Mike, P. G. Wodehouse [best books to read for teens .TXT] 📗

water-pipe at the side of the window.  The boy whom Sergeant Collard had seen climbing the pipe must have been making for this study.

He spun round and met Psmith’s blandly inquiring gaze.  He looked at Psmith carefully for a moment.  No.  The boy he had chased last night had not been Psmith.  That exquisite’s figure and general appearance were unmistakable, even in the dusk.

“Whom did you say you shared this study with, Smith?”

“Jackson, sir.  The cricketer.”

“Never mind about his cricket, Smith,” said Mr. Downing with irritation.

“No, sir.”

“He is the only other occupant of the room?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nobody else comes into it?”

“If they do, they go out extremely quickly, sir.”

“Ah!  Thank you, Smith.”

“Not at all, sir.”

Mr. Downing pondered.  Jackson!  The boy bore him a grudge.  The boy was precisely the sort of boy to revenge himself by painting the dog Sammy.  And, gadzooks!  The boy whom he had pursued last night had been just about Jackson’s size and build!

Mr. Downing was as firmly convinced at that moment that Mike’s had been the hand to wield the paint-brush as he had ever been of anything in his life.

“Smith!” he said excitedly.

“On the spot, sir,” said Psmith affably.

“Where are Jackson’s boots?”

There are moments when the giddy excitement of being right on the trail causes the amateur (or Watsonian) detective to be incautious.  Such a moment came to Mr. Downing then.  If he had been wise, he would have achieved his object, the getting a glimpse of Mike’s boots, by a devious and snaky route.  As it was, he rushed straight on.

“His boots, sir?  He has them on.  I noticed them as he went out just now.”

“Where is the pair he wore yesterday?”

“Where are the boots of yester-year?” murmured Psmith to himself.  “I should say at a venture, sir, that they would be in the basket downstairs.  Edmund, our genial knife-and-boot boy, collects them, I believe, at early dawn.”

“Would they have been cleaned yet?”

“If I know Edmund, sir—­no.”

“Smith,” said Mr. Downing, trembling with excitement, “go and bring that basket to me here.”

Psmith’s brain was working rapidly as he went downstairs.  What exactly was at the back of the sleuth’s mind, prompting these manoeuvres, he did not know.  But that there was something, and that that something was directed in a hostile manner against Mike, probably in connection with last night’s wild happenings, he was certain.  Psmith had noticed, on leaving his bed at the sound of the alarm bell, that he and Jellicoe were alone in the room.  That might mean that Mike had gone out through the door when the bell sounded, or it might mean that he had been out all the time.  It began to look as if the latter solution were the correct one.

He staggered back with the basket, painfully conscious the while that it was creasing his waistcoat, and dumped it down on the study floor.  Mr. Downing stooped eagerly over it.  Psmith leaned against the wall, and straightened out the damaged garment.

“We have here, sir,” he said, “a fair selection of our various bootings.”

Mr. Downing looked up.

“You dropped none of the boots on your way up, Smith?”

“Not one, sir.  It was a fine performance.”

Mr. Downing uttered a grunt of satisfaction, and bent once more to his task.  Boots flew about the room.  Mr. Downing knelt on the floor beside the basket, and dug like a terrier at a rat-hole.

At last he made a dive, and, with an exclamation of triumph, rose to his feet.  In his hand he held a boot.

“Put those back again, Smith,” he said.

The ex-Etonian, wearing an expression such as a martyr might have worn on being told off for the stake, began to pick up the scattered footgear, whistling softly the tune of “I do all the dirty work,” as he did so.

“That’s the lot, sir,” he said, rising.

“Ah.  Now come across with me to the headmaster’s house.  Leave the basket here.  You can carry it back when you return.”

“Shall I put back that boot, sir?”

“Certainly not.  I shall take this with me, of course.”

“Shall I carry it, sir?”

Mr. Downing reflected.

“Yes, Smith,” he said.  “I think it would be best.”

It occurred to him that the spectacle of a housemaster wandering abroad on the public highway, carrying a dirty boot, might be a trifle undignified.  You never knew whom you might meet on Sunday afternoon.

Psmith took the boot, and doing so, understood what before had puzzled him.

Across the toe of the boot was a broad splash of red paint.

He knew nothing, of course, of the upset tin in the bicycle shed; but when a housemaster’s dog has been painted red in the night, and when, on the following day, the housemaster goes about in search of a paint-splashed boot, one puts two and two together.  Psmith looked at the name inside the boot.  It was “Brown, boot-maker, Bridgnorth.”  Bridgnorth was only a few miles from his own home and Mike’s.  Undoubtedly it was Mike’s boot.

“Can you tell me whose boot that is?” asked Mr. Downing.

Psmith looked at it again.

“No, sir.  I can’t say the little chap’s familiar to me.”

“Come with me, then.”

Mr. Downing left the room.  After a moment Psmith followed him.

The headmaster was in his garden.  Thither Mr. Downing made his way, the boot-bearing Psmith in close attendance.

The Head listened to the amateur detective’s statement with interest.

“Indeed?” he said, when Mr. Downing had finished.

“Indeed?  Dear me!  It certainly seems—­It is a curiously well-connected thread of evidence.  You are certain that there was red paint on this boot you discovered in Mr. Outwood’s house?”

“I have it with me.  I brought it on purpose to show to you.  Smith!”

“Sir?”

“You have the boot?”

“Ah,” said the headmaster, putting on a pair of pince-nez, “now let me look at—­This, you say, is the—?  Just so.  Just so.  Just....  But, er, Mr. Downing, it may be that I have not examined this boot with sufficient care, but—­Can you point out to me exactly where this paint is that you speak of?”

Mr. Downing stood staring at the boot with a wild, fixed stare.  Of any suspicion of paint, red or otherwise, it was absolutely and entirely innocent.

CHAPTER L

THE DESTROYER OF EVIDENCE

The boot became the centre of attraction, the cynosure of all eyes.  Mr. Downing fixed it with the piercing stare of one who feels that his brain is tottering.  The headmaster looked at it with a mildly puzzled expression.  Psmith, putting up his eyeglass, gazed at it with a sort of affectionate interest, as if he were waiting for it to do a trick of some kind.

Mr. Downing was the first to break the silence.

“There was paint on this boot,” he said vehemently.  “I tell you there was a splash of red paint across the toe.  Smith will bear me out in this.  Smith, you saw the paint on this boot?”

“Paint, sir!”

“What!  Do you mean to tell me that you did not see it?”

“No, sir.  There was no paint on this boot.”

“This is foolery.  I saw it with my own eyes.  It was a broad splash right across the toe.”

The headmaster interposed.

“You must have made a mistake, Mr. Downing.  There is certainly no trace of paint on this boot.  These momentary optical delusions are, I fancy, not uncommon.  Any doctor will tell you——­”

“I had an aunt, sir,” said Psmith chattily, “who was remarkably subject——­”

“It is absurd.  I cannot have been mistaken,” said Mr. Downing.  “I am positively certain the toe of this boot was red when I found it.”

“It is undoubtedly black now, Mr. Downing.”

“A sort of chameleon boot,” murmured Psmith.

The goaded housemaster turned on him.

“What did you say, Smith?”

“Did I speak, sir?” said Psmith, with the start of one coming suddenly out of a trance.

Mr. Downing looked searchingly at him.

“You had better be careful, Smith.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I strongly suspect you of having something to do with this.”

“Really, Mr. Downing,” said the headmaster, “that is surely improbable.  Smith could scarcely have cleaned the boot on his way to my house.  On one occasion I inadvertently spilt some paint on a shoe of my own.  I can assure you that it does not brush off.  It needs a very systematic cleaning before all traces are removed.”

“Exactly, sir,” said Psmith.  “My theory, if I may——?”

“Certainly, Smith.”

Psmith bowed courteously and proceeded.

“My theory, sir, is that Mr. Downing was deceived by the light and shade effects on the toe of the boot.  The afternoon sun, streaming in through the window, must have shone on the boot in such a manner as to give it a momentary and fictitious aspect of redness.  If Mr. Downing recollects, he did not look long at the boot.  The picture on the retina of the eye, consequently, had not time to fade.  I remember thinking myself, at the moment, that the boot appeared to have a certain reddish tint.  The mistake——­”

“Bah!” said Mr. Downing shortly.

“Well, really,” said the headmaster, “it seems to me that that is the only explanation that will square with the facts.  A boot that is really smeared with red paint does not become black of itself in the course of a few minutes.”

“You are very right, sir,” said Psmith with benevolent approval.  “May I go now, sir?  I am in the middle of a singularly impressive passage of Cicero’s speech De Senectute.”

“I am sorry that you should leave your preparation till Sunday, Smith.  It is a habit of which I altogether disapprove.”

“I am reading it, sir,” said Psmith, with simple dignity, “for pleasure.  Shall I take the boot with me, sir?”

“If Mr. Downing does not want it?”

The housemaster passed the fraudulent piece of evidence to Psmith without a word, and the latter, having included both masters in a kindly smile, left the garden.

Pedestrians who had the good fortune to be passing along the road between the housemaster’s house and Mr. Outwood’s at that moment saw what, if they had but known it, was a most unusual sight, the spectacle of Psmith running.  Psmith’s usual mode of progression was a dignified walk.  He believed in the contemplative style rather than the hustling.

On this occasion, however, reckless of possible injuries to the crease of his trousers, he raced down the road, and turning in at Outwood’s gate, bounded upstairs like a highly trained professional athlete.

On arriving at the study, his first act was to remove a boot from the top of the pile in the basket, place it in the small cupboard under the bookshelf, and lock the cupboard.  Then he flung himself into a chair and panted.

“Brain,” he said to himself approvingly, “is what one chiefly needs in matters of this kind.  Without brain, where are we?  In the soup, every time.  The next development will be when Comrade Downing thinks it over, and is struck with the brilliant idea that it’s just possible that the boot he gave me to carry and the boot I did carry were not one boot but two boots.  Meanwhile——­”

He dragged up another chair for his feet and picked up his novel.

He had not been reading long when there was a footstep in the passage, and Mr. Downing appeared.

The possibility, in fact the probability, of Psmith having substituted another boot for the one with the incriminating splash of paint on it had occurred to him almost immediately on leaving the headmaster’s garden.  Psmith and Mike, he reflected, were friends.  Psmith’s impulse would be to do all that lay in his power to shield Mike.  Feeling aggrieved with himself that he had not thought of this before, he, too, hurried over to Outwood’s.

Mr. Downing was brisk and peremptory.

“I wish to look at these boots again,” he said.  Psmith, with a sigh, laid down his novel, and rose to assist him.

“Sit down, Smith,” said the housemaster.  “I can manage without your help.”

Psmith sat down again, carefully tucking up the knees of his trousers, and watched him with silent interest through his eyeglass.

The scrutiny irritated Mr. Downing.

“Put that thing away, Smith,” he said.

“That thing, sir?”

“Yes, that ridiculous glass.  Put it away.”

“Why, sir?”

“Why!  Because I tell you to do so.”

“I guessed that that was the reason, sir,” sighed Psmith replacing the eyeglass in his waistcoat pocket.  He rested his elbows on his knees, and his chin on his hands, and resumed his contemplative inspection of the boot-expert, who, after fidgeting for a few moments, lodged another complaint.

“Don’t sit there staring at me, Smith.”

“I was interested in what you were doing, sir.”

“Never mind.  Don’t stare at me in that idiotic way.”

“May I read, sir?” asked Psmith, patiently.

“Yes, read if you like.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Psmith took up his book again, and Mr. Downing, now thoroughly irritated, pursued his investigations in the boot-basket.

He went through it twice, but each time without success.  After the second search, he stood up, and looked wildly round the room.  He was as certain as he could be of anything that the missing piece of evidence was somewhere in the study.  It was no use asking Psmith point-blank where it was, for Psmith’s ability to parry dangerous questions with evasive answers was quite out of the common.

His eye roamed about the room.  There was very little cover there, even for so small a fugitive as a number nine boot.  The floor could be acquitted, on sight, of harbouring the quarry.

Then he caught sight of the cupboard, and something seemed to tell him that there was the place to look.

“Smith!” he said.

Psmith had been