“Well?”
“That’s all. He never said a word;
just glared, and put his sleeve back in his pocket
quickly. ‘I was saying,’ said he,
’that there was the prescription burning, wasn’t
I?’ Interrogative cough. ‘How the
devil,’ said I, ‘can you move an empty
sleeve like that?’ ‘Empty sleeve?’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘an empty sleeve.’
“‘It’s an empty sleeve, is it?
You saw it was an empty sleeve?’ He stood up
right away. I stood up too. He came towards
me in three very slow steps, and stood quite close.
Sniffed venomously. I didn’t flinch, though
I’m hanged if that bandaged knob of his, and
those blinkers, aren’t enough to unnerve any
one, coming quietly up to you.
“‘You said it was an empty sleeve?’
he said. ‘Certainly,’ I said.
At staring and saying nothing a barefaced man, unspectacled,
starts scratch. Then very quietly he pulled his
sleeve out of his pocket again, and raised his arm
towards me as though he would show it to me again.
He did it very, very slowly. I looked at it.
Seemed an age. ‘Well?’ said I, clearing
my throat, ‘there’s nothing in it.’
“Had to say something. I was beginning
to feel frightened. I could see right down it.
He extended it straight towards me, slowly, slowly—just
like that—until the cuff was six inches
from my face. Queer thing to see an empty sleeve
come at you like that! And then—”
“Well?”
“Something—exactly like a finger
and thumb it felt—nipped my nose.”
Bunting began to laugh.
“There wasn’t anything there!” said
Cuss, his voice running up into a shriek at the “there.”
“It’s all very well for you to laugh, but
I tell you I was so startled, I hit his cuff hard,
and turned around, and cut out of the room—I
left him—”
Cuss stopped. There was no mistaking the sincerity
of his panic. He turned round in a helpless way
and took a second glass of the excellent vicar’s
very inferior sherry. “When I hit his cuff,”
said Cuss, “I tell you, it felt exactly like
hitting an arm. And there wasn’t an arm!
There wasn’t the ghost of an arm!”
Mr. Bunting thought it over. He looked suspiciously
at Cuss. “It’s a most remarkable
story,” he said. He looked very wise and
grave indeed. “It’s really,”
said Mr. Bunting with judicial emphasis, “a
most remarkable story.”
THE BURGLARY AT THE VICARAGE
The facts of the burglary at the vicarage came to
us chiefly through the medium of the vicar and his
wife. It occurred in the small hours of Whit
Monday, the day devoted in Iping to the Club festivities.
Mrs. Bunting, it seems, woke up suddenly in the stillness
that comes before the dawn, with the strong impression
that the door of their bedroom had opened and closed.
She did not arouse her husband at first, but sat up
in bed listening. She then distinctly heard the
pad, pad, pad of bare feet coming out of the adjoining
dressing-room and walking along the passage towards
the staircase. As soon as she felt assured of
this, she aroused the Rev. Mr. Bunting as quietly
as possible. He did not strike a light, but putting
on his spectacles, her dressing-gown and his bath
slippers, he went out on the landing to listen.
He heard quite distinctly a fumbling going on at his
study desk down-stairs, and then a violent sneeze.
