The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [5887]
"The fishing isn't as good as I hoped," mused the colonel.
Then, as he turned to go out, he heard distinctly:
"Sure I remember you paying for the drink. I can prove that if you want me to. Are they tryin' to double-cross you?"
"Something like that, yes."
"Well, you leave it to me, see? I'll square you all right."
"Thanks," murmured Jean, and then he, too, turned aside.
"There may be something in it after all," was the colonel's thought, and then he, too, hurried from the Three Pines, passing beneath the big trees, with their sighing branches, which gave the name to the inn.
On toward The Haven, through the silence and darkness of the night, went the detective. And at a particularly dark and lonely place he stopped. The pungent, clean smell of grain alcohol filled the air, and a little later a man, devoid of goatee and moustache, passing out into the starlight, while a black, slouch hat went into the bag, and a Panama, so flexible that it had not suffered from having been thrust rather ruthlessly into the valise, came out.
"I don't like that sort of detective work," mused the colonel, "but it has its uses."
Viola Carwell, alone in her room, sat with a bundle of letters on a table before her. They were letters she had found in a small drawer of the private safe - a drawer she had, at first, thought contained nothing. The discovery of the letters had been made in a peculiar manner.
Viola and Miss Carwell, going over the documents, had sorted them into two piles - one to be submitted to the lawyer, the other being made up of obviously personal matters that could have no interest for any but members of the family.
Then Miss Carwell had been called away to attend to some household matters, and Viola had started to return to the safe such of the papers as were not to go to the lawyer.
She opened a small drawer, to slip back into it a bundle of letters her mother had written to Mr. Carwell years before. Then Viola became aware of something else in the drawer. It was something that caught on the end of her finger nail, and she was stung by a little prick-like that of a pin.
"A sliver-under my nail!" exclaimed Viola. "The bottom of the wooden drawer must be loose."
It was loose, as she discovered as soon as she looked in the compartment. But it was a looseness that meant nothing else than that the drawer had a false bottom.
It was not such a false bottom as would have been made use of in the moving pictures. That is to say it was very poorly made, and an almost casual glance would have revealed it. All that had been done was to take a piece of wood the exact size and shape of the bottom of the drawer, and fit it in. This extra piece of wood covered anything that might be put in the drawer under it, and then, on top of the false bottom other things might be placed so that when they were taken out, and the person doing it saw bare wood, the conclusion would naturally follow that all the contents of the drawer had been removed.
But such was not the case. Beneath the smoothfitting piece of wood, which had sprung loose and been the means of driving a splinter under Viola's nail, thus apprising her of the fact that there was something in the drawer she had not seen, had been found some letters. And Viola had not told her aunt about them.
"I want to see what they are myself, first," the girl decided.
Now they were spread out on her dressing table in front of her. She sat with her glorious blue-black hair unbound, and falling over her shoulders, which gleamed pink through the filmy thinness of her robe.
"I wonder if I shall be shocked when I read them?" she mused.
That was what Viola had been living in continual fear of since her father's death - that some disclosure would shock her - that she might come upon some phase of his past life which would not bear the full light of day. For Horace Carwell had not stinted himself