“Don’t think that.  I never had a theory.”

“Is that so?  Then failure lies somewhere else.  The hopeless way you bitched up this thing interests me quite a lot.  Remember that I know the case inside out and I’m not talking through my hat.  So now let’s see how and why you barked your shins so bad.

“Now, Mark, take a cinema show and consider it.  Perhaps it’s going to throw some light for you.  A cinema film presents two entirely different achievements.  It presents ten for that matter; but we’ll take just two.  It shows you a white sheet with a light thrown on it; it passes the light through a series of stains and shadows and the stains are magnified by lenses before they reach the screen.  A most elaborate mechanism, you see, but the spectator never thinks about all that, because the machine produces an appeal to another part of his mind altogether.  He forgets sheet, lantern, film, and all they are doing, in the illusion which they create.

“We accept the convention of the moving picture, the light and darkness, the tones and half tones, because these moving stains and shadows take the shape of familiar objects and tell a coherent story, showing life in action.  But we know, subconsciously, all the time that it is merely an imitation of reality, as in the case of a picture, a novel, or a stage play.  Certain ingenious applications of science and art combined have created the appearance of truth and told a story.  Well, in the Redmayne case, certain ingenious operations have combined to tell you a story; and you have found yourself so interested in the yarn that you have quite overlooked the mechanism.  But the mechanism should have been the first consideration, and the conjurers, by distracting your attention from it, did just what they were out to do.  Let us take a look at the mechanism, my son, and see where the archcrooks behind this thing bluffed you.”

Brendon did not hide his emotion, but kept silence while Mr. Ganns helped himself to a pinch of snuff.

“Now the little I’ve done in the world,” he continued, “is thanks not so much to the deductive mind we hear such a lot about, but to the synthetic mind.  The linking up of facts has been my strong suit.  That’s the backbone of success; and where facts can’t be linked up, then failure is usually the result.  I never waste one moment on a theory until I’ve got a tough skeleton of facts back of it.  It was up to you to hunt facts, Mark; and you didn’t hunt facts.”

“I had an encyclopedia of facts.”

“Granted.  But your encyclopedia began at the letter ‘B,’ instead of the letter ‘A.’  We’ll turn to that in a minute.”

“My facts, such as they were, cannot be denied,” argued Brendon, a little aggrieved.  “They are cast-iron.  My eyes and observation are trained to be exact and jealous of facts.  No amount of synthesis can prevent two and one from being three, Ganns.”

“On the contrary, two and one may be twenty-one, or twelve, or a half.  Why jump to any conclusion?  You had facts; but you did not have all the available facts—­or anything like all.  You tried to put on the roof before the walls were up; and, what’s more, a great many of your ‘cast-iron facts’ were no facts at all.”