The Black Cat by Anonymous

Author:Anonymous
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sexton, blake, sherlock holmes, mystery, detective, baker street
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER III.

“Mystery?” said Sexton Blake; as he and Philip Trevelyan trudged through tho deepening dusk to the Pollard Arms. “There is no mystery. There never was. Surely what has happened is as clear as anything can be?”

“To you, perhaps,” said Trevelyan. “To me, I confess, the whole affair is an inscrutable enigma.”

The detective shrugged his shoulders.

“That is because you do not give your reason unfettered play,” he said. “If you approached the problem in the same spirit as you would tackle a sum in arithmetic, the answer would suggest itself at once. You have only to exclude all those factors which fail to satisfy the conditions, and what remains, however improbable it may sound, is bound to be the true solution.”

“Both Ritchie and your father,” he continued, “were undoubtedly struck on the head by something, or somebody, which, or who was able to travel across the snow without leaving any footprint. Neither you nor I believe in ghosts, and a bird is out of the question. What, then, remains?”

Trevelyan shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Yet you have heard of such things as balloons, I suppose?” said Sexton Blake.

Trevelyan started. “By Jove!” he said. “You think—”

“I don’t think—I’m sure!” said Sexton Blake. “As soon as I had heard your story, I realised that a balloon was the only possible explanation. When I examined those brownish patches in the Ten-Acre Pasture, and found they were due to the presence of sand, my theory was confirmed. When I found that aneroid barometer, my theory ceased to be a theory, and became a certainty.

“Without a doubt, what happened the night before last was this,” he went on. “Somebody in a balloon, which was probably partly deflated, was drifting across the English Channel. Suddenly he found himself in danger of being dashed against the face of the cliffs to the south-west of this village. Uttering that cry of alarm which Ritchie heard, he threw out some ballast and thereby caused those brownish patches on the snow-clad face of the cliff.

“In consequence of this manoeuvre, the balloon shot upwards, and cleared the edge of the cliff. As it did so it evidently lurched to one side, and that mahogany case containing the barometer, was thrown out. The case struck Ritchie on the back of the head, and afterward rolled into that clump of bushes. The balloon then drifted inland and floated over the Ten-Acre Pasture.

“What happened next,” continued Sexton Blake, “is only conjecture, but conjecture, I think, which is founded on sound reasoning. The aeronaut’s grapnel, I opine, was dangling from the car, and it was one of the flukes of the grapnel which caught the pony and inflicted that wound in her neck, and which afterwards struck your father and stunned him.

“Owing to the darkness,” concluded the detective, “the occupant of the balloon did not see what happened. He only knew that his grapnel had caught on something which had failed to hold it. At the same time, probably, he saw the lights of

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