Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 9: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

TRUST LITTLE AL 9 from his waistcoat pocket. I could see some white tablets in it. ‘““'You’d do much better,” I said, ‘‘ not to think about it at all.’ “It’s nothing to do with thought,” he said crossly. ‘‘ Sea- sickness starts in your semicircular canals.” He gave me a lecture on this, most of which was Greek to me; but it lasted us safely into Calais. There’s nothing much to report about the next twenty-four hours. We shared a two-berth sleeper on the Arlberg Express. Captain Forestier was quite right: Baker didn’t clean his teeth, either going to bed or getting up. Apart from that, he was fairly inoffensive. I think I’m quite an easy chap to get on with. Anyway, all I had to do was listen. ‘“* 1m a thinker,” he said to me after dinner. ‘“ You remember Sherlock Holmes? ‘That’s stupid, most of it. None of his analyses holds water, you know. Not if you really examine it.” Then he quoted about three pages of one of the stories, verbatim as far as I could tell, and pulled it to pieces. It was quite an amusing performance. “'That’s all very well,” I said, “ but could you do any better yourself? ”’ ‘Certainly. But it takes time, like all real scientific processes. The mistake is in calling it deduction. It isn’t deduction at all. Just trial and error, trial and error, until the error gets less and less. When it finally vanishes altogether, why, you’ve got a fact.” He was still at it when we turned the light out in the sleeper that night. We changed at Schwarzach and got to Velden after tea next day. The hotel, which was on the south shore of the Wérthersee,—a big, attractive lake—seemed, to my simple mind, to offer all the heart could desire: bathing, boating, and woods and mountains behind it for walking and climbing. Baker’s idea of fun was to lie in the sun all day and get drunk in the evenings. After that, I’ve no doubt he would have liked one of the women. There were plenty about. I kept him on the straight and narrow the first evening by dint of stopping with him the whole time until I had him safely in his bedroom and heard his distinctive snore. It sounded like a circular saw making slow progress through a tough old plank, hitting a knot every now and then. Next morning I got a long cable. It appeared to come from a firm of wine merchants—that, by the way, is nominally my business—and there was a lot in it about purchases and prices and vintages. It was one of those mechanical codes that you comiclooks.comn