The thing stood out big and crude like a carpenter's patch.
Gosford's face became expressionless like wood, his body rigid;
then he stood up and faced the three men across the table.
"Quite so!" he said in his vacuous English voice. "Marshall
wrote a 3 by inadvertence and changed it. He borrowed my
penknife to erase the figure."
My father and Lewis gaped like men who see a penned-in beast slip
out through an unimagined passage. There was silence. Then
suddenly, in the strained stillness of the room, old Doctor Gaeki
laughed.
Gosford lifted his long pink face, with its cropped beard
bringing out the ugly mouth.
"Why do you laugh, my good man?" he said.
"I laugh," replied Gaeki, "because a figure 5 can have so many
colors."
And now my father and Lewis were no less astonished than Mr.
Gosford.
"Colors!" they said, for the changed figure in the will was
black.
"Why, yes," replied the old man, "it is very pretty."
He reached across the table and drew over Mr. Gosford's
memorandum beside the will.
"You are progressive, sir," he went on; "you write in
iron-nutgall ink, just made, commercially, in this year of
fifty-six by Mr.
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