“I’m not at all sure,” said Reeves, “that he may not have found the chewing-gum on his trousers, and formed his own conclusions that way. However, there isn’t very much harm done. The police have got their man, with no great inconvenience to anybody except that poor old collie at Weighford. Rather a fine dog it was, and the owner wasn’t a bit nice about it when I saw him.” “I suppose,” Carmichael asked, “that the police can actually prove Davenant was the murderer?” “Not a bit of it,” said Reeves confidently, “unless they’ve got more up their sleeve than I think they have.” “But surely,” urged Gordon, “if he went to all the trouble of hiding himself like a rat in the wainscoting——” “That’s all very well, but they haven’t even proved Davenant was the man in the passage. You see, Davenant was travelling on that train, but it’s the train he always does come up by every Saturday. He might say that he hadn’t had time to get his ticket; that he had come all the way from London; that the real murderer must have slipped out on to the six-foot way and lost himself on the opposite platform. I don’t know that he will say that; of course, he is reserving his defence. But even if they can bring people to prove—people who saw him boarding the train at Weighford—that he was the man we were pursuing, it still doesn’t follow that he was the murderer. It’s extraordinary, the shifts men have resorted to before now when they thought they were going to be accused of murder, although they were as innocent as you or me. Put it this way—suppose Davenant had actually come up by that train on Tuesday, for reasons best known to himself. He gets to Paston Whitchurch, and then hears of what we found at the third tee. He cannot give any plausible explanation of his coming back here on Tuesday at all. He has some grudge against Brotherhood which we know nothing about. Now, if he can conceal the fact that he came back here at all that day, he escapes suspicion. He knows, somehow, about this secret passage; knows that, as a member of the club, he can wander about here pretty safely without attracting attention. He decides to lie low in the priests’ hiding-place till Saturday, and then turn up bright and smiling, knowing nothing about the murder. I say, innocent men have done stranger things before now.” “It sounds pretty thin to me,” said Gordon. “Once more I tell you, it is a fatal habit to proceed from observation to inference, and give inference the name of fact. You say Davenant is the murderer; I say, we don’t know that; we only know that Davenant was a man who for some reason expected to be accused of the murder, and consequently behaved in a very peculiar way.” “I still don’t quite see,” said Carmichael, “what exactly happened while I was waiting outside the billiard-room door.”