exclaimed, with animation:
“Come, Mr. Meeks; the problem is solved. I can take you directly to the
house where your sister is living. And you may have no fears concerning
her welfare, for she is amply provided with funds—for the present at
least.”
Meeks felt joy and wonder in equal proportions.
“How did you manage it?” he asked, with admiration in his tones.
Perhaps Jolnes’s only weakness was a professional pride in his
wonderful achievements in induction. He was ever ready to astound and
charm his listeners by describing his methods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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