be beneath their dignity. In any case, there was a good chance that I should see such a large group before they saw me.
I went the rounds of the tents. The Beauties of the Harem proved entirely harmless. The Corsican Brothers was a pleasant puppet-show of the Dumas comedy. I viewed the Stereoscopic Wonders of the World. I even entered the booth of Madame Palmeira, clairvoyante. My last plunge was into a simple maze, tricked out as a Hall of Mirrors. It was under canvas and ill-lit. I could swear that no one saw me enter except the gypsy woman who took my coin. Her custom had declined by this hour. I waited until I was reasonably sure no one else was inside before I entered.
The interior consisted of arched passageways hung with crimson rep pinned upon boarding, against which the mirrors were bolted. There was little subtlety in the display of convex and concave which grotesquely caricatured the reflection. At one moment I saw myself squashed to a midget and then elongated to a beanpole. A moment later, as I turned my head, the left-hand side of my face bulged out at me and the right-hand was no more than a wafer of colour. Presently I was upside down with my heels on the ceiling, and then I was ingeniously split in two so that each half walked with a single foot.
The design of this maze was simple enough, and whatever fun there might be was in the absurd contortions of the images. The one thing you could not do was to get from one passage to another adjoining it without going all the way round the system. That was the entire mystery of the entertainment.
Then I heard a family—or at least two children and two women together—laughing and calling somewhere to the right of me. I could hear their erratic footsteps on the thinly carpeted board which served as the floor of the display. Presently, the sound of their merriment faded as they made their way out and I was, as it seemed to me, alone in the place.
I must have been almost at the centre of the pattern when I heard one other person, walking quietly but steadily. Perhaps it was the woman at the door who had come to see if I was still there before she closed the tent. The footsteps came closer, in the adjoining passage. The design of the maze would lead me round the outer ring before I could come face-to-face with whoever was there but who was no more than two feet from me beyond the mirrored partition.
Then the movements stopped and a voice that I recognised began.
“It won’t do, doctor. It won’t do at all, you know. Believe me, you had far better give it up—whatever it is. You will only hurt yourself, you see. Leave such things well alone. Go back to your family mysteries. Go back to the lost inheritances and disappointed spinsters. Better still—go and heal the sick. That is what you have been trained to do, is it not?”
There was a pause. Did he really expect a reply? With a chill in my heart I stood absolutely still and said nothing. Once he could locate me by the sound of my voice or my own footsteps, it would probably mean a bullet in my ribs. I kept very still. A step in either direction and the creak of a board would give me away.
“Give it up,” said the voice of Colonel Rawdon Moran again. “It won’t wash. You may say so to your friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, if you choose. Or you may keep it to yourself. That is entirely a matter for you. But your fate is no longer in your own hands. I beg you will believe me. Be warned, once and for all. Be assured, you will only hurt yourself.”
Be warned once and for all! Beware all—I warn but once. Such were the words that had vanished with the dew before anyone else could read them. It seemed Moran could not have reached London by that night; but I knew he was the author of the message, as surely as he was the donor of the severed head.
I will not say that I was too frightened to reply to this sudden warning. I simply could not bring myself to do it. In any case, the invisible corridor beyond the partition was now silent again. It did not mean the coast was clear. The