he cried, "oh, Tom, why did you do that?" Carleton then involuntarily started to pull the dagger away, but Tom stopped him.
"Don't," he said thickly. "To pull that out will finish me. Leave it, and I have a few moments more!"
"That is true," said Fleming Stone. "Some one telephone for a doctor, but do not disturb the weapon. Mr. Willard, if you have anything to say, say it quickly."
"I will," said Tom, quickly; "Fessenden, you are a lawyer, will you draw up my will?"
Without a word, Rob caught up paper and pen, and prepared to take the last words of the dying man.
Though not entirely in legal phrasing, the will was completed, and after a general bequest to Fessenden himself, and directing that all bills should be paid, and other minor matters of the sort, Tom Willard left the bulk of his fortune to Schuyler Carleton.
"That," he said, with almost his last breath, "is only a deed of justice, in the name of Madeleine and myself."
Before the arrival of Doctor Hills, Tom Willard was dead. Self-confessed, self-convicted, self-punished; but his crime was discovered by Fleming Stone, and proved by means of a tiny clue.
THE GOLD BAG
XVII. The Owner of the Gold Bag
XVIII. In Mr. Goodrich's Office
Chapter I.
The Crime in West Sedgwick
Though a young detective, I am not entirely an inexperienced one, and I have several fairly successful investigations to my credit on the records of the Central Office.
The Chief said to me one day: "Burroughs, if there's a mystery to be unravelled; I'd rather put it in your hands than to trust it to any other man on the force.
"Because," he went on, "you go about it scientifically, and you never jump at conclusions, or accept them, until they're indubitably warranted."
I declared myself duly grateful for the Chief's kind words, but I was secretly a bit chagrined. A detective's ambition is to be, considered capable of jumping at conclusions, only the conclusions must always prove to be correct ones.
But though I am an earnest and painstaking worker, though my habits are methodical and systematic, and though I am indefatigably patient and persevering, I can never make those brilliant deductions from seemingly unimportant clues that Fleming Stone can. He holds that it is nothing but observation and logical inference, but to me it is little short of clairvoyance.
The smallest detail in the way of evidence immediately connotes in his mind some important fact that is indisputable, but which would never have occurred to me. I suppose this is largely a natural bent of his brain, for I have not yet been able to achieve it, either by study or experience.
Of course I can deduce some facts, and my colleagues often say I am rather clever at it, but they don't know Fleming Stone as well as I do, and don't realize that by comparison with his talent mine is insignificant.
And so, it is both by way of entertainment, and in hope of learning from him, that I am with him whenever possible, and often ask him to "deduce" for me, even at risk of boring him, as, unless he is in the right mood, my requests sometimes do.
I met him accidentally one morning when we both chanced to go into a basement of the Metropolis Hotel in New York to have our shoes shined.
It was about half-past nine, and as I like to get to my office by ten o'clock, I looked forward to a pleasant half-hour's chat with him. While waiting our turn to get a chair, we stood talking, and, seeing a pair of shoes standing on a table, evidently there to be cleaned, I said banteringly:
"Now, I suppose, Stone, from looking at those shoes, you can deduce all there is to know about the owner of them."
I remember that Sherlock Holmes wrote once, "From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other," but
