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Page 59
"The Devil take your nonsense!" cried the Englishman.
My father stood up with a twisted, ironical smile.
"If you doubt my skill, Mr. Gosford, as a fortune, or rather a
misfortune-teller I will ask Mr. Lewis and Herman Gaeki to tell
me what they see."
The two men crossed the room and stooped over the paper, while my
father held the crystal. The manner and the bearing of the men
changed. They grew on the instant tense and fired with interest.
"I see it!" said the old doctor, with a queer foreign expletive.
"And I," cried Lewis, "see something more than Pendleton's
vision. I see the penitentiary in the distance."
The Englishman sprang up with an oath and leaned across the
table. Then he saw the thing.
"My father's hand held the crystal above the figures of the
bequest written in the body of the will. The focused lens of
glass magnified to a great diameter, and under the vast
enlargement a thing that would escape the eye stood out. The top
curl of a figure 3 had been erased, and the bar of a 5 added.
One could see the broken fibers of the paper on the outline of
the curl, and the bar of the five lay across the top of the three
and the top of the o behind it like a black lath tacked across
two uprights.
The figure 3 had been changed to 5 so cunningly is to deceive the
eye, but not to deceive the vast magnification of the crystal.
The thing stood out big and crude like a carpenter's patch.
Gosford's face became expressionless like wood, his body rigid;
then he stood up and faced the three men across the table.
"Quite so!" he said in his vacuous English voice. "Marshall
wrote a 3 by inadvertence and changed it. He borrowed my
penknife to erase the figure."
My father and Lewis gaped like men who see a penned-in beast slip
out through an unimagined passage. There was silence. Then
suddenly, in the strained stillness of the room, old Doctor Gaeki
laughed.
Gosford lifted his long pink face, with its cropped beard
bringing out the ugly mouth.
"Why do you laugh, my good man?" he said.
"I laugh," replied Gaeki, "because a figure 5 can have so many
colors."
And now my father and Lewis were no less astonished than Mr.
Gosford.
"Colors!" they said, for the changed figure in the will was
black.
"Why, yes," replied the old man, "it is very pretty."
He reached across the table and drew over Mr. Gosford's
memorandum beside the will.
"You are progressive, sir," he went on; "you write in
iron-nutgall ink, just made, commercially, in this year of
fifty-six by Mr. Stephens. But we write here as Marshall wrote
in 'fifty-four, with logwood."
He turned and fumbled in his little case of bottles.
"I carry a bit of acid for my people's indigestions. It has
other uses." He whipped out the stopper of his vial and dabbed
Gosford's notes and Marshall's signature.
"See!" he cried. "Your writing is blue, Mr. Gosford, and
Marshall's red!"
With an oath the trapped man struck at Gaeki's hand. The vial
fell and cracked on the table. The hydrochloric acid spread out
over Marshall's will. And under the chemical reagent the figure
in the bequest of fifty thousand dollars changed beautifully; the
bar of the 5 turned blue, and the remainder of it a deep
purple-red like the body of the will.
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