The trap in Artemus Marquis’s North Barracks quarters turns an ordinary search into a confinement, then into a test of what the evidence can and cannot establish. Augustus Landor and Captain Hitchcock escape a locked room as a lit shell burns outside its door; afterward they find a heart in a bundle in the woodbox. The shell proves harmless, and the heart is bovine rather than human. Together, the objects seem to implicate or protect Artemus, but their placement cannot be securely attributed to him. The scene advances the investigation by sharpening its central problem: evidence can be tangible and still fail to identify its maker or purpose.

Search and Setting

North Barracks offers larger rooms than the cadets’ earlier quarters: Artemus’s measures twenty-five by nineteen feet. Its extra space does little to relieve its gloom. The west-facing room receives what light can clear the mountains, and even at midmorning the investigators need matches to inspect its tight corners. The furnishings and atmosphere provide no straightforward sign of recent revelry: patched pallets, hard-used coverlets, soot-streaked walls, scattered grains of snuff, but no cards, chickens, pipes, or lingering smell of tobacco. A compacted telescope, tucked between a water bucket and a chamber pot, is one of the objects they notice.

At Captain Hitchcock’s suggestion, they turn to the woodbox. Its contents initially seem mundane: wood, an old lottery ticket from Cuming’s Truly Lucky Offices, a scrap of book-muslin handkerchief, and a half-empty packet of Brazil sugar. The small finds make the search feel procedural, even faintly comic; Landor is nearly ready to pocket the sugar when a click sounds behind them. A second, fainter sound follows. As the sun begins to reflect off the western slopes, the light flooding the room lets Landor understand that the search has become something else. He tells Captain Hitchcock that they may have been expected, but the scene does not establish who prepared the room for their arrival.

The Door and the Burning Shell

The door will not open. Captain Hitchcock first tries kicking it twice, then joins Landor in a series of blows that make a racket but do not loosen it. Through the noise, they hear a damp sputtering sound and see light flickering through the gap beneath the door. The narrow sounds and glimpse of flame turn the locked room into an immediate threat: they are not merely unable to leave; something burning is waiting on the other side.

Captain Hitchcock grabs a cadet trunk and hurls it at the door. The wood sags, but holds. On the next attempt, he and Landor throw their combined weight against it, forcing a gap of roughly three inches; another kick breaks the latch. In the hallway lies a black ball about the size of a cantaloupe, its long, yarn-like fuse still streaming with fire. Captain Hitchcock carries it to the nearest window, checks that no one is there, and throws it into the yard. The two men remain to watch the fuse burn down. Its eventual extinction brings neither explosion nor cloud of sulfur, only smoke and silence. The danger has been real enough to confine them and demand a hurried escape, but the expected blast never comes.

The Bundle in the Woodbox

After the smoke clears and the shell still lies smoking in the grass, Captain Hitchcock returns to the woodbox and carefully unwraps the bundle he had dropped. Inside is a heart, described in Landor’s account as “Oozing rust. As raw as life.” Its appearance initially suggests a human organ, and the discovery carries the force of a new piece of evidence in an investigation already concerned with hearts being removed. Yet appearance is not identification.

A doctor compares the organ’s anatomy with a human heart and points to its size as decisive. This specimen, he estimates, weighs upwards of five pounds; a human heart seldom exceeds nine or ten ounces. He judges it almost certainly to be a cow’s, recalling his experience dissecting cow hearts in Edinburgh. Captain Hitchcock connects the identification to Haverstraw and concludes that the heart must have come from there. The object therefore resembles incriminating evidence but does not prove that a human heart was hidden in Artemus’s quarters, much less that Artemus put it there.

What the Evidence Leaves Unsettled

The heart and shell do not close the case. No one saw Artemus place the bundle in the woodbox, and cadet rooms are not locked, so another person could have left it there. The investigators also recognize that the piece of stovewood jammed into the door latch could have been put there by anyone seeking to keep them inside. The room’s apparent connection to Artemus is not proof of his control over its contents or access.

The shell is similarly inconclusive as evidence of a genuine attempt to kill. The powder magazine is lightly guarded, especially at night, and the shell has not been charged. Someone nevertheless lit its fuse while Landor and Captain Hitchcock were inside the quarters, between thirty and thirty-five minutes past ten. Landor interprets the uncharged bomb as a device intended to give Artemus an alibi: a threat outside his quarters while Artemus is at a recital could make it appear that someone else was trying to frame or endanger him. That is an inference, not a demonstrated fact. Captain Hitchcock sees the resulting contradiction plainly: one person may want to clear Artemus while another wants him hanged, and the evidence does not show where Artemus himself fits. The trap thus ends not in a resolution but in a tighter, more troubling ambiguity: the investigators have escaped, the shell has gone out, and the objects they recovered have multiplied the possible explanations.