• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“So have I,” I replied, aiming at the center of Vincey’s chest. He had stopped ten feet away, his empty hands extended.

“I am unarmed,” he said quietly. “You may search me if you like. Only allow me to speak—to clear away the misapprehensions under which you understandably labor. I only learned of them a few days ago, and I have spent every hour since then gathering the evidence which will prove I am not the man you believe me to be.”

“Impossible,” I cried. “I saw you with my own eyes.”

“You could not have seen me. I was in Damascus, as I told you. I have brought my alibi with me.”

He indicated the second man, who had now caught him up. His face was round and red and adorned with a set of superb mustaches curled like the horns of a water buffalo. Whipping off his helmet, he bent at the waist in a stiff formal bow.

“Guten Morgen, meine Freunde. To greet you at last is my pleasure. I could not in Cairo do so, for I was in Damascus.”

“Karl von Bork!” I exclaimed. “But I thought you were in Berlin, working with Professor Sethe.”

“So it was,” Karl said, bowing again. “Until the summer, when a position with the Damascus expedition to me offered was. Egyptian reliefs had been found—”

“Yes, now I remember,” I interrupted, for Karl, like my son, would go on talking until someone stopped him. “Someone—the Reverend Sayce, I believe—mentioned it when we dined with him in Cairo. Are you telling me that Mr. Vincey was with you?”

“Ja, ja, das ist recht. With a fever I was ill, and I feared I would not be soon recovered. A substitute was necessary to carry on my work. The good God sent me health sooner than I had hoped; and when Herr Vincey telegraphed to me that the police had accused him of terrible crimes I hurried at once to clear his name. I had heard, with what shock and distress my tongue fails me to say, of the Herr Professor’s accident, but never would I have supposed—”

“Yes, Karl, thank you,” I said. “Then the police have accepted your story? I wonder they have not informed me.”

“It was only yesterday they told me I was no longer under suspicion,” Vincey said. “We set out at once for Amarna, for I was even more anxious to clear myself with you than with the police.” He started to reach for his pocket, and then gave me a quizzical smile. “You will allow me? I brought other evidence—train tickets, dated and stamped, a receipt from the Sultana Hotel, affidavits from other members of the expedition.”

“Karl’s evidence is good enough for me,” I said. “He is an old friend whom we have known for years—”

“Hmph,” said Emerson, who of course had no recollection of ever having seen Karl before.

“All the same,” I went on. “I trust Karl will not take offense if I call another witness, and if I request Cyrus to keep you covered (that is the phrase, I believe?) while I go in search of her.”

“Good idea,” said Cyrus. “Not that I doubt your word, von Bork, but this is the doggonedest story I ever heard. If it wasn’t Vincey, then who—”

“That will all be gone into at the proper time,” I said. “First—where is Bertha?”

There was no need to search for her; she was there, a few feet behind us. René was at her side, his arm encircling her slim shoulders. “There is nothing to fear,” he assured her. “This villain, this scum, cannot hurt you now.”

“But it is not he,” Bertha said.

“I would like to beat him as he—” René’s jaw dropped. “What is it you say?”

“He is not the one.” Bertha moved slowly forward, out of the protective circle of his arm. Her wide dark eyes were fixed on Vincey. “They are alike as sons of the same mother, but this is not the same man. Who would know better than I?”

“So it was Sethos after all,” I said.

We had retired to the shade and I had asked Selim to brew tea. With such overwhelming evidence to support his claim it hardly seemed fair to exclude Mr. Vincey from our company, but I noticed Cyrus kept his right hand in his pocket and held his cup in his left.

“The conclusion is forced upon