🦵 Jonathan Small
The wooden-legged convict of the Agra treasure, bound by an oath to three Sikh troopers and undone by a poison dart he never fired. His confession is the canon's longest — and its best case for how treasure ruins men.
“I have done nothing against the Sahibs. It was the treasure that did it.”
The oath that named a novel
Jonathan Small's life turns on a compact sealed in the siege of Agra: he and three Sikh troopers — the four of the sign — took the rajah's treasure and swore that none would profit except all together. Betrayed into a convict settlement while an officer stole the hoard, Small spent twenty years planning to reclaim what the oath made his. The novel's title is his contract, and his tragedy is that he honours it more faithfully than any honest man in the story honours anything.
The pursuit down the Thames
Small's endgame gives the canon its greatest chase: the steam launch Aurora flying down the night river with a police boat closing, a poisoned dart against a service revolver, and the treasure going overboard handful by handful into the mud. He scatters the gems not from spite, he explains, but from principle — no one profits unless the four do.
The canon's verdict on treasure
Small's confession traces the Agra hoard's whole career: every man who touched it earned betrayal, prison, or death, and the woman who should have inherited it found happiness only when it sank. Holmes listens without judgement, and the novel agrees with its prisoner: it was the treasure that did it. No object in the canon carries a clearer moral.