The Perils of Sherlock Holmes (8 page)

“At first, of course, I had to eliminate the mundane possibility of a niche concealed in the bowl. That attended to, the crucial factor was the character of the enemy. It was not enough to this fellow that you should fear for your life; should you manage to uncover the secret, the solution itself must rob your triumph of its savour. Remember that Mr. King represents a culture that has had two thousand years to refine the punishment of torture. Armed with that intelligence, I proceeded on the assumption that the bowl was counterfeit. Any reputable dealer in antiquities could have done the rest.”

“Then the thing is worthless.” Rohmer gazed disconsolately at the object in his hands.

“Not quite,” said Holmes. “Although I should be much surprised if upon scratching it you do not discover base lead beneath the plate. The workmanship is still a thing of beauty. A London pawnbroker might be persuaded to part with ten pounds in order to display it in his shop window.”

“Still, I have been cheated. That fraudulent old devil led me to believe I would own something of real value.”

“But you do. He has given you the gift of your life.”

Somewhere in the villa a clock chimed the hour. Holmes stirred. “There is a telephone in the hall, which you may use to order an auto to return you to the station. First, however, I suggest you ring up the
Times
and place an advertisement announcing the riddle’s solution in tomorrow’s edition.”

Sax Rohmer regarded Sherlock Holmes with an expression I had seen many times upon many faces. “You are still the best detective in England.”

“Thank you.” Holmes closed his eyes, displaying for the first time the weariness which his feat of brilliance had created; he was, when all was said and done, a man in the sixtieth year of an adventurous life sufficient for ten of his contemporaries. “One never tires of hearing it,” said he.

A
uthor’s Note:
I wrote “Dr. and Mrs. Watson at Home” to be performed by a two-person cast for my fellow members of The Arcadia Mixture, the Ann Arbor, Michigan, scion of the national Baker Street Irregulars. Although casual readers of Holmes may find some of its lighthearted references a bit “inside” (not to say somewhat corny), diehard Sherlockians may appreciate the shout-out. Both may agree that the Mrs. Watson in the original stories always seemed a bit too understanding about her husband’s frequent desertions of her to gad about with his former roommate.

TIME:
1890-ish

SCENE:
The sitting-room of JOHN H. and MARY MORSTAN WATSON’s London home. MARY is busy knitting.

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 meagre 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 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 an invitation to submit so much as a line to that august institution.

Our mission completed, 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 still 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 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 standing 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 practise 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 considerably 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 offence 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 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 commit 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.”

“The brambles in this case being Arizona, where the savages don’t all wear paint and feathers,” Holmes said. “It’s crude reasoning, filled with flaws, but I warrant that within six months you’d make chief inspector at Scotland Yard.” He shook the stranger’s hand firmly. “My associate, Dr. John H. Watson.”

The sun broke in the man’s features. “Doc, is it? Well, if that’s not a good show card, I’ll give up the game.”

I accepted the grip of Mr. Wyatt Earp, late of Tombstone. When winters are damp, I still feel it in my fingers.

“I’m glad to see you travelling with a friend.” Earp sipped from his glass of beer, which after thirty minutes was not half gone; he seemed a man who kept his appetites tightly in rein. “I don’t know how things are in England, though I expect they’ve settled a bit since Shakespeare, but no matter how much attention a man pays to his cuffs and flatware, he needs a good man at his back.”

Holmes said, “Dr. Watson is my Sancho Panza. You would have marvelled to see his stone face just before I clapped the irons on Jefferson Hope.”

We were relaxing in the cool dry shade of the Mescalero Saloon, a model of the rustic American public house, with a long carved mahogany bar standing in sharp contrast to the rough plank floor, cuspidors in an execrable state of maintenance, and the head of an enormous grizzly bear mounted on a wall flanked by portraits of the martyred presidents Abraham Lincoln and James A. Garfield. Some marksman, possibly of a patriotic bent, had managed to put out one of the grizzly’s eyes and its left canine without nicking either commander-in-chief. I felt distinctly out of my element, and ordered a third whisky-and-water. Our new acquaintance’s tales of romance and gunplay in Dodge City and elsewhere required stimulants to digest. I was unclear as to whether he was a gambler or a road agent or a peace officer or a liar on the grand scale of P. T. Barnum. As a frustrated writer, I itched to commit his stories to paper, but as a man of science, I thought him a charlatan.

“I’m ignorant as to Hopes, but I pride myself on my Cervantes,” said Earp. “My father wanted me to practise law.”