Page:Chesterton - The Wisdom of Father Brown.djvu/145

THE MISTAKE OF THE MACHINE a hurry, when the convict with the gun hove in sight."

"Do you seriously mean" began the official.

"Why, look here, Mr. Usher," said Father Brown quietly, "you said the machine couldn't make a mistake; and in one sense it didn't. But the other machine did; the machine that worked it. You assumed that the man in rags jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy, because he was Lord Falconroy's murderer. He jumped at the name of Lord Falconroy because he is Lord Falconroy."

"Then why the blazes didn't he say so?" demanded the staring Usher.

"He felt his plight and recent panic were hardly patrician," replied the priest, "so he tried to keep the name back at first. But he was just going to tell it you, when"—and Father Brown looked down at his boots—"when a woman found another name for him."

"But you can't be so mad as to say," said Greywood Usher, very white, "that Lord Falconroy was Drugger Davis."

The priest looked at him very earnestly but with a baffling and a decipherable face.

"I am not saying anything about it," he said; "I leave all the rest to you. Your pink paper says that the title was recently revived for him; but those papers are very unreliable. It says he was 131