“Now,” Keeley went on, “I must do some real Sherlocking. First, as to Harper Ames. I’m inclined to scratch his name from my list of suspects because of his frankly expressed desire that I should take the case for him. Either he has the knowledge of his own absolute innocence, or else he is the very most clever devil I have ever chanced to run across.” “He’s innocent all right,” Lora said. “He couldn’t act out all that. He really wants you to take the case, Kee, and that proves his innocence.” “But does it?” Moore argued. “May it not be that he is the guilty man and he is bold enough to think that by taking such a course he can steer suspicion away from himself?” “Seems to me,” I put in, “that for a real Sherlock you are doing a lot of theorizing and surmising. Why not get down to shreds of wool, missing cuff-links and dropped handkerchiefs?” “Keeley isn’t a fictional detective,” Lora exclaimed. “He doesn’t work on conventional lines——” “There are two kinds of fictional detectives, my dear girl,” Keeley told her. “The detective of fiction, and the story-book sleuth who declares that he is _not_ the detective of fiction. The original detective of fiction was the hound-on-the-scent sort. The man who could put two and two together. The wizard who could tell the height, weight, and colouring of the unknown criminal from a flick of cigar ash. Then, as this superman palled a bit on the reader, came then his successor, the man who scorned all these tricks of the trade and announced himself as not the detective of fiction.” “And which sort are you?” asked Lora, brightly, with a hint of veiled chaffing. “I’m a mixture of both,” Kee stated calmly. “But I do think one should consider the bent and inclination of a suspect as well as the material clues he leaves about.” “For instance?” I asked. “All that stuff left on the bed. Your old Sherlock type would say: ‘These flowers were placed here by an ex-gardener, with red hair and a missing little finger.’ But to my mind, the deduction would be that the flowers were put there by a man the farthest possible remove from an ex-gardener, rather, a man of keen, sharp wits and decided ingenuity.” “Merely as a blind, or, rather as a misleading clue?” I suggested. “Yes. Now, the superfluity of those things on the bed, I mean the multiplicity of them, betokens a nature inclined to overdo. Like a man who, getting on a steam-boat, ties himself on.” “Or,” put in Lora, “if a man compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.” “Yes, something of that sort. Yet it may be that he started on his mad career of bed decorating and went on and on, sort of absent-mindedly.” “Got started and couldn’t stop.” “Exactly. Say he placed the flowers first, then, seeing the orange and crackers, added those, then, noticing the crucifix, used that; then the handkerchief, and finally draped the scarf round them all, just because it was handy by.” “And the watch in the pitcher?”