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The
Clue
The old Van
Norman mansion was the finest house in Mapleton.
Well back from the road, it sat proudly among
its finely kept lawns and gardens, as if with a
dignified sense of its own importance, and its
white, Colonial columns gleamed through the
trees, like sentinels guarding the entrance to
the stately hall.
All Mapleton was proud of the picturesque old
place, and it was shown to visiting strangers
with the same pride that the native villagers
pointed out the Memorial Library and the new
church.
More than a half-century old, the patrician
white house seemed to glance coldly on the
upstart cottages, whose inadequate pillars
supported beetling second stories, and whose
spacious, filigreed verandas left woefully small
area for rooms inside the house.
The Van Norman mansion was not like that. It was
a long rectangle, and each of its four stories
was a series of commodious, well-shaped
apartments.
And its owner, the beautiful Madeleine Van
Norman, was the most envied as well as the most
admired young woman in the town.
Magnificent Madeleine, as she was sometimes
called, was of the haughty, imperious type which
inspires admiration and respect rather than love.
An orphan and an heiress, she had lived all of
her twenty-two years of life in the old house,
and since the death of her uncle, two years
before, had continued as mistress of the place,
ably assisted by a pleasant, motherly chaperon,
a clever social secretary, and a corps of
capable servants...
The
Gold Bag
Though a young detective, I am not
entirely an inexperienced one, and I have
several fairly successful investigations to my
credit on the records of the Central Office.
The Chief said to me one day: “Burroughs, if
there’s a mystery to be unravelled; I’d rather
put it in your hands than to trust it to any
other man on the force.
“Because,” he went on, “you go about it
scientifically, and you never jump at
conclusions, or accept them, until they’re
indubitably warranted.”
I declared myself duly grateful for the Chief’s
kind words, but I was secretly a bit chagrined.
A detective’s ambition is to be, considered
capable of jumping at conclusions, only the
conclusions must always prove to be correct ones.
But though I am an earnest and painstaking
worker, though my habits are methodical and
systematic, and though I am indefatigably
patient and persevering, I can never make those
brilliant deductions from seemingly unimportant
clues that Fleming Stone can. He holds that it
is nothing but observation and logical inference,
but to me it is little short of clairvoyance.
The smallest detail in the way of evidence
immediately connotes in his mind some important
fact that is indisputable, but which would never
have occurred to me. I suppose this is largely a
natural bent of his brain, for I have not yet
been able to achieve it, either by study or
experience...
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