Ramon and I disconnected the battery and dragged the body into the room.  We found in the pockets a butcher’s knife and a revolver, and round the waist a rope, with which the would-be murderer had doubtless intended to descend from the window after accomplishing his purpose.

This incident, of course, caused a great sensation both at Kingscote and in the country-side, and, equally of course, there was an inquest, at which Mr. Fortescue, Ramon, and myself, were the only witnesses.  As Mr. Fortescue did not want it to be known that he was the victim of a vendetta, and detested the idea of having himself and his affairs discussed by the press, we were careful not to gainsay the popular belief that Griscelli was neither more nor less than a dangerous and resolute burglar, and, as his possession of lethal weapons proved, a potential murderer.  As for the cause of death I said, as I then fully believed (though I have since had occasion to modify this opinion somewhat), that the battery was not strong enough to kill a healthy man, and that Griscelli had died of nervous shock and fear acting on a weak heart.  In this view the jury concurred and returned a verdict of accidental death, with the (informal) rider that it “served him right.”  The chairman, a burly farmer, warmly congratulated me on my ingenuity, and regretted that he had not “one of them things” at every window in his house.

So far so good; but, unfortunately, a London paper which lived on sensation, and happened at the moment to be in want of a new one, took the matter up.  One of the editor’s jackals came down to Kingscote, and there and elsewhere picked up a few facts concerning Mr. Fortescue’s antecedents and habits, which he served up to his readers in a highly spiced and amazingly mendacious article, entitled “old Fortescue and his Strange Fortunes.”  But the sting of the article was in its tail.  The writer threw doubt on the justice of the verdict.  It remained to be proved, he said, that Griscelli was a burglar, and his death accidental.  And even burglars had their rights.  The law assumed them to be innocent until they were proved to be guilty, and it could be permitted neither to Mr. Fortescue nor to any other man to take people’s lives, merely because he suspected them of an intention to come in by the window instead of the door.  By what right, he asked, did Mr. Fortescue place on his window an appliance as dangerous as forked lightning, and as deadly as dynamite?  What was the difference between magnetized bars in a window and spring-guns on a game-preserve?  In conclusion, the writer demanded a searching investigation into the circumstances attending Guiseppe Griscelli’s death, likewise the immediate passing of an act of Parliament forbidding, under heavy penalties, the use of magnetic batteries as a defence against supposed burglars.

This effusion (which he read in a marked copy of the paper obligingly forwarded by the enterprising editor) put Mr. Fortescue in a terrible passion, which made him, for a moment, look younger than ever I had seen him look before.  The outrage rekindled the fire of his youth; he seemed to grow taller, his eyes glowed with anger, and, had the enterprising editor been present, he would have passed a very bad quarter of an hour.