The Infernal Device & Others: A Professor Moriarty Omnibus Read Online Free PDF

your affairs, but you're not here, by any chance, to watch the sea trials, are you?"
     
                  "Sea trials?" Moriarty asked, sounding puzzled.
     
                  "The Garrett-Harris submersible boat," Barnett explained. "Day after tomorrow."
     
                  "No, gentlemen, I have nothing to do with the trials. I would find it fascinating to watch them, but I cannot stay. My business in Odessa calls me away tomorrow."
     
                  "Then you are not with Her Majesty's Government in any way?" Lieutenant Sefton asked.
     
                  The idea seemed to amuse Professor Moriarty greatly. "You have my word," he assured Sefton.
     
                  "Say!" Barnett said. "I meant to ask: how did you know I'm a journalist, and from New York?"
     
                  "And Paris," Lieutenant Sefton added.
     
                  Moriarty touched his finger to his ear. "If you could hear yourself," he said, "you wouldn't have to ask the second part of that question. As to the first: the notebook in your inner pocket, the sharpened pencils in your breast pocket, the writing callus on your right forefinger—all point in a certain direction. And to verify my deduction, I had only to look at the signet on your ring. The New York Press Club sigil is not unfamiliar to me."
     
                  "I see," Barnett said, fingering the ring Moriarty had mentioned and nodding his head slowly. "And Paris? How did you know I had come from Paris?"
     
                  "Your shoes, sir," Moriarty said. "Unmistakable."
     
                  "Is that all?" Lieutenant Sefton asked. "How simple!"
     
                  Moriarty laughed—a dry, humorless sound. "For a moment you thought I'd done something clever, is that it?" He leaned forward and fixed Sefton with his gray eyes.
     
                  "Well, yes, I—"
     
                  "My little feats of deductive and inductive reasoning are only clever until they are explained. I must learn, like magicians, never to divulge my methods. Conjurers never explain their illusions. Neither do the other sort."
     
                  "What other sort?" Lieutenant Sefton asked.
     
                  "Mentalists, mystics, mediums: all practitioners of the occult. The gentlemen who blow bugles from inside cabinets and start stopped pocket watches. The ladies who hold long conversations with your poor deceased Aunt Tillie and Lord Nelson. And the only thing Lord Nelson can find to say is, 'it's very beautiful up here and we're all very happy.' And death seems to have given a certain cockney lilt to his speech that it never had in life."
     
                  "You seem quite conversant with the subject, sir," Barnett said.
     
                  "Conjuring has been a fascination of mine," Moriarty told him. "And I have made a special study of human gullibility. The number of patent idiocies that otherwise intelligent people believe, or profess to believe, never cease to amaze me."
     
                  "For example?" Barnett said, finding himself intrigued with this ex-professor of mathematics.
     
                  "The examples are endless. People have fought wars in the ridiculous belief that one religion is somehow superior to another or that one man is inherently better than another."
     
                  "That is a bit strong, sir," Barnett said.
     
                  "Do you profess to believe, sir," Sefton asked, "that all men are exactly equal?"
     
                  "Certainly not. I, for example, am superior. But this superiority is due to clearly establishable intellectual capacity, not to the lightness of my skin, the blondness of my hair, or the blind chance of my being born in England rather than in Abyssinia." This statement was delivered