Butler Ellis Parker
Philo Gubb, Correspondence-School Detective
The stock-keeper was the first to speak.
“Hello!” he said. “Somebody broke that window!” And it was true. Somebody had not only broken the window, but had broken every pane and the sash itself. But Mr. Gubb was not interested in this. He was gazing at the electric bulb and thinking of Part Two, Lesson Six of the Course of Twelve Lessons – “How to Identify by Finger-Prints, with General Remarks on the Bertillon System.” He looked about for some means of reaching the bulb above his head. His eye lit on the fallen chair. By placing the chair upright and placing one foot on the frame of Henry Smitz’s machine and the other on the chair-back, he could reach the bulb. He righted the chair and stepped onto its seat. He put one foot on the frame of Henry Smitz’s machine; very carefully he put the other foot on the top of the chair-back. He reached upward and unscrewed the bulb.
The stock-keeper saw the chair totter. He sprang forward to steady it, but he was too late. Philo Gubb, grasping the air, fell on the broad, level board that formed the middle part of Henry Smitz’s machine.
The effect was instantaneous. The cogs and wheels of the machine began to revolve rapidly. Two strong, steel arms flopped down and held Detective Gubb to the table, clamping his arms to his side. The roll of burlap unrolled, and as it unrolled, the loose end was seized and slipped under Mr. Gubb and wrapped around him and drawn taut, bundling him as a sheep’s carcass is bundled. An arm reached down and back and forth, with a sewing motion, and passed from Mr. Gubb’s head to his feet. As it reached his feet a knife sliced the burlap in which he was wrapped from the burlap on the roll.
And then a most surprising thing happened. As if the board on which he lay had been a catapult, it suddenly and unexpectedly raised Philo Gubb and tossed him through the open window. The stock-keeper heard a muffled scream and then a great splash, but when he ran to the window, the great paper-hanger detective had disappeared in the bosom of the Mississippi.
Like Henry Smitz he had tried to reach the ceiling by standing on the chair-back; like Henry Smitz he had fallen upon the newly invented burlaping and loading machine; like Henry Smitz he had been wrapped and thrown through the window into the river; but, unlike Henry Smitz, he had not been sewn into the burlap, because Philo Gubb had the double-pointed shuttle-action needle in his pocket.
Page Seventeen of Lesson Eleven of the Rising Sun Detective Agency’s Correspondence School of Detecting’s Course of Twelve Lessons, says: —
In cases of extreme difficulty of solution it is well for the detective to reënact as nearly as possible the probable action of the crime.
Mr. Philo Gubb had done so. He had also proved that a man may be sewn in a sack and drowned in a river without committing willful suicide or being the victim of foul play.
