The Sherlock Holmes Megapack: 25 Modern Tales by Masters: 25 Modern Tales by Masters (43 page)

There was a gasp from the crowd. One knife now had five or six flies on it. The others did not.

“Would the other men now retrieve their knives?” Holmes instructed.

He looked at the young red-headed man whose face was now ashen. “Mr Jensen junior, is it not?” Holmes said, “And if I’m not mistaken, your boots have distinctive metal tips. I saw your prints as you ran away from the scene of the crime.”

As hands went to grab him, Jensen whipped out a gun. “He made me do it,” he shouted, waving the pistol at the big man in the red shirt. “He said we had to make sure Fletcher didn’t talk.”

“What nonsense is this?” Mr Jensen senior stepped forward. “Accusing my boy? That’s a mighty stupid thing to do, stranger. You’ve been nothing but trouble since you came into town. And if you men know what’s good for you, you won’t listen to a word he says.”

“On the contrary.” The federal agent pushed his way to the front of the crowd. “I believe he has put his case extremely well. I for one am satisfied that he has arrived at the truth. If you wish to deal with him, you will have to deal with me first. And I can assure you that my colleagues in Washington would have the cavalry here in a flat minute and would take over the running of this town if anything happened to me.”

He moved to stand beside Holmes. “Judge,” he said. “I think it behooves you to release this Indian.”

The judge shot an anxious glance at Mr Jensen. “Oh, very well. Bring out the Indian. But you guys better get him out of town pretty danged fast, or I’ll not be responsible for what happens to him, or to any of you.”

“As it happens, I planned to leave today anyway,” the man in black said. “Would you care to join me, Mr Holmes? I am on my way to Phoenix and then to the West Coast.”

“My dear sir, I’d be delighted,” Holmes said, “if we can give my good friend Shadow Wolf a ride to safely.”

“We most certainly can,” Mr Cleveland replied.

“Before I go,” Holmes said, turning back to the crowd. “I should like to retrieve my pocket watch. I don’t know what happened to the rest of my belongings but that watch was dear to me.” He walked up to the big man in red and held out his hand. “I noticed it in court,” he said.

“Hey, I bought this watch fair and square from a trader,” the man snapped. “Ain’t no way you can prove it’s yours.”

“I think that the inscription, inside the back cover might convince some people that it is mine,” Holmes said. “To my dear brother Sherlock on his twenty-first birthday.” It is signed Mycroft.”

Hands removed the watch, opened it and a murmur of recognition went around the crowd. The watch was handed to Holmes.

“Now take it and get out while you’re still alive,” Mr Jensen barked.

Shadow Wolf was brought out and climbed onto the buckboard. Holmes and the federal agent climbed up beside him.

“I fear that justice will not be served in that place,” Holmes said.

“We have done the best we can do without reinforcements,” Mr Cleveland said. “You should be glad the outcome was so positive. Had I not been there I rather fear that both of you would be swinging from a noose at this moment. I will report the case to my superiors in Washington, but I doubt that much can be done. We shall have to wait until more women come out West. They are always a civilizing influence.”

The buckboard started off. As they swung to take the road out of town, young Jensen ran forward and drew his pistol. “Take that, ya’ damned meddler,” he yelled. A gunshot reverberated in the clear air.

Then a surprised look came over his face and he slumped to the ground. A surprised smile spread over Holmes’s face as he replaced his smoking pistol into its holster.

“One of the things Mr Tucker taught me during the time of my recuperation was how to shoot one of these things. I must have mastered it remarkably quickly.”

The horses picked up speed as the town fell away behind them.

THE STAGECOACH DETECTIVE, by Linda Robertson

“…we are here in a land of stage-drivers and highwaymen: a land, in that sense, like England a hundred years ago.”

—Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Silverado Squatters

The Royal Family of Silverado, as I called us that summer, were as raffish a dynasty as ever disgraced the most dubious Balkan principality—an invalid literary man (myself), Fanny, my ravel-haired American bride, and my stepson Sam, then a Crown Prince of eleven years.

On a bright day late in July we were making our daily progress from our camp on the mountain to the little hotel on the toll road where the mail coaches stopped. Rounding the last turn in our path, we saw the Lakeport stage stopped before the hotel, earlier than usual and empty of passengers. The dust from the coach’s passage stood in a chalky cloud above the road.

In the yard, a group of men stood talking urgently among themselves. I saw Corwin, the landlord, dark and hollow-chested, and McConnell, the stagecoach driver, the tallest and broadest of them, glowering and turning his big blond head from side to side, like a caged bear. The landlord’s wife was shepherding a couple of women down the veranda to the hotel door.

“Mr McConnell,” she called out, “can you wait for a bit before going on? I think the ladies could use a little rest and a chance to calm down.”

McConnell turned and fixed his bear-like gaze on her. “I ain’t goin’ anywhere, Mrs C,” he answered, resentfully. “Gotta wait for the sheriff.” He turned away and spat on the ground. “I guess we’ll have to spend the night here. Be hell to pay in Lakeport,” he added, shaking his head.

Trailed by Sam, I walked to the edge of the group to hear more, while Fanny joined Mrs Corwin in the hotel.

“Who’s gonna ride to Calistoga and tell the sheriff?” one of the men asked.

“My boy Tom,” said Corwin. “I sent José back to saddle up one of our ponies.”

“We need to put together a posse—go out and hunt him down,” another man said. “Mr Corwin, how many horses do you have?”

“Not enough,” the innkeeper said. “Besides, the fella’s got a good hour’s start. We’ll need a tracker and bloodhounds, and they’re in Calistoga.” He caught his son Tom’s eye and pointed over his shoulder to where José, the stableman, was walking up with a saddled horse.

Tom ran over, took the reins, swung lightly into the saddle in true western style, and started at a gallop down the toll road.

“Sweet Jesus, Tommy, don’t kill the pony!” Corwin shouted after him, as horse and boy disappeared into the woods. He looked around the bare, dusty yard at the little crowd of passengers, hotel guests, workers and idlers, and announced, “Come inside and have a beer—it’s on the house. Been a rough morning.”

As we passed down the veranda, I saw one of the hotel’s residents leaning back in a rocking chair, a newspaper in his lap, watching the happenings in the yard with half-closed eyes. He looked up at us, as we walked across the creaking boards.

“Your Majesty. Your Highness,” he said, sitting straighter and tipping his battered straw hat.

“Interesting morning, Joe,” I said. “What’s going on out there?”

“Stagecoach was robbed again.”

“Wow!” Sam said beside me.

“Again?” I asked.

“Twice in the last two months.”

The last few men were clumping across the worn boards of the veranda and through the door of the saloon. “Free beer,” I said to Joe as we turned to follow them. Folding his paper in half, he rose, casually, onto stork-like legs and drifted after us.

The barroom was cooler than outdoors. A couple of opened windows at the back brought in a little air and the purling of water in the creek behind the hotel. The reek of old whisky and stale beer rose like mist on a marsh from the sanded floorboards and the varnished bar, stained with the rings of countless glasses. A few flies moved sluggishly through the warm air, as if biding their time until dinner. Corwin and Hoddy, the barman, drew pints of beer and slapped them down on the bar.

“It’s a bad business,” Hoddy said. “Second time this year. McConnell thinks this one was done by the same fellow did the last. Ain’t that right, McConnell?”

“He sure looked the same.”

“What did he look like?”

“Hard to tell much,” broke in a mustachioed man in a new miner’s outfit. “He was wearing a bandanna, blue one, tied across his face.”

“I thought it was red,” said a red-faced, balding man in a rumpled grey suit.

“And a broad-brimmed hat,” the first man added.

“Some kind of serape over his clothes.”

“Looked to me like one of them green Army blankets.”

“How tall was he?” Corwin asked.

“Tall—a big fellow,” said a stout man in a linen jacket.

McConnell disagreed. “He wasn’t that big—kind of skinny, I thought. Couldn’t really tell much, though, under that blanket.”

All of them remembered he had a large-calibre pistol. “Silver coloured,” said the stout man, and another agreed.

“No—gun metal, with wood grips,” McConnell said, with conviction.

Near me, another man spoke up, in the familiar accent of an Englishman. “He was about five feet six inches in height, dark eyes, reddish hair, very nervous. Brown wide awake hat, with a broad brim, blue bandanna, blue work shirt under a serape made from an Army blanket, denim trousers, black boots. He wore black riding gloves, and the gun was a .45 calibre Colt Arms Company cavalry model, blue metal with darkened wooden grips—nice observation, Mr McConnell.”

We all looked at him blankly.

“And how do you know all that?” The miner asked, with the exaggerated suspicion of a fool. “You a friend of his or something?”

The Englishman turned and fixed him with a look of polite scorn. “I looked.”

The miner was undaunted. “Well, shee-it,” he shot back with what I assumed he thought was wit, then turned and spat on the floor. A couple of the other men shifted uncomfortably.

Corwin broke the tension. “Come on, everyone, get your beer and settle down.”

As the men moved toward the bar, the Englishman stayed where he was, watching them. I turned to him, introduced myself, and made some comment about being far from home. He shook my proffered hand. “Sherlock Holmes,” he said. “You’re from Edinburgh, I take it?”

“Not hard to tell that, I suppose,” I answered.

He was young—under thirty, I’d say—tall and lanky as a Kentuckian, and thin in the face, with a long, sharp jaw, rather narrow-set eyes, and a high-bridged, aquiline nose which gave his expression the aloof inquisitiveness of a bird of prey. His hair, a nondescript brown, was combed back from his high forehead and parted high on one side. His suit was of a light wool, and his tie carefully knotted. There was an indescribable Englishness about his whole person—something in the cut and cloth of his jacket, the set of his shoulders, and the supercilious way he looked down his long English nose at the crowd of men at the bar.

I asked him what brought him so far from home, and he said he’d been working and travelling in America. He paused and studied me for a few seconds, then said, “I could ask the same of you. I see that you write a lot, but you don’t appear to be employed, and you’re short of money. I’d guess you to be a literary man, but not at this point a particularly successful one.”

The remark was so unexpected and impertinent, coming from someone to whom I’d introduced myself only a moment ago, that I was left momentarily without a rejoinder. “What makes you think that?”I asked, a little hotly.

He gave me a thin smile. “Your right hand and shirt cuff are ink-stained,” he answered, with a glance toward the offending article, “and the cuff is worn and frayed where it would have rested against a writing-desk. Your clothes are threadbare, your belt is old and too large for you, and your jacket and trousers haven’t been pressed or brushed for weeks. Your boots show that you haven’t been staying at the hotel. No hotel guest who could get his boots polished while he slept would let them get into such a state. Your face and hands are brown, but you are not in good health, so your colour isn’t likely to have come from working in the sun, which leads me to surmise that you’ve been living outdoors. And,” he said finally, “there are bits of straw in your hair.”

His all too accurate dissection of my appearance and finances made me flush with shame and irritation.

“I apologize if I offended you, sir,” he said, in a tone that suggested that I was not by any means the first person he had affronted with his observations. “I was simply answering your question.”

I resolved, with some difficulty, to keep an open mind about my new acquaintance, if only because he was a fellow countryman. “It’s all right, really,” I said, with more lightness than I felt. “I’ve been mistaken for a hobo or a peddler before, but you’ve drawn me to the life—a poor literary fellow, camping here on the mountain for his health—though I confess I didn’t know about the straw.”

“Ah,” Holmes said, clearly pleased with himself. He paused listening, excused himself, and walked to the bar.

Corwin was saying to McConnell, “Why don’t we take a couple of men now and ride down to where it happened? Meet the sheriff on his way and maybe help track the fellow. I have fresh horses for four of us.” Corwin called to his younger son, “Jake, go tell José to saddle up Eddy, Duke, Pancho and Red.”

Holmes had reached the counter where Corwin stood, collecting beer glasses. “May I ride there with you?” he asked.

Corwin thought for a second. “I guess so—seems like you could tell the sheriff a good deal more than some of these other yokels. You can take Duke.” Holmes thanked him and disappeared out the door.

Corwin turned to me. “Would you like to come see how we handle these things, Mr Stevenson?”

“But aren’t you out of horses?”

“True,” he said, and thought for a second or two. “You don’t mind riding a mule, do you? Won’t be as fast, but you’ll get there in time to see the fun. I shouldn’t think you’d want to join the posse anyway.”

“I don’t think my wife would stand for it,” I said.

Corwin nodded knowingly. “Women,” he said.

Hoddy and Corwin had just cleared the last of the beer mugs from the bar when Jake exploded into the saloon, shouting that the horses were in the yard. Corwin put down the towel he was using to wipe the bar and started for the door. McConnell downed the rest of his beer in one long swallow, and followed.

From the doorway, Corwin called back, “Tell José I said to saddle one of the mules for you, and we’ll see you there.”

The mule I was given was named Jasper. He was the size of a horse, with a horse’s bay coat, but with a head like an anvil and a most un-horselike self-possession and confidence in his own decisions. José explained, perhaps to reassure me, that he had been trained to carry ladies and invalids.

I was just as glad to be alone as I rode down the toll road, because I hardly cut a dashing figure on my steed. Jasper’s fastest gait appeared to be a matter-of-fact walk. If I tried to spur him with a kick of my heels in his flanks, he shook his head slightly, in a fatherly way, declining my pleas to enlist him in such recklessness. During our short journey, the stage to Calistoga hurtled past us in a chaos of dust, pounding hoofs, clattering wheels, and shouts. Jasper edged carefully to the side of the road and gazed reproachfully at the receding coach before resuming his dutiful progress.

The scene of the robbery was a ford, where a small creek crossed the road. It had washed out a part of the downhill side, and the coach would have slowed to cross it. Tall pines and oaks overhung the road, and vines, bushes and saplings grew together in a tangled mass beneath them. Its lushness and shade was ominous, as if created for an ambush—the sort of place a solitary walker might pass through with a quickening of heart and pace and a glance or two over his shoulder.

Corwin, McConnell and one of the men from the hotel were standing with the horses by the road on the near side of the ford. I could hear McConnell’s growling voice and Corwin’s calm one in return. Near them lay the express box from the stage, its lid open. Then, among the trees to the right of the road, I saw Holmes.

He was alone in a small clearing, where the stream formed a pool before continuing in its course across the road. Apparently unconscious of our curious or irritated looks, he crossed slowly back and forth, like a tracker searching for signs marking the passage of his quarry. From time to time he knelt and studied the ground as though committing it to memory, and then jotted something in a small notebook he carried.

Several times, he made measurements with a measuring tape and wrote the numbers down in his notebook. Along the way, he picked up a couple of small objects and placed them in a leather wallet he drew from a pocket of his jacket, or carefully untangled something from a branch and wrapped it in a bit of paper before adding it to the wallet. Sometimes a questioning frown shadowed his thin face, but most of the time his posture and expression held the concentrated energy of a man intent on dissecting a particularly interesting and challenging problem.

A little later, he crossed to the downhill side, where he climbed for some distance down the stream bank until he was no longer in sight. He reappeared a few minutes afterward, walking back toward us on the toll road. As he approached, I heard hoofbeats and the clatter of wagon wheels in the distance, followed by the baying of a dog. Corwin looked up. “The sheriff and Sorensen, with the bloodhounds,” he said.

In a minute we saw, rounding a curve, a half-dozen men on horseback, followed by a farm wagon driven by a stocky old man in a straw hat. Two red-brown bloodhounds stood at the wagon rail, wriggling with excitement and baying their peculiar note, between a bark and a howl, from somewhere within their drooping dewlaps.

Holmes walked to the wagon and said to the driver, as it stopped, “You can try the bloodhounds, but they may not be able to get a scent.”

Sorensen looked dubious. “And why would that be?

“The robber doused the area with cayenne pepper.”

Sorensen leaned forward in the seat of his wagon and looked at Holmes from under the brim of his hat. “You’re kidding me,” he said.