“Mystery?” said Sexton Blake; as he and Philip Trevelyan trudged through tho deepening dusk to the Pollard Arms. “There is no mystery. There never was. Surely what has happened is as clear as anything can be?”
“To you, perhaps,” said Trevelyan. “To me, I confess, the whole affair is an inscrutable enigma.”
The detective shrugged his shoulders.
“That is because you do not give your reason unfettered play,” he said. “If you approached the problem in the same spirit as you would tackle a sum in arithmetic, the answer would suggest itself at once. You have only to exclude all those factors which fail to satisfy the conditions, and what remains, however improbable it may sound, is bound to be the true solution.”
“Both Ritchie and your father,” he continued, “were undoubtedly struck on the head by something, or somebody, which, or who was able to travel across the snow without leaving any footprint. Neither you nor I believe in ghosts, and a bird is out of the question. What, then, remains?”
Trevelyan shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Yet you have heard of such things as balloons, I suppose?” said Sexton Blake.
Trevelyan started. “By Jove!” he said. “You think—”
“I don’t think—I’m sure!” said Sexton Blake. “As soon as I had heard your story, I realised that a balloon was the only possible explanation. When I examined those brownish patches in the Ten-Acre Pasture, and found they were due to the presence of sand, my theory was confirmed. When I found that aneroid barometer, my theory ceased to be a theory, and became a certainty.
“Without a doubt, what happened the night before last was this,” he went on. “Somebody in a balloon, which was probably partly deflated, was drifting across the English Channel. Suddenly he found himself in danger of being dashed against the face of the cliffs to the south-west of this village. Uttering that cry of alarm which Ritchie heard, he threw out some ballast and thereby caused those brownish patches on the snow-clad face of the cliff.
“In consequence of this manoeuvre, the balloon shot upwards, and cleared the edge of the cliff. As it did so it evidently lurched to one side, and that mahogany case containing the barometer, was thrown out. The case struck Ritchie on the back of the head, and afterward rolled into that clump of bushes. The balloon then drifted inland and floated over the Ten-Acre Pasture.
“What happened next,” continued Sexton Blake, “is only conjecture, but conjecture, I think, which is founded on sound reasoning. The aeronaut’s grapnel, I opine, was dangling from the car, and it was one of the flukes of the grapnel which caught the pony and inflicted that wound in her neck, and which afterwards struck your father and stunned him.
“Owing to the darkness,” concluded the detective, “the occupant of the balloon did not see what happened. He only knew that his grapnel had caught on something which had failed to hold it. At the same time, probably, he saw the lights of the rectory in front of him, and, not wishing to be dashed against the walls of the house, he threw out the contents of another sandbag. Hence the line of brownish patches which we saw, stretching away towards the north-east corner of the field.”
Trevelyan gazed at him admiringly.
“You have solved the mystery, without a doubt,” he said. “But what was the meaning of your mysterious allusion to the Black Cat, and who is the unknown man who was found in Padley Wood?”
By way of reply the detective drew from his pocket a copy of that day’s Daily Mail.
“Read that, and then you will understand,” he said, handing the paper and his pocket electric lamp to Trevelyan, and pointing to a paragraph on the fifth page, which was headed:
The Fate of the Comte de Passy.
His Balloon Found near Exeter
There is no need to reproduce the paragraph in full. Suffice to say that it recounted how the Comte de Passy, a well-known Parisian aeronaut, had ascended in his balloon, which he had christened “Le Chat Noir”—i.e., “The Black Cat”—with the intention of attempting to cross the English’ Channel; how the wind had backed to the east shortly after the ascent, with the result that the Comte had been blown out to sea; how the wind had afterwards veered round to the south-west, and had thereby given rise to a hope that the intrepid Comte might land somewhere in England, after all.
“Such hope, however, must now be abandoned,” the paragraph concluded. “Early yesterday morning a derelict balloon was observed to be floating over Exeter. It eventually collapsed and fell into a field on the outskirts of the city. From papers and other evidence found in the car, no doubt remains that the balloon is Le Chat Noir.”
* * * *
“I read that in the train on my way down here,” said Sexton Blake; “and after I had heard your story, and had satisfied myself that a balloon was responsible for the alleged attack on your father and the coast-guard, I had little hesitation in deciding that the balloon must have been that of the unfortunate Comte de Passy—especially as I knew that Penleven is due south-west of Exeter, so that a balloon drifting with the wind that was blowing the night before last would, after passing over Penleven, eventually reach Exeter.”
“And the unknown man who was found in Padley Wood this afternoon?” asked Trevelyan.
“Is the Comte de Passy, no doubt,” said Sexton Blake, “His balloon was apparently unmanageable when he reached the English coast, and after drifting over the Ten-Acre Pasture it must have lurched to one side again and thrown the Comte out, just as it had previously thrown the barometer out. Then, lightened by the loss of the Comte de Passy’s weight, it bounded up into the air, drifted with the wind towards the north-east, and eventually settled down near Exeter.”
“All of which sounds very plausible,” said Trevelyan, “and is, no doubt, the truth, At any rate, we shall soon know whether you are right or not, for here is the Pollard Arms.”
They turned into the only public-house which Penleven possessed. The doctor was coming downstairs and met them in the sanded front passage.
“Great news!” he said to Sexton Blake. “From papers found in my patient’s pocket, we have discovered his identity. And who do you think he is?”
“The Comte de Passy,” said Sexton Blake.
The doctor gasped.
“You—you must be a wizard!” he exclaimed. “How on earth did you know?”
How the detective knew, the reader already knows. For the rest, it is only necessary to say that both the rector and the Comte de Passy eventually recovered from their injuries, when Sexton Blake’s theory of what had happened was proved to be as correct as if he had been an actual eyewitness of the whole affair.