The Hound of the Baskervilles
this morning which wants more thinking out than I am able to give
it.”
“Pray take a seat, Sir Henry. Do I understand you to say that you
have yourself had some remarkable experience since you arrived in
London?”
“Nothing of much importance, Mr. Holmes. Only a joke, as like as
not. It was this letter, if you can call it a letter, which
reached me this morning.”
He laid an envelope upon the table, and we all bent over it. It
was of common quality, greyish in colour. The address, “Sir Henry
Baskerville, Northumberland Hotel,” was printed in rough
characters; the post-mark “Charing Cross,” and the date of
posting the preceding evening.
“Who knew that you were going to the Northumberland Hotel?” asked
Holmes, glancing keenly across at our visitor.
“No one could have known. We only decided after I met Dr.
Mortimer.”
“But Dr. Mortimer was no doubt already stopping there?”
“No, I had been staying with a friend,” said the doctor.
“There was no possible indication that we intended to go to this
hotel.”
“Hum! Someone seems to be very deeply interested in your
movements.” Out of the envelope he took a half-sheet of foolscap
paper folded into four. This he opened and spread flat upon the
table. Across the middle of it a single sentence had been formed
by the expedient of pasting printed words upon it. It ran:
As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.
The word “moor” only was printed in ink.
“Now,” said Sir Henry Baskerville, “perhaps you will tell me, Mr.
Holmes, what in thunder is the meaning of that, and who it is
that takes so much interest in my affairs?”
“What do you make of it, Dr. Mortimer? You must allow that there
is nothing supernatural about this, at any rate?”
“No, sir, but it might very well come from someone who was
convinced that the business is supernatural.”
“What business?” asked Sir Henry sharply. “It seems to me that
all you gentlemen know a great deal more than I do about my own
affairs.”
“You shall share our knowledge before you leave this room, Sir
Henry. I promise you that,” said Sherlock Holmes. “We will
confine ourselves for the present with your permission to this
very interesting document, which must have been put together and
posted yesterday evening. Have you yesterday’s _Times_, Watson?”
“It is here in the corner.”
“Might I trouble you for it—the inside page, please, with the
leading articles?” He glanced swiftly over it, running his eyes
up and down the columns. “Capital article this on free trade.
Permit me to give you an extract from it.
‘You may be cajoled into imagining that your own special trade or
your own industry will be encouraged by a protective tariff, but
it stands to reason that such legislation must in the long run
keep away wealth from the country, diminish the value of our
imports, and lower the general conditions of life in this island.’
“What do you think of that, Watson?” cried Holmes in high glee,
rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. “Don’t you think
that is an admirable sentiment?”
Dr. Mortimer looked at Holmes with an air of professional
interest, and Sir Henry Baskerville turned a pair of puzzled dark
eyes upon me.
“I don’t know much about the tariff and things of that kind,”
said he, “but it seems to me we’ve got a bit off the trail so far
as that note is concerned.”
“On the contrary, I think we are particularly hot upon the trail,
Sir Henry. Watson here knows more about my methods than you do,
but I fear that even he has not quite grasped the significance of
this sentence.”
“No, I confess that I see no connection.”
“And yet, my dear Watson, there is so very close a connection
that the one is extracted out of the other. ‘You,’ ‘your,’
‘your,’ ‘life,’ ‘reason,’ ‘value,’ ‘keep away,’ ‘from the.’ Don’t
you see now whence these words have been taken?”
“By thunder, you’re right! Well, if that isn’t smart!” cried Sir
Henry.
“If any possible doubt remained it is settled by the fact that
‘keep away’ and ‘from the’ are cut out in one piece.”
“Well, now—so it is!”
“Really, Mr. Holmes, this exceeds anything which I could have
imagined,” said Dr. Mortimer, gazing at my friend in amazement.
“I could understand anyone saying that the words were from a
newspaper; but that you should name which, and add that it came
from the leading article, is really one of the most remarkable
things which I have ever known. How did you do it?”
“I presume, Doctor, that you could tell the skull of a negro from
that of an Esquimau?”
“Most certainly.”
“But how?”
“Because that is my special hobby. The differences are obvious.
The supra-orbital crest, the facial angle, the maxillary curve,
the—”
“But this is my special hobby, and the differences are equally
obvious. There is as much difference to my eyes between the
leaded bourgeois type of a _Times_ article and the slovenly print
of an evening half-penny paper as there could be between your
negro and your Esquimau. The detection of types is one of the
most elementary branches of knowledge to the special expert in
crime, though I confess that once when I was very young I
confused the _Leeds Mercury_ with the _Western Morning News_. But
a _Times_ leader is entirely distinctive, and these words could
have been taken from nothing else. As it was done yesterday the
strong probability was that we should find the words in
yesterday’s issue.”
“So far as I can follow you, then, Mr. Holmes,” said Sir Henry
Baskerville, “someone cut out this message with a scissors—”
“Nail-scissors,” said Holmes. “You can see that it was a very
short-bladed scissors, since the cutter had to take two snips
over ‘keep away.’”
“That is so. Someone, then, cut out the message with a pair of
short-bladed scissors, pasted it with paste—”
“Gum,” said Holmes.
“With gum on to the paper. But I want to know why the word ‘moor’
should have been written?”
“Because he could not find it in print. The other words were all
simple and might be found in any issue, but ‘moor’ would be less
common.”
“Why, of course, that would explain it. Have you read anything
else in this message, Mr. Holmes?”
“There are one or two indications, and yet the utmost pains have
been taken to remove all clues. The address, you observe is
printed in rough characters. But the _Times_ is a paper which is
seldom found in any hands but those of the highly educated. We
may take it, therefore, that the letter was composed by an
educated man who wished to pose as an uneducated one, and his
effort to conceal his own writing suggests that that writing
might be known, or come to be known, by you. Again, you will
observe that the words are not gummed on in an accurate line, but
that some are much higher than others. ‘Life,’ for example is
quite out of its proper place. That may point to carelessness or
it may point to agitation and hurry upon the part of the cutter.
On the whole I incline to the latter view, since the matter was
evidently important, and it is unlikely that the composer of such
a letter would be careless. If he were in a hurry it opens up the
interesting question why he should be in a hurry, since any
letter posted up to early morning would reach Sir Henry before he
would leave his hotel. Did the composer fear an interruption—and
from whom?”
“We are coming now rather into the region of guesswork,” said Dr.
Mortimer.
“Say, rather, into the region where we balance probabilities and
choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the
imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to
start our speculation. Now, you would call it a guess, no doubt,
but I am almost certain that this address has been written in a
hotel.”
“How in the world can you say that?”
“If you examine it carefully you will see that both the pen and
the ink have given the writer trouble. The pen has spluttered
twice in a single word and has run dry three times in a short
address, showing that there was very little ink in the bottle.
Now, a private pen or ink-bottle is seldom allowed to be in such
a state, and the combination of the two must be quite rare. But
you know the hotel ink and the hotel pen, where it is rare to get
anything else. Yes, I have very little hesitation in saying that
could we examine the waste-paper baskets of the hotels around
Charing Cross until we found the remains of the mutilated _Times_
leader we could lay our hands straight upon the person who sent
this singular message. Halloa! Halloa! What’s this?”
He was carefully examining the foolscap, upon which the words
were pasted, holding it only an inch or two from his eyes.
“Well?”
“Nothing,” said he, throwing it down. “It is a blank half-sheet
of paper, without even a water-mark upon it. I think we have
drawn as much as we can from this curious letter; and now, Sir
Henry, has anything else of interest happened to you since you
have been in London?”
“Why, no, Mr. Holmes. I think not.”
“You have not observed anyone follow or watch you?”
“I seem to have walked right into the thick of a dime novel,”
said our visitor. “Why in thunder should anyone follow or watch
me?”
“We are coming to that. You have nothing else to report to us
before we go into this matter?”
“Well, it depends upon what you think worth reporting.”
“I think anything out of the ordinary routine of life well worth
reporting.”
Sir Henry smiled. “I don’t know much of British life yet, for I
have spent nearly all my time in the States and in Canada. But I
hope that to lose one of your boots is not part of the ordinary
routine of life over here.”
“You have lost one of your boots?”
“My dear sir,” cried Dr. Mortimer, “it is only mislaid. You will
find it when you return to the hotel. What is the use of
troubling Mr. Holmes with trifles of this kind?”
“Well, he asked me for anything outside the ordinary routine.”
“Exactly,” said Holmes, “however foolish the incident may seem.
You have lost one of your boots, you say?”
“Well, mislaid it, anyhow. I put them both outside my door last
night, and there was only one in the morning. I could get no
sense out of the chap who cleans them. The worst of it is that I
only bought the pair last night in the Strand, and I have never
had them on.”
“If you have never worn them, why did you put them out to be
cleaned?”
“They were tan boots and had never been varnished. That was why I
put them out.”
“Then I understand that on your arrival in London yesterday you
went out at once and bought a pair of boots?”
“I did a good deal of shopping. Dr. Mortimer here went round with