Sherlock Holmes In America (13 page)

Dennis was in considerable pain until I administered some morphia and he drifted off. My shot had been lucky for both of us, for I had stopped his shooting without doing him much harm beyond breaking his thumb, but he had broken his ankle in his fall from the eminence where he'd been doing guard duty for the camp. Just what the camp's purpose was, I had yet to find: were these young women the “contraband” Dennis was running?

After I had made my patient as comfortable as possible, my hostess led me to a set of canvas camp chairs at her campfire, offered me a mug of barbarous American coffee, and we talked a bit as we awaited the arrival of Sherlock Holmes, which I assured her was imminent.

“You notice I don't use that fiend Drebber's name, Doctor,” she said quietly. “I don't count that as a marriage but as an abduction, of course.”

“I quite understand,” I told her. “But how did you escape? Hope told us he saw you stretched out dead on your bier.”

She smiled in a way that made me shiver. “Why, so he did. Didn't he tell you also that he used to be the sweeper-out of the laboratory at York College, and learned a thing or two about drugs and medicines?”

“Poisons, you mean,” I corrected her.

“Oh, poisons, too,” she admitted. “But what he gave me was more like what Romeo's friar gave Juliet—a potion to give me ‘A thing like death to chide away this shame, that cop'st with death himself to scape from it.' Something to make me sleep till he burst in and carried me off amongst all those ‘mourning' Drebber wives. Oh, and wasn't I glad when I woke up!”

I was stunned, not for the first or last time in this case. “But he told us he only came in to take the ring off your finger!”

“I know,” she replied calmly. “He told me when I visited him in prison. But that was one of his tallest ones! Why on earth should he have wanted the ring Drebber gave me? Jeff and I both hated Drebber.”

My mind was swimming
—
each new revelation prompted at least two questions.

“How could you visit him in prison? He only lived one night! He wanted the ring for revenge, didn't he?”

“Oh, Doctor!” She shook her head, and her still-beautiful tresses, chestnut mingled with grey, fell about her solemn face as the hint of a reminiscent smile lit it. “Don't you think I'd been improving my time all those months we'd been in London? I was very active helping the Visitation Society, and it was no problem for me to get permission to visit Jeff. I'll tell you this, about those ‘poisons' you mentioned: Jefferson Hope never poisoned anybody. But I wasn't about to let the man I loved languish in prison to die a lonely death from a burst heart, or at the end of an English noose for murders he never did. He taught me about drugs and poisons too! So there's my confession, and if you and Mr. Holmes want to take me back to London for it, I'll go quietly, after I've finished the work I'm about today.”

My mother tried to raise her sons properly, but I have a dreadful feeling that my mouth was hanging agape at this point. I certainly wondered if it was I who was mad, or the lady speaking to me. “But Hope confessed,” I said at last.

“I know that,” she reiterated, as if she were explaining to a child. “He did that because he knew he didn't have long to live anyway.” She wiped away a tear sliding down her sunburnt cheek. “And because he wanted to shield Tom.”

The sun was now high in the Utah sky, and at last the light began to dawn in my foggy English brain as well. “Dennis killed them both,” I said.

“Of course,” Lucy nodded. “He hated Drebber and Stangerson far worse than Jeff or I did. You see, he hadn't been able to save the girl he loved. She really was dead.”

“Sally Sawyer,” I whispered.

Lucy looked at me, surprised. “How did you know?”

“Never multiply names unnecessarily,” I recited, recalling Holmes's dictum as if from a dream. “Dennis told us the name himself, in the story he prattled when he came to try to get the ring from us. But come—how did Hope know of that visit?”

“Oh, goodness, Doctor!” Lucy laughed, for the first time, and I saw she was still a handsome woman. “What chatterboxes you and Inspector Gregson were in that cab on the way to Scotland Yard! Jeff told me all about it!”

I must have looked hurt, because she added, in a kindly tone, “Jeff said Mr. Holmes let slip a hint or two, also . . . and you have to admit that my Jeff was a resourceful man.”

“More even than we credited,” I agreed sincerely. Seeing sudden misery in her face, I reached across the distance between our two chairs and clasped her wrist. “You must miss him sorely.”

“Every day!” she cried, raising her overflowing eyes to the empty sky, then turning them back to me. “But we had near two happy decades ranching in Wyoming before Jeff learned Tom was on Drebber's trail in Cleveland. Jeff determined to stop him from doing murder. He couldn't bear for Tom to have that sin on his conscience or his soul, no matter what the provocation.” Now she was caught up in the full onrush of her story, and had to tell all.

“And I couldn't bear him to go without me, so we went together. We couldn't find Tom in Cleveland, but that foul Drebber spotted Jeff and had him jailed for a trumpery nonsense—and I couldn't bail him out at first for fear that Drebber would see me! By the time Drebber was gone and I'd got Jeff out, it was too late to stop Tom. That was how it went, across half the world, it seemed, using up our resources and Jeff getting more and more desperate, until finally we came to London.

“Jeff tried to do double duty hunting for Tom and guarding Drebber and Stangerson, while I did what I could, too—though it wasn't much because I daren't let them see me.

“At last, at Lauriston Gardens, Jeff was too late by moments to stop Tom. It nigh broke his heart.” She looked at me fiercely as if daring me to deny it.

“He wasn't too late to be observed by the constable,” I pointed out. “And his presence there created all kinds of compromising physical evidence, although I always said that Holmes was too quick to theorize about a crime scene which he himself compared to the aftermath of a buffalo stampede.”

“Jeff made up that stuff about going back for the ring,” she said. “After you told him about ‘Mrs. Sawyer' coming to your rooms for it, it was easy enough for him to figure out that Tom had lost Sally's ring there. Tom really wanted it back, you know; it was the one he'd given Sally himself, not like the one in my case.”

“You mean Dennis and Sally had really been married before Drebber had taken her away?” I exclaimed. “But that's infamous!”

“Oh yes,” she sighed. “It's not unknown among the polygamists, you know. Sometimes plural wives are passed around—it's awful. Anyway, Jeff was too late again when Tom got to Stangerson, and I guess you know the rest.”

“But why did the two of you go through all this to save Tom Dennis?” I asked, running my hand through my hair distractedly. “It's noble, of course, and I commend you both for it, but why should Hope risk the happiness of the woman he loved to save Dennis?”

“Because he didn't want his son to be a murderer.”

I was suddenly as dizzy as if I had really plunged into one of those mountain chasms.

“Tom is Jeff's son from an attachment long before me,” she continued. “And now poor Tom is truly bereft over this; he understands, as Jeff always knew he'd do, about revenge not lightening his heart from sorrow. That's why he decided to join me in my good work.”

“Good work?” I muttered blankly. “What work is that?”

“Why, helping plural brides to escape over the border into Wyoming and freedom!” she exulted. “Jeff and I had done it for years, and now Tom's taking it up with me, in Jeff's memory, and Sally's—or at least he was, until you laid him low with that lucky shot.” She gave me a dark look under which I began to shift uneasily in my seat. I began to wish, not for the first time, that Holmes would arrive.

I'm not sure that her animadversion about my marksmanship did not rankle as much as the implication that I was somehow setting back the march of women's rights. “Oh, I'd love to do it all by myself!” she went on. “Maybe even be a Masked Rider like my old friend Bess Erne, but we can't get a passel of young Mormon women past the Temple guards without a man. The safest way's to pretend that we're a Mormon family traveling, a husband with his wives. Now I don't know what I'm to do! If I take these girls back, their families will never let them slip away again. They'll be watched too closely. And we can't camp here much longer; the relief squad for the guards will be coming.”

She looked me full in the face with her piercing eyes. “Do you want them to end up like me—or Sally?” she asked.

I was silent. “No,” she mused, after a few moments watching my face, “so I guess the only answer is for the fake husband to be you, or Mr. Holmes.”

“Hah!” I laughed. “Holmes will never do it! You don't know his views about women. He couldn't carry the part off even if he did agree.”

She smiled at me.

And that is how I added the women of a third continent to my store of dearly-bought knowledge. “How many of them are there in all?” I sighed.

“Seven.”

“Oh dear,” I muttered. “‘As I was going to St. Ives . . . ' Introduce these young ladies to me,” I said. “I must know their names if I'm to be plausible.”

“Oh, that won't be any problem,” laughed Lucy. “All seven are named for flowers, and four of them are named Violet.”

When I returned exhausted to the foot of the mountain, the stars were out and I was wrestling with conflicting emotions. I felt pleased with my good deed, but also unsure of how to tell Holmes that I had left Dennis with Lucy Hope—or, for that matter, how to share any of my news with him. I confess I was also put out with him for leaving me to handle the entire matter myself, and I tried to keep that perturbation uppermost in my mind, so as not to contemplate the awful possibility that he might have attempted to follow me, but met with some mishap on the treacherous mountain pathway.

Consequently, it was with mingled relief and displeasure that I found both Holmes and Ames still at our campsite, in a cloud of tobacco smoke discussing possible Phoenician voyages to the New World, and the relevance of this to the Book of Mormon.

Holmes, when he spied me, seemed more annoyed than relieved. “What's this, Watson? Did you miss Dennis?”

“And you
as well
, Holmes,” I replied testily.

“My horse took lame,” he explained after a moment's hesitation.

“Deputy Ames,” I said sternly, turning to the other miscreant, “you ought really to have started for the hospital long before this.”

“Oh, a snake bite ain't nothin',” he chortled, taking a swig of his cure-all.

“Really, Watson,” Holmes resumed, “I cannot congratulate you. Have we made all this trip for naught?”

“I don't know, Holmes,” I replied, suddenly lighthearted, looking up at the starry expanse of the Western night sky. “You were right, as usual: a change in perspective does work wonders!”

Loren D. Estleman

Loren D. Estleman has published more than sixty novels in the mystery and historical western genres and mainstream fiction. He has received four Shamus awards from the Private Eye Writers of America, five Spurs from the Western Writers of America, and has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award and the American Book Award. His first Sherlock Holmes pastiche,
Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula
, has been in print for most of the past thirty years. His latest novel is
Frames
, introducing Valentino, a film archivist-turned detective. Estleman lives in Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan.

T
hroughout the first year of our association, Mr. Sherlock Holmes and I were rather like strangers wed by prearrangement, mutually respectful but uncertain of the person with whom each was sharing accommodations. The situation was ungainly, to say the least, because upon the surface we were very different individuals indeed. When, therefore, it chanced that we should travel together abroad, we agreed without hesitation. As Mr. Clemens says (mortally assaulting the Queen's English), “I have found that there ain't no better way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”

As it happened, both Scotland Yard and the
Times
of London, which was publishing a series chronicling the tragic events I have set down elsewhere under the somewhat sensational title of
A Study in Scarlet
, had asked Holmes to visit the place where the troubles involving Enoch Drebber, Joseph Stangerson, and Jefferson Hope had begun, and apply his formidable detecting skills towards eliminating a number of small discrepancies in the murderer's confession. This journey, with expenses to be paid by the
Times
in return for an exclusive report of the investigation, would take us to Salt Lake City, the capital of Mormon country in the Utah Territory, a strange and terrible place not unlike Afghanistan of darkest memory.

When I say that we did not hesitate to accept the offer, I do not mean to imply that we failed to discuss it at length in the privacy of our Baker Street digs.

“This is redolent of inspectors Gregson and Lestrade,” said Holmes, flicking his long tapering fingers at the telegram from the
Times
as he lounged in his basket chair. “They were swift to claim credit when the boat seemed seaworthy, but now that it's sprung a leak or two they seek to abandon ship and let me go down with it.”

“Undoubtedly. But if you're still certain of the soundness of the solution—”

“I'd stake my reputation upon it, were I to possess such a thing.”

“Then,” said I, “you have nothing to lose but a month or so from your studies here, and a holiday to gain.”

“Holidays are for the overworked. I am singularly idle thanks to my magnanimity towards the Yard. The press perceived it to be a police case from start to finish until this moment.” He made a motion of dismissal, exactly as if he were slashing his bow across the strings of his violin. Then his face assumed a quizzical expression. “You say ‘you' as if I am to be alone in this excursion. What do I know of being a special correspondent? You're the literary half of this partnership, Doctor.”

“That's flattering, but premature. I've only just begun arranging my notes, and there is no guarantee of publication, rather the opposite. I'm just one more returning veteran with a story to tell. Fleet Street must be crowded to the rafters with unrequested and unwelcome manuscripts like mine.”

“Hardly like yours. There's romance in the business, murder, and not a line about troop movements or grand strategy. I'd read it myself if I didn't know the ending already. I never accept a pig without a poke. No, Doctor, I shan't undertake the assignment without a companion upon whose loyalty and discretion I can rely without question. What is your answer?”

“I was afraid you'd never ask.”

His smile was shy, an emotion I had thought absent from his meager repertoire. We would be quite on the other side of our second adventure before such reticence vanished from our relationship forever.

Our crossing was not uneventful, despite calm seas; but the affair of the American industrialist and the Swedish stowaway presents facets of its own, and its appearance in these pages would only distract the reader from the circumstances I am about to relate. It is a story the world may be prepared to hear, but which I am unprepared to tell. As many times as Holmes has explained to me how a disparity between a ship's bells and the time on a pocket watch,
both equally accurate
, can coexist, I remain ignorant as to how he brought the matter to a satisfactory conclusion before we arrived in the Port of New York.

Ironically, the very questions that had brought us from our hemisphere and across the vast reaches of the North American continent proved easier to answer than the conundrum aboard ship. Suffice it to say that a minor but crucial player in the Hope tragedy lied to dissemble a sordid personal peccadillo, and that most of the burden fell to me as I struggled to turn a half-penny hurricane into four columns in the
Times
. They were printed, and our fare and lodgings were paid for without complaint, but from that day to this I have not received another invitation to submit so much as a line to that august institution.

We were left with a wealth of time and opportunity to broaden our experience of the world's curiosities. I circumnavigated the gargantuan lake in a hired launch, and Holmes made copious entries in his notebook about the practice of polygamy for a monograph upon the subject, but we were both eager to add to our education and were soon off to Denver.

On the way we were detained in a muddy little hamlet whose police force had been forewarned of a visit by the remnants of the Jesse James gang of notorious reputation, suspected because of our British accents and European clothes as bandits in disguise. While awaiting word from Washington, D.C., confirming the material in our travel documents, we were placed under house arrest in the town's only hotel. One of our guards was a friendly fellow with swooping moustaches and a revolver the size of a meat-axe, who taught us the rudiments of the game of faro. By the time we were released, Holmes had become an expert, and I had learned just enough to swear off playing ever again for the sake of my army pension.

Having lost several days, we elected to forego Denver as just another large city like St. Louis and turned south towards the territory of Arizona. There among weird rock formations and cactus plants shaped like tall men with arms upraised, I remarked to my companion that I was disappointed not to have seen a red Indian yet, to add to my observations of the aborigines upon three continents.

“In order to make an observation, one must first observe,” said Holmes. “Those silhouettes are not the product of erosion.”

I followed the direction of his pointing finger, but we had nearly drawn beyond range before I identified what had looked like broken battlements atop a sandstone ridge as a group of motionless horsemen watching the train steam past.

“Apaches, if my preliminary reading is accurate. Zulus are peace lovers by comparison.” He laid aside his
Rocky Mountain News
and uncocked the Eley's pistol he was holding in his lap.

“You might have said something. I'm no babe in the woods, you know.”

“Quite the opposite, Doctor. A seasoned warrior like yourself might have responded from instinct and training. That would in all likelihood precipitate an action we should all regret.”

“I am not a hothead.” I fear I sounded petulant.

“You've given me no reason to think otherwise. Now that you have so informed me, as one gentleman to another, I shall not repeat the mistake.”

Ours was a difficult getting-acquainted period, as I've said. Even my dear late wife and I had an easier time of it; but then I'd had the advantage of having saved her life early in the courtship. I can't recommend a better approach when it comes to breaking the ice.

The gypsy life deposited us at length in the city of Youngblood, some forty miles north of Tucson. I'm told the place no longer exists, with nary a broken bottle nor a stone upon stone to indicate it ever did. I do not grieve over this pass.

Why we alighted in this vagabond jungle of canvas and clapboard, with an open sewer running merrily down its main street, is a question I cannot answer with certainty. We had not paused thirty seconds to take on water when Holmes shot to his feet and snatched his Gladstone bag from the brass rack overhead. Perhaps it was the scenery which inspired him. I vividly recall a one-eyed mongrel performing its ablutions on the platform and an ancient red Indian wrapped in a filthy blanket attempting to peddle an earthenware pot to everyone who stepped down from the train. A place so sinister in appearance seemed an ideal location for a consulting detective to practice his trade; then again, he may simply have been drawn to its perfect ugliness through some aesthetic of his own.

“Well, Doctor?” He stood in the aisle holding out my medical bag. His eyes glittered.

“Here?”

“Here forsooth. Can you picture a place further removed from Mayfair?”

For this I could offer no argument, and so I took the bag and hoisted my army footlocker from the rack.

Approaching the exit, Holmes nearly collided with a man boarding. When Holmes asked his pardon, the fellow started and seized him by the shoulders. “There's no call, stranger, if that accent's real and it belongs to Sherlock Holmes.”

The reader will indulge me if I remind him that at this juncture in his long and illustrious career, my companion was no more public a figure than the thousands of immigrants then pouring into the frontier in pursuit of free land, precious metal for the taking, and the promise of a new life. To hear one's associate addressed by name so far from home was as much a surprise as to be struck by a bullet on some peaceful corner, and one nearly as unsettling. My hand went to the revolver in my pocket.

“I believe you have the advantage,” said Holmes stiffly.

He did indeed. The stranger was as tall as my fellow lodger, and a distinct specimen of the Western type, with long fair hair, splendid moustaches, and a strong-jowled face deeply tanned despite the broad brim of his black hat. He wore a Prince Albert coat of the same funereal hue over a gaily printed waistcoat, striped trousers stuffed into the tops of tall black boots, and a revolver every bit as large as our erstwhile jailer's on his hip. I left my much smaller weapon in its pocket—albeit gripping it tightly—in the sudden certainty that any swift move by me would be met by one much swifter on his part, and far more deadly.

To my surprise, the man released his grip upon Holmes's shoulders and stepped back, dipping his head in a show of deference. “No offense meant. I feared I'd missed you, and charging square into you like a bull buffalo set my good manners clear to rout. Wyatt Earp, sir, late of Tombstone, and headed I-don't-know-where, or was anyway till I set foot in this hell.”

The name signified nothing to me and was so unusual that I took it at first as a statement interrupted by gastric distress: “Why, at—urp!” was how I received his introduction. Having sampled in Colorado the popular regional fare of beans and hot peppers stewed and served in a bowl, I had been suffering from the same complaint for several hundreds of miles.

Holmes did not share this delusion, and he, who in later years would treat kings and supercriminals with the same cordial disdain, became deferential on the instant. “I am just off reading of your exploits in the
Rocky Mountain News.
This business in a certain corral—”

“It wasn't in the O.K., but in an alley down the street next to the photo studio of C.S. Fly; but I don't reckon ‘The Shoot-out in Fly's Alley' would make it as far as Denver. It cost me a brother last March, and crippled another one three months before that. I'm not finished collecting on that bill, but it's not why I met this train. I saw a piece about you being in jail up north—”

It was Holmes's turn to interrupt. “Hardly a jail, although the condition of the hotel linens was a crime in itself. I'm curious as to the process by which you deduced I would proceed south from there, instead of east to Denver.”

“You're a detective, the piece said, vacationing from England. I'm in sort of that line myself, tracking stagecoach robbers and such, and it occurred to me nobody who's truly interested in crime and them that commits it would bother with a place where there's a policeman on every corner. I wouldn't give a spruce nickel for a blue-tick hound that didn't head straight for the brambles.”