Among the curiosities which crowded the mantelpiece of our old sitting-room in Baker Street, and which Mrs. Hudson was forbidden on pain of a scene to dust, there stood for some years a small glass phial, stoppered and sealed with wax. It held perhaps a thimbleful of a white substance so light and fine that it stirred whenever the phial was turned, like the snow in a child's glass globe. I had supposed it to be the residue of one of my friend's chemical researches, of which the room bore many other and less agreeable traces, and I paid it no attention until a raw evening in the November of 1887, when Holmes, who had been without a case for a week and was the worse for it, took it down and held it to the lamp.

"You have never asked me about this, Watson."

"I took it for one of your precipitates."

"So it is, after a fashion. It is the only evidence in a case of theft that never came to trial, and the reason that a footman by the name of Swan is not at this moment breaking stones at Portland." He turned the phial, and the white stuff drifted. "It is the bloom of the aluminium crutch."

I begged him to tell me the story, and he did so the more readily, I think, because it showed him young. I set it down here as nearly in his own words as my notes allow.

I.

"It was in the January of 'seventy-nine," said he, "when I had my rooms in Montague Street and a great deal more leisure than I wanted. The young surgeon who lodged beneath me had attended the household at Highgate, and so it was that on a Wednesday morning, with snow on her hat and her gloves wrung into a rope, Miss Josephine Bingham came up my stairs.

"She was twenty years of age, and she would be twenty-one upon the first of March. I mention the date because she mentioned it three times in the first ten minutes, and each time she looked as though she were ashamed of it.

"Her father, she told me, had been a maker of philosophical instruments in Holborn, barometers and thermometers and the like, in partnership with her mother's brother, a Mr. Martin Troutman. Both her parents were dead. Her father had left her eight thousand pounds in railway bonds, to be held in trust by her uncle until she came of age, and her uncle had given her a home in his house at Highgate. The business had been sold. Of her father's instruments only one remained in the house, a fine stick barometer of his own make, which hung in the study on the first floor, beside the desk where the iron deed-box was kept.

"Her uncle, she said, was a lame man. Five years before, he had been thrown from a cab, and the hip had never mended. Since then he had kept entirely to the ground floor, where a bedroom had been made up for him in the old back parlour, and he had not once been above stairs. He went about upon a crutch, of which he was exceedingly proud. It had been made for him in Paris of aluminium, which in those days, Watson, was still a costly marvel, a metal fit for the cutlery of emperors, and it weighed less than an ordinary walking-stick. He showed it to every visitor. He would hand it to them to heft, and then he would tell them, as a great joke, that the Parisian maker had warned him on no account to let it come near quicksilver, which would eat it as the moth eats wool. It was the one joke he had, she said, and he told it often.

"I made a note of that.

"Then she came to the night before. At about two in the morning the household had been woken by a crash from the study. The footman, Swan, who slept at the top of the house, had come down with a candle and found the study door open and the window raised, the deed-box forced and empty, and her father's barometer lying broken upon the floor, with the quicksilver running all across the boards. Beneath the window, against the wall of the house, stood a ladder which the gardener had left there the afternoon before. Swan roused the house. Miss Bingham came down from her room. Swan knocked at Mr. Troutman's door, and Mr. Troutman called out to know what was the matter, and then unlocked the door from within, for he was a nervous man and had locked it every night for five years. He sat upon his bed as white as the sheet, Miss Bingham said, and sent Swan running for the police.

"The inspector of the division, a Mr. Brandon, was a sensible man, and he went straight to the point. Snow had fallen until midnight and then stopped. The ladder's feet had sunk into it, but there was not a footprint in the snow anywhere about the ladder, nor anywhere in the garden. No one had come in by the window. The window had been raised from within, to make it look as though someone had. That left the household: Mr. Troutman, who could not climb the stairs; Miss Bingham, whose own fortune it was; an old cook as deaf as a post; and Swan, who kept the key to the study door for the sake of the fires. The inspector had taken Swan away at eight o'clock.

"'He has been with us eleven years,' said Miss Bingham. 'He taught me to skate. He polishes my uncle's crutch every night at ten o'clock when he takes in the hot water, because my uncle won't let anyone else touch it. Mr. Holmes, I would sooner believe I had done it myself.'

"I told her that I did not think she had, and we took a cab to Highgate."

II.

"It was a tall, narrow house near the top of the hill, with a long garden behind it running down to a wall, and everything I saw there that morning bore out the inspector's reading of the snow. The ladder stood where the gardener had left it. Its feet were sunk six inches deep, and the snow about them was as smooth as a tablecloth. Brandon had had the sense to look at it from the study window and to keep his constables out of the garden, which is more than I should have expected of most of his colleagues, and he was right. Nobody had come up that ladder or gone down it.

"The study told me rather more. The lock of the deed-box had been cut round with a chisel, very neatly, by a hand in no hurry at all, which is not the way of a man who expects at any moment to hear a footstep on the stair. The chisel lay on the desk. The barometer had hung upon a hook on the wall beside the desk, at about the height of a man's waist, and now lay on the floor below, its frame cracked and its glass tube in splinters. The housemaid had swept up the glass. She had not been able to sweep up the quicksilver. No one ever can. It lay in a hundred bright beads in the cracks between the boards, and a few of the beads, when I looked at them through my lens, were dulled with a grey skin of dust and splinters.

"'Is there any other quicksilver in this house, Miss Bingham?' I asked her. 'Any thermometer, or another glass?'

"She thought. 'There is the thermometer in the conservatory, but that is spirit, coloured red. Father's barometer was the last. My uncle sold all the rest with the business.'

"'And your uncle did not come up here this morning? Not even with the inspector?'

"'He could not. The inspector went down to him.'

"So we went down to him, too.

"Mr. Martin Troutman was a large, florid man of sixty, with a silver beard and a voice too big for the room. He sat in an armchair by the fire with his bad leg upon a stool, and he received me with a great deal of grief and a great deal of indignation, the first for his niece and the second for Swan, who had eaten his bread for eleven years. The bonds were gone, he said. He would make good what he could. He was not a rich man; there had been a failure in the autumn, a bank in Glasgow, in which he had held a few shares that he was now called upon to pay for, and it had cost him dear. But what he had would be hers.

"While he talked, I looked at the crutch.

"It leaned against the arm of his chair, and it was a handsome thing, I grant him: a dull, silvery shaft, a padded crosspiece of red morocco, and at the foot a leather shoe to keep it from slipping. A little above the leather shoe there was a scratch, bright and new, about half an inch long. And out of that scratch there grew a white fur. It was as fine as the down on a moth's wing and stood perhaps an eighth of an inch high, and it was entirely out of place on a gentleman's crutch in a warm room.

"Mr. Troutman saw where I was looking and frowned. 'That confounded mildew,' he said. 'The girl has wiped it off twice since breakfast, and it comes back. Swan would never have let it come to that.'

"'May I?' I said. I took a sheet of notepaper from his desk, and with the blade of my penknife I scraped the white stuff from the scratch into the paper, and folded it, and put it in my pocket. Then I leaned the crutch where it had been, and asked him a few questions about the bonds, and listened to his answers, and watched the scratch. In ten minutes, Watson, the fur had begun to grow again. I could see it rise along the bright edge of the metal, white and fine, as one may see the minute hand of a clock move if one is patient enough.

"'Mr. Troutman,' I said, 'Swan polished this crutch last night at ten o'clock?'

"'He did. It was as bright as a new sixpence.'

"'And then you locked your door.'

"'I did. I always do.'

"'Where did the crutch stand in the night?'

"'Against the bed, where it always stands. Where else should it be?'

"'And you did not leave your room until Swan knocked?'

"'I did not leave it until the inspector had come and gone. I have told him so, and now I tell you. I could not have gone up to that study if the house were on fire. I have not been up those stairs in five years.'

"'Then, sir,' I said, 'I am afraid you will have to explain to me how your crutch went up them.'"

III.

Holmes paused here and turned the little phial in his long fingers.

"You see it, of course, Watson," said he. "I had seen it the moment I saw the fur, and the rest of my questions were only to close the doors behind him. His maker in Paris was perfectly right. Aluminium wears a coat of its own rust, too thin for the eye, and it is that coat which keeps it bright. Scratch through the coat while quicksilver is upon the metal, and the quicksilver enters at the scratch and spreads beneath it, and from then on the metal cannot keep its coat on. It rusts as fast as you can wipe it, and its rust is not red like iron's, but white, and it grows outward from the wound in a fur, as you see. It will go on growing, after its fashion, until the quicksilver is spent.

"Now consider. At ten o'clock that crutch was polished bright by a man who had polished it every night for five years and would have noticed a speck. From ten o'clock until the inspector came, by its owner's own account, it never left a room whose door was locked on the inside, and neither did he. There was no quicksilver in that house at all until two in the morning, when the barometer came off the wall. There was no broken glass in that house until the same moment, in the same room. And at some time between ten and morning, that crutch had been struck by glass hard enough to scratch it, and wetted with quicksilver in the scratch.

"I had looked at the carpet in his bedroom, while he talked, and at the hall floor on the way in. There was not a bead of quicksilver on either, nor anywhere in that house but in the cracks of the study floor. A crutch does not climb stairs alone, Watson. It had been in the study when the barometer fell, and there was only one man who could have carried it there."

"And he confessed?"

"He did not even try to deny it. I think he was rather relieved. He had sold his niece's bonds in November, every one of them, to meet the calls upon his Glasgow shares, and he had sat in that armchair for two months watching the first of March come towards him like a train. He could climb the stairs, after all. Not well, and not quickly, but a lame man with a stout banister and a strong motive can do a great deal in the dark. He went up at a quarter to two. He raised the window, so that the gardener's ladder might take the blame. He cut round the lock of the box, which held nothing but the ribbon that the bonds had been tied with. And then, turning to go, he swung his crutch about him in the dark, as a man on a crutch must, and it struck the barometer, and down came the barometer upon it, glass and quicksilver and all.

"He was down the stairs and behind his locked door before Swan's candle reached the second landing. He never gave the quicksilver a thought. He had told the Paris maker's warning as a joke to every caller for five years, you see, and he had never once believed it."

"What became of him?"

"Nothing that a court had any hand in. His niece would not charge him. He made over to her the house and whatever was left, which was not a great deal, and went to live with a married sister in Bath, and I am told he never boasted of anything again. Swan came home that same evening. Brandon was very decent about it. He shook my hand, and asked me, in the doorway, how I came to know so much about aluminium, and I am afraid I told him that every man ought to know a little about everything that might hang him."

"And Miss Bingham?"

"She keeps a school for girls in Kent, and sends me a card at Christmas, and she paid me my fee, two guineas, in eight half-crowns and the rest in shillings, over the course of a year. It was the first fee I ever earned, Watson, that I felt I had earned twice."

He put the phial back upon the mantelpiece, between the jack-knife and the slipper.

"I read in one of the journals," said he, "that a young man in Ohio and another in France have each lately found a way to make aluminium by electricity, and cheaply. Within a few years, I dare say, there will be aluminium saucepans in every kitchen in London, and nobody will think it a marvel at all." He settled back in his chair. "I hope the cooks will be careful with their thermometers."

~ THE END ~

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