Page:The Incredulity of Father Brown.pdf/69

The Arrow of Heaven crook, so perhaps it was well to hunt in couples with him. But if you know the truth about this, where the devil did you get it from?"

"I got it from you," answered the priest, quietly, and continued to gaze mildly at the glaring veteran. "I mean I made the first guess from a hint in a story of yours about an Indian who threw a knife and hit a man on the top of a fortress."

"You've said that several times," said Wain, with a puzzled air, "but I can't see any inference except that this murderer threw an arrow and hit a man on the top of a house very like a fortress. But of course the arrow wasn't thrown but shot, and would go much farther. Certainly it went uncommonly far; but I don't see how it brings us any farther."

"I'm afraid you missed the point of the story," said Father Brown. "It isn't that if one thing can go far another can go farther. It is that the wrong use of a tool can cut both ways. The men on Crake's fort thought of a knife as a thing for a hand-to-hand fight and forgot that it could be a missile like a javelin. Some other people I know thought of a thing as a missile like a javelin and forgot that, after all, it could be used hand-to-hand as a spear. In short, the moral of the story is that since a dagger can be turned into an arrow, so can an arrow be turned into a dagger."

They were all looking at him now; but he continued in the same casual and unconscious tone.