Since the intrusion of two nights before I had slept with a chair blocked firmly against my door, knowing that no one could enter from the corridor, at least without waking me. My own pistol lay just under my mattress where the hand could reach it in an instant. Both these things were an immense consolation now. I would not be so helpless in case of another midnight visitor.
Yet I had no after-image of terror in thinking upon the intruder of two nights before. Strangely, that hand reaching in the flashlight was the one redeeming feature of this affair of Kastle Krags. That hand was flesh and blood, and thus the whole mystery seemed of flesh and blood too. If this incident did not confine the mystery to the realm of human affairs, at least it showed that there were human motives and human agents playing their parts in it.
Was that intruder Pescini? The hand could easily have been his--firm, strong, aristocratic, sensitive and white. After all, there was quite a case to be made against Pescini. "Find George Florey and you'll find the murderer," William Noyes had written. And the whole business of proving that Pescini was George Florey was simply that of proving his handwriting and that of the "George" notes we had found in the butler's room were the same.
"They have been bitter enemies since youth." Rich, proud, distinguished, had this bearded man carried a life-long hatred for the humble servitor of Kastle Krags? What boyhood rivalry, what malice, what blinding, bitter jealousy had wakened such a hatred as this? Yet who can trace the slightest action from its origin to its consummation; much less such a complex human drama as this. No man can see truly into the human heart. It seemed fairly credible that this gray servant might hate, with that bitter hatred born of jealousy, his richer, more distinguished brother--yet human relations, in their fullness, are beyond the ken of the wisest men. It would be easy to prove or disprove whether or not Pescini and Florey were brothers: the "George" letters were secure in the hands of the State, and a copy of Pescini's handwriting could be procured with ease. Besides their lives and origins would likely be easy to trace.
Florey's letter to his sister was further proof of Pescini's guilt. I made an entirely different interpretation of it than that of the officials. I did not think that he was referring to any physical disease. I believed, at the first hearing, and I believed still that he had written in veiled language of the persecutions of his brother: