“There was a thing I heard about, walking one morning with some of the women down to where the bread was distributed. I am not absolutely certain that it concerned the Russells, you understand, but I believe it may have. It had happened the previous evening, three or four days after the earthquake itself, because the fire was out and the rain had just started. Might that have been the Sunday? Yes, I believe so. At first, the rains were welcome—we gathered it in buckets, the children ran about wildly, all we ladies washed our hair. But that evening, very early, everyone retreated inside their tents—what with the huge relief of knowing that the fires were at an end, and the blessedness of having shelter, and general exhaustion, this visitor came and found most everyone inside, so that he'd had to ask his way. He stopped at one tent, and the woman's children were asleep so she stepped outside to answer him quietly. She said he was dressed like a tramp, all dirt and mismatched garments. However, that would have described most of us by that time, and underneath everything he seemed polite and nicely spoken, so when he asked where Charles Russell might be found, she directed him to the Russells' tent and stood in her door-way to see that he found the right one.

“As soon as she heard the little girl scream, she knew what had happened, and she felt just terrible. Not to have warned the man first, you see. He'd very clearly been caught in a fire, possibly some sort of explosion—you know how a puff of burning gasoline can singe off eyelashes? Well, that's what had happened to this poor fellow. Swollen eyes, raw-looking skin, and no hair at all, lashes, brows, and even the front part of his head that his hat didn't cover. And he'd smeared some sort of white ointment on it as well—he startled this lady, so he must have scared the little Russell girl half to death. I can't think . . . Why are you smiling?”

“My . . . client remembered what she called a ‘faceless man.' I think you've just found him for me.”

“An apt description, I should think. We depend largely on hair for facial definition, do we not?”

“What about his beard?”

“I don't know that she mentioned a beard. But then, lack of a beard is not as startling as a lack of eyebrows, is it?”

No, thought Holmes, but it would take severe burns indeed to prevent a man's beard from growing in, and a man “all dirt and mismatched garments” would be unlikely to have visited a barber for a shave—to say nothing of submitting his burns to that degree of discomfort. Which would suggest that either the burns were recently acquired (and this was twenty-four hours after the fires were quenched), or that Russell's “faceless man” was a person without much of a beard in the first place.