Sherlock Holmes Read Free

with the usual flat American vowels, and though
when first we entered his cell – it was now about ten o’clock at
night – he started up in wary alarm, when he saw Diggs with us he
relaxed at little. In the dim gas-light I saw that one of his eyes
had been blacked, and his face bore other bruises; his friends at
the boarding-house had not been far amiss in their fears of a
lynching.
    “And I’m afraid it won’t stop with me,” he
said, almost whispering, when I exclaimed at his hurts. “My parents
have already left town, but if a mob formed, I know they wouldn’t
leave Chinatown just because my family isn’t there. They wouldn’t
know what my family looks like,” he added bitterly, “or care.”
    “I am assuming,” said Holmes, “that anyone
who wished to kidnap a child wouldn’t do so in so public a venue as
the Californian theater—”
    “Good God, no!” cried the young man, truly
distressed. “When I opened the cabinet and saw nothing there but
her shoe, it was like someone had rammed me in the wind with the
end of a pole. I was too shocked to speak, and stood there like a
fool until her mother screamed—What did they expect I would have
done? Shouted, Ha-ha, I have spirited away your child ?” He
clasped his hands, which shook at the memory of the shock.
    “Precisely,” said Holmes. “Therefore this is
an attack upon the child herself – and twenty years in my business
has shown me that one cannot discount the possibility of an
obsessed madman – upon the child’s family, upon yourself, or upon
the Chinese community here as a whole. Which do you yourself think
it might be?”
    Li’s eyes shifted. He looked aside; for a
long time he sat silent, his hands pressed together. Then he said,
“There is always hatred for my people, since the time my
grandparents came to this country.”
    “A rather elaborate way of stirring it up, I
should think,” said Holmes, watching the young man’s face intently.
“As far as Captain O’Day could tell me – and so far as any
newspaper knows – John Redwalls and his wife are completely
unremarkable people without enemies. How did you happen to choose
Miss Redwalls to assist you in your act?”
    “Well,” said Li, and his gaze returned to
Holmes’s face, “I generally pick a child – you’ve seen the
apparatus of the cabinets, and a small opening in the backdrop can
be concealed much more easily with mirrors and lighting than a
larger one. And people pay more attention when it’s a child. They
keep their eyes on the first cabinet while she’s being slipped into
the second. I watch their faces as the audience comes in, and look
for one who’s bright and who… who looks outward, who’ll go along
with it when I whisper—” His voice shifted into the accents of
melodramatic stage-pidgin, “— Honorable Miss will not split on
insignificant Li, will she ? It makes them laugh,” he added,
with a faint smile. “You can tell looking at them, who might think
it’s funny to come out of the cabinet and shout to the audience, It’s all a trick . Miss Redwalls wasn’t that sort. She was a
perfect accomplice.”
    He pressed his hand suddenly to his mouth,
his face working with horror and shock.
    Holmes asked, “Was the shoe fastened or
unfastened?”
    Li raised his head, his eyes haunted. “The
laces had been cut with a knife.”
    “But there was really no way of telling in
advance,” Holmes went on, “which child in the audience you would
choose for your act?”
    “No.”
    “Only that it would be a child.”
    Li nodded. “Did you find anything at the
theater? Was Rosales able to tell you anything?”
    “One or two items of interest,” said Holmes.
“Would Rosales himself have had any reason to take the child?”
    “I can think of none. He came to the theater
well-recommended; I think he’s had experience as an illusionist
himself, so he needed very little coaching in his duties.”
    “Yes, I thought he had,” said Holmes. “When
the