=============== AI-Generated Graded Readers Masaru Uchida, Gifu University Publication webpage: https://www1.gifu-u.ac.jp/~masaru/a1/ai-generated_graded_readers.html Publication date: April 17, 2026 About This Edition This book is a simplified English adaptation created for extensive reading practice. The text was generated using ChatGPT and prepared for intermediate English learners as part of an educational project. Target reading level: CEFR A2-B1 This edition aims to support fluency development through accessible vocabulary, expanded narration, and improved readability while preserving the original story structure. Source Text Original work: His Last Bow Author: Arthur Conan Doyle Source: Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ Full text available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2350/pg2350.txt The original text is in the public domain. Copyright and Use This simplified edition is intended for educational and non-commercial use only. The source text is provided by Project Gutenberg under its public domain policy. Users should refer to the Project Gutenberg License for full terms: https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html This adaptation was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence and edited for readability and educational purposes. Disclaimer This edition is an educational adaptation and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Project Gutenberg. =============== Arthur Conan Doyle, His Last Bow (Simplified Edition, Adapted and Simplified by ChatGPT) CONTENTS The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot The Adventure of the Red Circle The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax The Adventure of the Dying Detective His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge Part 1 　　It was a cold, windy day near the end of March in 1892. Holmes and I were sitting together after lunch in Baker Street when a telegram came for him. He wrote a quick reply at once, but after that he said nothing. Still, I could see that the message stayed in his mind. He stood by the fire, smoked his pipe, and looked at the paper again and again with a bright, thoughtful look in his eyes. 　　At last he turned to me with a faint smile. “Watson,” he said, “how would you explain the word ‘grotesque’?” I told him that it meant something strange or very unusual. Holmes shook his head at once. He said there was more in the word than simple strangeness. To him, it often meant that something odd was hiding something dark, dangerous, or even terrible. 　　He reminded me of earlier cases that had begun in a curious way and ended in crime. Then he picked up the telegram and read it aloud. The message was short. It said that the sender had had a most strange and unbelievable experience, and that he wished to consult Holmes. The name at the end was John Scott Eccles, and the telegram had been sent from Charing Cross. 　　I asked whether the writer was a man or a woman. Holmes said at once that it must be a man. Then I asked if he meant to see him. Holmes laughed softly and said that I knew very well how bored he had been lately. Common life, he said, was dull, the newspapers were empty, and bold crime seemed almost dead. So of course he would see anyone who brought even the smallest chance of something new. 　　Even as he spoke, we heard a steady step on the stairs. A moment later our visitor was shown in. He was a large, tall man with grey whiskers and heavy, serious features. Everything about him suggested respectability, order, and old habits. Yet something had clearly shaken him very badly. His hair was rough, his face was red with anger and worry, and his whole manner was excited and confused. 　　He began at once. He said that he had had a most unpleasant and most extraordinary experience, unlike anything in all his life. He demanded an explanation, and he spoke with the hurt pride of a man who had always lived in a proper and well-managed world. Holmes asked him to sit down and speak calmly. Then, in his quiet way, Holmes asked why he had come to him instead of going straight to the police. 　　The man answered that he did not like private detectives, but the matter was so strange that he could not leave it alone. Holmes looked at his watch and then studied him closely. He pointed out that the telegram had been sent about an hour earlier, yet our visitor’s rough hair, unshaven chin, and careless clothes showed that his trouble had begun the moment he woke up. Mr. Scott Eccles admitted this at once. He said that he had been too eager to leave a certain house to think about his appearance, though before coming to us he had gone to ask questions of the house agents. 　　Holmes told him that he was beginning at the wrong end and should tell the story in the proper order. Scott Eccles looked down sadly at his own untidy state and agreed. He said that in all his life he had never appeared so badly turned out, but the facts would explain everything. He had just begun to collect his thoughts when the door opened once more. This time two detectives entered, and one of them was Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard. 　　With Gregson was Inspector Baynes from Surrey. They had come looking for Mr. Scott Eccles, and when they asked his name, he admitted it at once. Then came the blow. They said that they wanted a statement from him about the events connected with the death of Mr. Aloysius Garcia of Wisteria Lodge, near Esher. Scott Eccles stared at them in horror and could hardly speak. When he learned that Garcia had been murdered, he turned pale and looked as if his legs might fail him. 　　Gregson reminded him that a letter of his had been found in the dead man’s pocket, showing that he had planned to stay at Garcia’s house the night before. Scott Eccles was so shaken that Holmes asked me to give him some brandy and soda. When he had drunk it, the colour slowly came back into his face. Holmes then asked him to ignore the detectives for the moment and tell his story exactly as he had meant to do. With an uneasy glance at the open notebook in Gregson’s hand, Scott Eccles began. 　　He told us first that he was an unmarried man with many social friends. Among them was the family of a retired brewer named Melville, and it was at their table that he had met Garcia some weeks earlier. Garcia was, he believed, of Spanish family and connected somehow with the embassy. He spoke excellent English, had pleasant manners, and was a very handsome young man. For some reason he quickly became friendly with Scott Eccles and, within two days of their meeting, came out to visit him at Lee. 　　From that beginning, the friendship grew quickly. Garcia invited him to spend a few days at his country house, Wisteria Lodge, between Esher and Oxshott. Scott Eccles accepted and went there the evening before. Garcia had already described his small household: a servant from his own country who managed the house, and a remarkable cook of mixed race whom he had met in his travels. It had sounded unusual enough in Surrey, Scott Eccles said, but the truth had proved far stranger than he had expected. 　　He drove about two miles south of Esher and came to a house that did not please him at all. It stood back from the road behind thick evergreen shrubs and looked old, worn, and lonely. The drive was overgrown, the front door was stained by weather, and the whole place had an air of neglect. For a moment he regretted coming. Still, Garcia himself opened the door and welcomed him warmly, while the servant, a dark, silent, gloomy man, carried his bag upstairs. 　　From the start, the whole house felt oppressive. Scott Eccles dined alone with Garcia, and though his host tried to be pleasant, something was clearly troubling him. His thoughts kept wandering. He drummed his fingers, bit his nails, and showed all the signs of a nervous man waiting for something. The meal was poor, the service was worse, and the servant’s silent face made the evening heavier still. 　　Near the end of dinner, a note was brought in. Scott Eccles had not paid much attention to it at the time, but later he felt sure it mattered. Garcia read the message and grew even more uneasy than before. After that he hardly talked at all. He sat smoking one cigarette after another, lost in thought, and gave no explanation. By eleven o’clock Scott Eccles was relieved to go to bed. 　　Some time later, when his room was dark, Garcia came to his door and asked if he had rung for anything. Scott Eccles said that he had not. Garcia apologized for disturbing him and added that it was nearly one o’clock. After that, Scott Eccles went back to sleep and rested well through the rest of the night. When he woke, however, daylight was already filling the room. He looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly nine, though he had asked to be called at eight. 　　At first he was annoyed, not frightened. He rang the bell again and again, but no one came. Thinking the bell must be broken, he dressed in a hurry and went downstairs to complain and ask for hot water. Then the real shock came. There was no one in the hall. No one answered his calls. He ran from room to room and found the whole house empty. 　　At last he went to Garcia’s bedroom. His host had shown him the room the night before, so he knocked first and then opened the door. The room was empty, and the bed had not been slept in. Garcia was gone. The servant was gone. The cook was gone. Every one of them had disappeared in the night and left him alone in the silent house. 　　Scott Eccles stopped there and spread out his hands in anger and disbelief. “That,” he said, “was the end of my visit to Wisteria Lodge.” Part 2 　　Holmes rubbed his hands with quiet pleasure after Scott Eccles finished his strange story. He said that the experience seemed, as far as he knew, completely unique. Then he asked the obvious question: what had Scott Eccles done after finding the house empty? Our visitor answered that he had been angry rather than afraid. At first he believed he had been the victim of a foolish joke. 　　He packed his things at once, left the house, and walked into Esher carrying his bag. There he went to the local house agents and learned that Wisteria Lodge had indeed been rented in the proper way. For a short time he suspected that Garcia had used him as part of some trick connected with unpaid rent, but that idea also failed. The rent, he was told, had already been paid in advance. After that he went up to London, visited the Spanish embassy, and found that Garcia was unknown there. 　　He then called on Mr. Melville, at whose house he had first met Garcia, but Melville knew very little about the man. At last, when Holmes’s reply to the telegram reached him, he came straight to Baker Street. He ended by saying again that every word of his story was true. Outside of what he had already told us, he knew nothing at all about Garcia’s fate. He only wished to help the law in any way he could. 　　Gregson said politely that Scott Eccles’s statement matched the facts very well. Then he asked about the note that had arrived during dinner. Did Mr. Scott Eccles happen to notice what became of it? Scott Eccles answered that he had seen Garcia roll it up and throw it into the fire. At that, Inspector Baynes smiled and slowly took a scorched piece of paper from his pocket. 　　Baynes explained that it had fallen behind the grate instead of burning completely. Holmes praised him at once for such careful work. Baynes then read the note aloud. It was short but very strange: “Our own colours, green and white. Green open, white shut. Main stair, first corridor, seventh right, green baize. Good luck. D.” 　　Baynes added that the message was written in a woman’s hand, but the address looked as if it had been written by someone else, or at least with a different pen. Holmes examined the scrap and said that the seal had probably been made with a plain cuff link. He also noticed that the paper had been cut by small curved scissors, probably nail scissors. Baynes laughed and admitted that Holmes had found even more in the note than he had. Still, neither of them yet understood its meaning. 　　Scott Eccles was growing uneasy and reminded them that he had still not been told what had happened to Garcia himself. Gregson then described the murder. Garcia had been found dead that morning on Oxshott Common, not far from his house. His head had been beaten in with terrible violence, and though he had likely been struck first from behind, the attacker had continued long after death. There had been no robbery, no clear tracks, and no direct clue. 　　Scott Eccles was horrified, but he was also hurt and frightened for himself. He asked how he had become involved in such a matter when he knew nothing of Garcia’s late-night movements. Baynes answered very plainly. The only useful paper found on the dead man was Scott Eccles’s letter saying that he would stay at Wisteria Lodge that night. That letter had led the police first to the house, then to the missing guest, and finally to Baker Street. 　　Gregson rose and said that Scott Eccles must now come to the station and give his statement in writing. Scott Eccles agreed at once, but before he left he formally asked Holmes to take up the case on his behalf and spare neither effort nor cost in finding the truth. Holmes then turned to Baynes and politely asked whether he objected to having help. Baynes answered that he would be honoured. Holmes next asked if there was any sign of the exact hour of death, and Baynes replied that Garcia had been dead since about one o’clock, before the rain began. 　　This caused fresh surprise, because Scott Eccles insisted that he had heard Garcia’s voice at his bedroom door at about that very hour. Holmes only smiled and said that the contradiction was strange, but not impossible. He refused to give a full opinion yet, since more facts were needed. Still, he asked Baynes whether anything else unusual had been found in the house. Baynes gave him a curious look and said that there were indeed one or two very remarkable things, which Holmes might inspect later in person. 　　After our visitors had gone, Holmes sat smoking in deep thought. At last he turned to me and asked what I made of the matter. I answered that the most natural idea was that Garcia’s servants had helped murder him and then fled. Holmes agreed that this was possible, but he pointed out a difficulty at once. If the servants wished to kill Garcia, why choose the one night when there was a guest in the house, when all other nights he had been alone and easier to attack? 　　Holmes said there were two great facts that had to be explained together. One was the murder. The other was the strange experience of Scott Eccles. If one idea could explain both of them, and also fit the strange note, then it would be worth keeping as a working theory. He then began to build that theory step by step. Garcia, he said, had clearly worked hard to bring Scott Eccles to Wisteria Lodge, and not because he liked him. 　　Scott Eccles, Holmes explained, was exactly the sort of respectable Englishman whose word would be believed at once. That made him useful as a witness. A witness to what? To an alibi. Holmes believed that Garcia had planned some dangerous action for that night and had wanted Scott Eccles ready to swear later that Garcia had still been at home after midnight. In Holmes’s view, Garcia had likely lied about the hour, so that he could go out, do what he planned, and return in time to protect himself if trouble followed. 　　I asked about the sudden disappearance of the servants, and Holmes said that they too were probably involved in the same scheme. If Garcia failed to return, they had likely been ordered to escape at once and wait in some safe hiding place. He then turned to the note itself. The green and white colours seemed to be a signal. The reference to a main stair, a first corridor, and a seventh door on the right suggested a very large house. And because Garcia had gone out on foot and needed to return quickly, that house could not be far from Oxshott. 　　Before Baynes returned, Holmes received an answer to the telegram he had sent out earlier. It contained a list of the large houses in the district and the names of the people living in them. Holmes explained that the note must point to one of these houses, since only a big house would fit the directions in the message. By narrowing the field in this simple way, he hoped to find the place where Garcia had planned his secret meeting. By the time Baynes came back for us, Holmes had already fixed the next stage of the inquiry in his mind. 　　It was nearly six o’clock when we reached the pretty Surrey village of Esher with Inspector Baynes beside us. Holmes and I took rooms for the night at the Bull, and then the three of us set out together for Wisteria Lodge. The evening was cold and dark, with a sharp wind and a thin rain blowing into our faces. The lonely common stretched before us under the falling light. It was the right road for a grim business, and we walked on toward the silent house. Part 3 　　A cold and unhappy walk of about two miles brought us to the gate of Wisteria Lodge. The road was dark, the trees were heavy above us, and the house stood black against the evening sky. Only one weak light showed in a front window. Baynes told us that a policeman had been left inside to guard the place. He crossed the wet grass and knocked on the glass. 　　At once we heard movement within, and then the door flew open. A constable stood there with a candle in his shaking hand. His face was pale, and he seemed deeply frightened. Baynes asked sharply what was wrong with him. The man, whose name was Walters, wiped his forehead and said that it had been a long and lonely evening in that dreadful house. 　　Baynes laughed at him at first, but Walters insisted that he had seen something at the window two hours earlier. He said he had been sitting by the fire when he suddenly looked up and saw a huge face staring in through the pane. It was not like the face of any normal man. He could not even describe its colour properly. It was not black, not white, but something strange and ugly between the two. 　　What frightened him most, he said, were the wide eyes and the line of white teeth. The face had vanished at once, and he had rushed outside into the shrubs, but found no one. Baynes scolded him for speaking like a nervous child instead of a policeman. Holmes, however, said nothing foolish. He quietly took out his small lantern and examined the ground beneath the window. 　　A little later he announced that the visitor had left clear marks in the grass. The foot was enormous, and Holmes judged it to be a size twelve shoe. If the man’s body matched his foot, he said, he must be very large indeed. The tracks led through the bushes toward the road. Whoever had returned to Wisteria Lodge had come with some purpose, but for the moment he was gone again. 　　Baynes then took us through the house. The bedrooms and sitting rooms gave very little help. Almost everything in the place had been taken with the house, and the men who lived there seemed to have brought almost nothing of their own. There were some clothes, a few pipes, a guitar, a revolver, and a small number of books, two of them in Spanish. None of it told us enough. 　　At last Baynes led us to the kitchen, and there the case became far stranger. The room was dark, high, and unpleasant, and the cook seemed to have slept on straw in one corner. Dirty dishes from the last meal still lay on the table. Baynes held up the candle before a dreadful little object on the dresser. It was dry, black, twisted, and so shrunken that I could not decide whether it had once been animal or human. 　　Around the middle of this ugly thing was a band of white shells. Holmes looked at it with deep interest but no surprise. Then Baynes showed us something even worse. In the sink lay the torn remains of a large white bird, still covered with feathers. Holmes pointed to the head and said at once that it was a white cock. 　　Baynes had one last exhibit. From under the sink he pulled out a metal pail with blood in it, and from the table he took a plate full of burned pieces of bone. A doctor had already looked at them and said that they were not human. Holmes guessed that they came from a lamb or a young goat. Baynes said the people in this house had very strange habits indeed, and Holmes agreed with him. 　　The two men then spoke more openly. Baynes hinted that he had his own ideas about the case and did not believe the servants had simply killed Garcia and fled. He wanted to solve the matter in his own way and win some credit for himself. Holmes answered in a friendly spirit. He said that Baynes should follow his own path, while we followed ours. He added that he was beginning to find the case very interesting. 　　I could see that Holmes was on the track of something, but he did not explain it to me that night. In the days that followed he seemed, to my great disappointment, to do very little. He took long walks by himself, sometimes carrying a small tin box and a book on plants, as if he had become a country student of botany. Once he even spent a morning in London at the British Museum. Still, I knew him too well to believe that these quiet days were truly wasted. 　　Now and then we met Inspector Baynes in the village, and he always looked pleased with himself. He said very little, but I had the impression that he too believed he was making progress. Then, about five days after the murder, I opened the morning paper and saw a large report that the mystery had been solved. A suspect had been arrested. Holmes jumped from his chair when I read the headline aloud. 　　The article said that the cook, the huge and ugly man seen near the house, had been caught after trying again to return to Wisteria Lodge. Baynes had guessed that the man would come back, hidden his officers in the bushes, and trapped him there. The fellow had fought wildly and bitten one constable badly before they overpowered him. Holmes read the report with great attention, and then said that we must speak to Baynes at once. 　　We found the inspector just leaving his lodgings. Holmes warned him kindly that he might be making a mistake if he put too much trust in this arrest. Baynes listened with a smile and answered that each man had his own method. He did not clearly say that the prisoner was the murderer. He only repeated that he was following his own system. As we walked away, Holmes admitted that he could not fully understand Baynes, though he felt there was more thought in the man than first appeared. 　　Back in our room, Holmes finally explained his own view to me. Garcia, he said, had arranged Scott Eccles’s visit to create an alibi, so Garcia himself must have planned some crime for that night. If so, the person most likely to kill Garcia was the person against whom that crime was directed. Holmes believed that the missing servants had fled not because they had betrayed their master, but because they were part of the same plan and had orders to escape if Garcia failed to return. The man who came back to the house was probably trying to recover something too important, or too sacred, to leave behind. 　　Holmes then turned to the note and the house it must have described. After many walks and quiet questions in the neighborhood, he had fixed on one place above all others: a large old house called High Gable. The owner, a man named Henderson, was rich, feared, violent, and deeply mysterious. He lived there with his secretary Lucas, two young daughters, a governess named Miss Burnet, and a large staff, yet the family lived apart from the servants in a strange, guarded way. Most important of all, Miss Burnet had not been seen since the night of Garcia’s murder. Holmes believed she had written the note, and by the end of that evening he was ready to risk everything and go with me to High Gable under cover of darkness. Part 4 　　Holmes had just told me that we might have to go to High Gable that very night when our plans suddenly changed. It was late in the afternoon, and the March light was already fading, when a village man rushed into our room. He was the gardener, Warner, whom Holmes had been using as his helper. Breathless with excitement, he cried that the people from High Gable had gone to the station and that the lady had broken away from them. He had brought her in a cab, and she was waiting below. 　　We hurried down at once and found a woman in a state of complete exhaustion. Her face was thin and deeply marked by suffering, and her eyes were dull and heavy. She could hardly hold up her head. Holmes took one look at her and said that she had been drugged with opium. We carried her upstairs and laid her on the sofa. 　　Strong coffee slowly brought her back to herself. At the same time Holmes sent for Inspector Baynes, who came quickly when he learned what had happened. Warner explained that he had watched the gates of High Gable as Holmes had told him to do. When the carriage came out, he followed it to the station. There he saw that the woman looked as if she were half asleep, but when they tried to put her into the train she suddenly came to life and struggled to escape. 　　Warner had stepped in on her side and managed to get her into a cab before her captors could stop him. He added that he would not forget the face of the man who looked out of the carriage window as he drove away with her. It was, he said, the dark, angry face of a devil. Baynes listened with great attention, but Holmes cared even more for the woman herself. Every minute, he said, she was growing clearer in mind and stronger in speech. 　　Baynes then revealed the first great truth of the case. Henderson, he said, was not Henderson at all. He was Don Murillo, once known across Central America as the Tiger of San Pedro. I knew the name at once. It belonged to a cruel ruler who had grown rich through violence, fear, and blood, and who had escaped with his secretary, his children, and his treasure when his people finally rose against him. 　　Baynes explained that he had traced the man’s movements across Europe and found that the supposed Henderson was this same lost tyrant. The green and white colours in the note matched the colours of San Pedro. That small clue had helped confirm the truth. Miss Burnet, who had now sat up on the sofa, heard the name and spoke with sudden fire. She said that Garcia had died bravely, but that the monster still lived and would remain in danger until justice at last reached him. 　　Holmes asked how an Englishwoman had become mixed up in such a violent business. The woman answered that she had joined it because the ordinary law could not touch a man like Murillo for the crimes of his past. Then she told us who she really was. Her true name, she said, was Signora Victor Durando. Her husband had once served San Pedro as its minister in London, and Murillo had later called him back only to have him shot. 　　After her husband’s murder, Murillo had fallen from power and fled abroad. But those whose lives he had ruined did not forget him. They formed a group with one purpose only: to follow him, watch him, and destroy him when the chance came. Her task had been to enter his household and report his movements to the others. In this way she had become governess to his two daughters, smiling before the man who had killed her husband and waiting for her moment. 　　When Murillo returned to England and settled again at High Gable, others of the same cause came near him. Garcia was one of them. He was the son of a great man from San Pedro, and he had with him two loyal companions of lower rank. Miss Burnet had agreed to help him. She would send a note with final directions, and she would make a signal from the house to show whether the way was open or closed. 　　But, she said, everything went wrong at the last moment. Murillo’s secretary, Lucas, had begun to suspect her. He came upon her just as she was finishing the note. Murillo and Lucas dragged her away, questioned her, and nearly killed her on the spot. At last they decided that murdering her inside the house was too dangerous, but they forced from her Garcia’s address and used it for their own purpose. 　　Lopez, as Lucas had once been known, addressed the note in his own hand, sealed it with his cuff link, and sent it by the servant José. Then Murillo went out to wait for Garcia. Miss Burnet said she did not see the murder, but she believed Murillo struck Garcia down as he came along the path. At first they had thought of letting him enter the house and then killing him as a supposed burglar, but they feared that any open inquiry would expose who they really were. So they killed him outside instead. 　　After Garcia’s death, Miss Burnet herself became a prisoner. For five days she was kept locked in her room, threatened, starved, and beaten. She showed us marks on her body to prove it. Once she tried to call from the window, but they forced a gag into her mouth. At last they decided to move her away, and before the journey they drugged her heavily. Even so, when they tried to push her into the train, her mind cleared enough for her to understand that this was her one chance, and she fought her way free. 　　We all sat silent for a moment after hearing this terrible story. Then Holmes said that our difficulties were not over. We now understood the truth, but proving it in court might still be hard. I agreed with him. A clever lawyer, I said, might try to twist the murder into an act of self-defence. Baynes, however, was in good spirits and answered that drawing a man into a trap and killing him in cold blood was not the same thing at all. 　　Holmes then turned to the inspector and praised him warmly. Baynes admitted at last that he had never truly believed the captured cook to be the murderer. He had arrested the wrong man on purpose to make Murillo think that suspicion had gone elsewhere. Once Murillo believed himself safe, he would try to move Miss Burnet, and that was exactly what had happened. Holmes smiled and said that Baynes would go far in his profession, for he had both instinct and courage. 　　In the end, however, the law did not close its hand on the Tiger of San Pedro in England. Murillo and his secretary slipped away before they could be properly taken. Months later they were both found murdered in a hotel in Madrid, and no one was ever arrested for that crime. Holmes told me afterward that justice had come at last, though by another road. He also explained the last strange points of the case: the huge cook had returned because he could not leave behind the ugly little idol he worshipped, and the white bird, the blood, and the burned bones were part of a dark ritual from his own land. Then Holmes closed his notebook and said that this, once again, proved how quickly the strange can turn into the terrible. The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans Part 1 　　In the third week of November, 1895, a thick yellow fog lay over London for days together. From our windows in Baker Street we could hardly see the houses across the road. Holmes had tried to keep himself busy. One day he worked on his great book of references, and on the next two days he gave himself to old church music, which had lately become his special interest. But on the fourth morning even he could bear it no longer. 　　He walked up and down our room with all the restless force of a man built for action. He tapped the furniture, bit his nails, and looked out into the ugly brown mist with clear dislike. When he asked if there was anything interesting in the paper, I knew exactly what he meant. To Holmes, only crime was truly interesting, and that morning the newspapers offered nothing but dull public matters and small, common offences. 　　Holmes said that a day like that seemed made for some bold and dangerous act. In such fog, he told me, a thief or murderer could move through London almost unseen. He even remarked that it was a good thing for society that he himself was not a criminal, since weather like this would suit him only too well. I answered warmly that this was certainly true. He had just begun another dark joke about how easy it would be to arrange a false meeting and destroy an enemy when the maid entered with a telegram. 　　Holmes tore it open, glanced at it, and laughed in surprise. The telegram was from his brother Mycroft, and it said only that he must see Holmes at once about Cadogan West. This startled Holmes far more than the name itself. Mycroft, he explained, almost never changed his habits. His whole life moved between his lodgings, the Diogenes Club, and Whitehall. For him to come to Baker Street was so unusual that Holmes compared it to seeing a tram-car in a country lane. 　　I asked whether the message explained anything more, but it did not. Holmes then began to speak about his brother, and his tone showed both respect and amusement. He told me that I had once heard only a very small part of the truth. Mycroft, he said, was not just some minor government servant. At times he was so central to the machine of state that one could almost say he was the British government. 　　Holmes explained that Mycroft had the most orderly mind of any man alive, and a memory in which facts were stored and arranged with perfect ease. Where other men knew one department or one subject, Mycroft could hold many at once and see how they all connected. Ministers and officials passed facts to him from every side, and he could weigh them together and give a judgment almost at once. He had no hunger for rank, praise, or office, yet he had made himself indispensable. Holmes spoke of him as a man who could guide great affairs from an armchair, and I could see that even he admired this power deeply. 　　Still, Holmes came back to the same point. If Mycroft was leaving his fixed path and coming to us in person, the matter had to be serious indeed. I searched through the papers on the sofa and suddenly found the name. Cadogan West, I cried, was the young man whose body had been found on the Underground on Tuesday morning. At once Holmes became alert. He said that a death important enough to bring Mycroft to Baker Street could not be ordinary. 　　I then told him the facts as they had appeared in the reports. Arthur Cadogan West was twenty-seven, unmarried, and employed as a clerk at Woolwich Arsenal. On Monday evening he had been with his fiancée, Miss Violet Westbury. At about half past seven, in the fog, he suddenly left her without explanation. There had been no quarrel, and she could give no reason for his abrupt departure. 　　The next thing known was that his dead body had been found at six the following morning near Aldgate Station. It lay beside the line at the point where the railway comes out of the tunnel. The head was terribly crushed, and the injury might have come from a fall from a moving train. Since the body could not have been brought in from the street without passing the station barriers, it seemed certain that he had reached that spot from the railway itself. Holmes said that, alive or dead, the man must either have fallen or been thrown from a train. 　　I added that the line carried trains running eastward, and so Cadogan West must have been travelling in that direction late in the night. Yet no one could say where he had got onto the train. Holmes naturally asked about the ticket, and I had to answer that none had been found in his pockets. This interested him at once. He pointed out that one does not reach the platform of such a train without a ticket, so either it had been removed to hide his starting point or it had been lost in the carriage. 　　There were other things in the dead man’s pockets. He still had money, so robbery was not the reason for the affair. He had a check-book, by which the police had identified him. He also had two theatre tickets for that very evening, which suggested that he had intended a normal night with Miss Westbury before something suddenly changed his plans. But the most important discovery was a packet of technical papers. The moment I mentioned these, Holmes said that the chain was complete: government work, Woolwich Arsenal, technical documents, and Mycroft’s sudden visit all pointed to one conclusion. 　　Almost at once Mycroft himself arrived, and with him came Lestrade of Scotland Yard. Mycroft was a heavy, powerful man, awkward in body but commanding in face, with deep-set eyes and a forehead that seemed made for thought. Lestrade looked as grave as he did, and both men carried the air of a serious national matter. Mycroft dropped into a chair and said that the business was deeply annoying, since high officials had insisted on pulling him from his office at a very awkward time. He added that he had never seen the Prime Minister more upset. 　　Holmes asked at once whether the reports were correct. Had the police truly found technical papers on Cadogan West? Mycroft answered that they had, but that the newspapers had not guessed what they were. Then he spoke the name that gave the whole matter its weight. The papers, he said, were plans of the Bruce-Partington submarine. 　　Neither Holmes nor I knew much about it beyond the name, and Mycroft explained why that itself was so significant. The Bruce-Partington submarine, he said, was one of the most closely guarded secrets in the country. Its value was so great that naval war would be transformed wherever it could operate. The invention had cost the government a very large sum, and every effort had been made to keep the plans from foreign eyes. They were not ordinary drawings but a large and complex set, with many separate parts, all needed for the whole design. 　　These papers, Mycroft continued, were kept in a special safe in a confidential office beside the arsenal. The room itself was strongly protected, and under no conditions were the plans meant to leave it. If a senior naval expert wished to study them, he had to go to the office and examine them there. Yet now those very papers had appeared in the pocket of a dead junior clerk in central London. From the government’s point of view, Mycroft said, the thing was disastrous. 　　Holmes asked whether the plans had at least all been recovered, and Mycroft gave the answer that made the matter still worse. Ten papers had been taken from Woolwich. Only seven had been found on Cadogan West. The three most important were missing. That meant that someone else had them, and that the heart of the secret might already be on its way abroad. 　　Mycroft then laid the whole problem before Holmes in plain terms. Why had Cadogan West taken the papers? Where were the three missing ones? How had he died? How had his body reached the railway line? And how could the danger to the country now be repaired? Holmes listened with complete attention. Mycroft admitted frankly that, while he could judge facts as well as his brother, he was not the man to chase witnesses, inspect railway lines, or search the ground with a lens. That was Sherlock Holmes’s work, not his. 　　Holmes smiled at the suggestion that success might earn him public honour. He said, as always, that he played the game for its own sake. Still, I could see that the case had fully taken hold of him. He answered that the problem certainly had points of great interest and that he would be very glad to examine it. Then he asked for more facts and addresses, and the real work of the Bruce-Partington case began. Part 2 　　After Mycroft had laid the case before us, Holmes did not accept the simplest explanation without protest. Lestrade thought the whole thing plain enough. In his view, Cadogan West had stolen the papers, met a foreign agent in London, failed to agree on payment, and then been murdered on the way home. The murderer, according to Lestrade, had taken the three most important papers and removed the railway ticket so that the police could not easily trace where the meeting had taken place. Holmes admitted that the theory held together on the surface, but he was far from satisfied. 　　He pointed out the first difficulty at once. If Cadogan West had planned to betray his country, why had he bought two theatre tickets for the same evening and gone out with his fiancée as if he meant to spend a normal night? That did not look like a man keeping himself free for a secret sale. Then there was the second difficulty. If he had truly gone to London to sell ten papers, why were only seven found on him afterward? Holmes said that a traitor might be greedy, false, or weak, but he would hardly choose to give away the best part of his prize and keep the rest in his own pocket. 　　A third objection followed. No large sum of money had been found on Cadogan West’s body. If he had been selling a secret of such value, one would expect some payment, or at least a sign that payment had been arranged. Holmes did not say that Lestrade’s idea was impossible, but he made it clear that the case was not yet solved. Mycroft, who hated this explanation from the start, urged him with unusual force to leave nothing untested and to see the scene with his own eyes. Holmes answered with a shrug, took up his hat, and told Lestrade to come with us at once. 　　An hour later we stood near Aldgate Station at the place where the Underground line comes out of the tunnel. A railway official showed us the exact spot where the body had lain, about three feet from the rails. He explained that the corpse could not have fallen from above, since the place was bordered by blank walls. Therefore, he said, it must have come from a passing train, and the train in question had likely gone through about midnight on Monday. He added that no sign of violence had been found inside the carriages and no missing ticket had turned up there either. 　　Holmes listened carefully, asked a few quiet questions, and then crouched down to examine the line itself. He paid close attention not only to the rails and the sleepers but also to the shape of the walls and the space above the trains. Lestrade then said that the police had gained one new fact that morning, though it did not seem to lead very far. Holmes, however, kept studying the spot with a concentration I knew well. Presently he rose and gave one of those little signs which told me that some new idea had taken firm hold of him. 　　From the station we went on to Woolwich and began with the official side of the matter. The plans had been kept in a confidential office near the arsenal, and the man responsible for them was Sir James Walter, a famous government expert. Holmes first considered the safe, the doors, the hours of closing, and the general routine of the building. He wanted to know not only what had been done, but what could have been done without immediate discovery. Every detail mattered now, especially the question of keys. 　　We learned that the office had closed at five on Monday and that the papers had then been locked safely away. Sidney Johnson, the senior clerk, had been the last man out. He said that the plans were in the safe when he left them there himself. There was a watchman for the building, but the fog had been thick, and the man had charge of more than one department. He had seen nothing unusual that evening. Johnson clearly believed Cadogan West guilty, yet he spoke with real pain, for he had trusted the young man completely before this disaster. 　　Holmes asked how many keys were needed to get at the papers after hours. Johnson answered that three were necessary: one for the outer door, one for the office itself, and one for the safe. He personally possessed only the safe key. The door keys were kept by Sir James Walter, who, according to Johnson, carried them together on one ring. Holmes then asked whether Johnson’s own key had ever left his possession. Johnson replied firmly that it had not. If West had entered alone, Holmes said, then he must somehow have had a duplicate key, and yet no such key had been found on his body. 　　Holmes next raised another point which struck Johnson much less strongly than it struck him. If a clerk wanted to sell the plans, would it not be safer to copy them than to steal the originals? Johnson admitted that copying them well would require technical knowledge, but he also agreed that such knowledge was possessed by the small number of men who had access to them. Holmes said that this made the theft of the originals even stranger. The risk had been far greater, while the gain was not obviously greater. Johnson could only repeat that, however strange it looked, the originals had in fact been found on West. 　　Then came one more disturbing answer. Holmes asked whether the three missing papers were enough, by themselves, to allow a foreign power to build the submarine. Johnson said that he had first told the Admiralty they were, but after thinking again, he was less sure. One of the most difficult devices in the design appeared on one of the seven recovered papers. Without solving that problem independently, the missing three would not be enough. Still, Johnson insisted that those three were the most important of the set. Holmes listened to this with the look of a man whose puzzle has not become easier, but harder. 　　After this interview Holmes asked permission to walk through the premises himself. He moved through the office with slow care, testing distances, doors, windows, and the likely path of anyone entering by stealth. Nothing in the building suggested a quick and simple theft. On the contrary, everything pointed to preparation, access, and method. If Cadogan West had acted alone, he had done something very difficult without leaving behind the means by which he did it. Holmes said little, but his silence was full of thought. 　　By the time we left Woolwich, several fixed points had begun to stand out. Cadogan West had gone suddenly toward London in the fog. He had died near Aldgate. The three most important papers were gone. No payment had been found. No ticket had been found. No duplicate key had been found. And the theft itself looked less like the careless act of a weak young clerk than like a movement within a much larger plan. Holmes did not yet say this openly, but I could see that he no longer believed we were dealing with a simple case of patriotism sold for money. 　　As we made our way back, Holmes returned in thought to the railway line. The body could certainly have come from a train, but the details did not fit an ordinary struggle inside a carriage. At last he told us the idea that had come to him at Aldgate. The body, he said, had not been thrown from a compartment at all. It had travelled on the roof of the train. That alone would explain how it reached that exact place without anyone in the carriage seeing or hearing anything. 　　Once he had formed that idea, the rest followed quickly. We later found the very house from whose upper window the corpse could have been placed upon the roof. Holmes showed me the soot on the sill, the marks where a weight had rested, and even blood traces on the window and stair. When a train stopped below, we saw for ourselves that the roof lay only a few feet beneath the ledge. Holmes said that from the moment he had thought of the roof, the line to the truth had become much clearer. But he also warned me that the real difficulty still lay ahead, because now we had to discover who had used that window, and why. 　　Thus the case changed shape before my eyes. It was no longer only a mystery about a dead clerk and stolen papers. It had become a question of a secret meeting place in London, of men who could handle railway timing and government plans, and of a corpse carefully arranged to mislead the police. Holmes had not yet named our enemy, but the field had narrowed. He had found that the death at Aldgate was staged, not accidental, and that the missing three papers had not vanished into the fog by chance. They were somewhere in human hands, and the next step would be to find whose hands those were. Part 3 　　Holmes stood for a moment by the window above the railway and looked down at the roof of the stopped train. He said that this part of the case was now clear enough. Someone had placed Cadogan West’s body there, and when the train moved on, the corpse had later fallen near Aldgate and misled the police. But Holmes did not look pleased. He said that the easy part was over, and the difficult part still lay ahead. 　　We then turned to the rooms inside the house. One was a dining room with little in it. Another was a bedroom, and that too gave us nothing useful. The third room was clearly a study, and Holmes at once set to work there with his usual quick and orderly care. 　　Drawer after drawer was opened and searched. Cupboards were examined, shelves were checked, and papers were turned over one by one. Yet nothing directly connected the room to the missing plans or to Cadogan West’s death. At the end of an hour Holmes said that the man we sought had hidden his tracks very well. 　　Then his eye fell upon a small metal cash-box standing on the writing table. He forced it open with his tool and emptied the contents out before us. Inside were several rolls of paper covered with figures and calculations. The repeated words about water pressure made Holmes think they might relate to submarine work, but he pushed them aside at once because they told us nothing certain. 　　There was also an envelope containing a few newspaper cuttings. The moment Holmes shook them onto the table, his whole face changed. He saw their meaning at once. They were not ordinary scraps at all, but a record of short notices printed in the advertisement column of the Daily Telegraph. 　　Holmes arranged them in what he believed was their proper order and read them aloud to me. One said that terms had been agreed and asked for full details at an address already given. Another said the matter was too complex to describe briefly and that payment would be ready when the goods were delivered. A third pressed for speed and said an appointment should be fixed by letter and then confirmed by advertisement. 　　The last of the old messages was the most important. It named Monday night after nine, ordered two taps, and promised payment in cash when the goods were delivered. Holmes said that at last we had something solid in our hands. The man in this house had clearly been in secret communication with someone over the stolen papers, and the meeting had been fixed for the very night on which Cadogan West died. 　　Holmes then made a quick decision. He said that there was no more to be done inside the house for the moment. Our next move was to go to the office of the Daily Telegraph and learn what could be learned there. By the time we returned and met Mycroft and Lestrade the next morning, Holmes had already taken the first step in turning these advertisements against the man who had used them. 　　When Mycroft and Lestrade came to Baker Street, Holmes told them everything we had found. Lestrade shook his head over our unlawful entry into the empty house, but he did so with clear respect. Holmes only laughed and asked Mycroft what he thought of the new evidence. Mycroft praised the discovery, but naturally wanted to know what Holmes meant to do with it. 　　Holmes picked up the day’s Daily Telegraph and showed us a fresh advertisement that had just appeared. It repeated the same style as the earlier ones. It told the reader to come that very night, at the same hour and the same place, to give two taps, and it added that the matter was of the greatest importance and concerned his very safety. Lestrade cried out at once that if the other man answered this call, we would finally have him. 　　Holmes said that this had been exactly his idea when he arranged for the advertisement to be printed. If the man behind the plot was anxious, greedy, or afraid, he might well come. Holmes therefore invited both Lestrade and Mycroft to meet us that evening at Caulfield Gardens. There, he said, we might get much nearer to the truth. 　　During the long day that followed, Holmes did something I had often seen before and never ceased to admire. Once he had carried his own reasoning as far as it could go, he pushed the whole case aside and buried himself in a learned work on old church music. I could do nothing of the sort. The danger to the country, the missing papers, and the chance of failure kept my mind in constant movement until the evening came at last. 　　After a light dinner we set out for the meeting place. Lestrade and Mycroft were waiting for us near Gloucester Road Station, and together we made our way to the dark house in Caulfield Gardens. By nine o’clock we were all inside the study, silent and watchful. An hour passed, then another, until at last, near eleven, Holmes suddenly lifted his head and said in a low voice that the man was coming. Part 4 　　We sat in silence in the dark study while the minutes passed. Then, at last, Holmes lifted his head and said softly that our man was coming. We heard a cautious step outside, followed by two quick taps. Holmes opened the door, let the visitor slip in, and then shut it fast behind him. In another moment he had seized the intruder and thrown him back into the room before us. 　　The man stared wildly around him, lost his balance, and fell to the floor in a faint. His hat flew off, his scarf slipped down, and his false beard came loose. To our astonishment, the face before us was not Oberstein’s at all. It was Colonel Valentine Walter, the younger brother of the late Sir James Walter. Holmes gave a low whistle and admitted at once that he had expected another man. 　　When the prisoner recovered, he looked at us with horror and said that he had come to see Mr. Oberstein. Holmes answered that the whole game was known. He then laid out the case in a clear order, point by point. Walter had been short of money, had taken an impression of the keys in his brother’s keeping, and had entered into secret dealings with Oberstein through the newspaper advertisements. 　　Holmes went on to say that Walter had stolen the papers on the foggy Monday night, but that Cadogan West had seen or suspected enough to follow him. The young clerk, acting like an honest citizen, left his private life behind and kept close on Walter’s heels through the fog until he reached the house in Caulfield Gardens. There, Holmes said, Walter had passed from treason to murder. At this Walter cried out that he was guilty of the first crime but not of the second. 　　He then gave his account. He admitted that he had badly needed money because of a debt and that Oberstein had promised him five thousand pounds. He said that, in the thick fog, he had no idea that West was following him until he was actually at the door. He gave the agreed signal, Oberstein opened, and then West rushed up and demanded to know what they meant to do with the plans. 　　According to Walter, Oberstein always carried a short heavy club. When West forced his way into the house after them, Oberstein struck him on the head. The blow was fatal, and within a few minutes the young man was dead in the hall. Walter said that they were both shocked and uncertain what to do next. Then Oberstein thought of the trains that stopped beneath the back window. 　　Before moving the body, Oberstein examined the papers. He insisted on keeping the three most important ones because there was not enough time to copy them. Walter protested, fearing the uproar that would follow at Woolwich if the set was not complete. Oberstein then suggested the plan which Holmes had already guessed: they would put the seven less important papers in West’s pocket and place his body on the roof of the train, so that the police would think he himself had stolen them and died in flight. 　　In this way the last dark point became clear. Cadogan West had not betrayed his country at all. He had discovered betrayal and tried to stop it. For that brave act he had died, and his dead body had been used to hide the guilt of others. The theatre tickets, the lack of money, and his fiancée’s belief in his honour all suddenly made perfect sense. 　　Once the confession had been secured, Holmes moved quickly to the final step. Since Oberstein was still free and still held the three missing papers, he had to be trapped at once. Holmes made Walter write a message saying that he would not trust the post, that he would take only English notes or gold, and that he would meet Oberstein in the smoking room of the Charing Cross Hotel at noon on Saturday. Holmes said that he would be very surprised if this bait failed. 　　It did not fail. Oberstein came to complete the greatest bargain of his life, and there he was arrested. In his trunk the police found the valuable Bruce-Partington plans, which he had already tried to offer in the naval centres of Europe. So the missing three papers were recovered at last, and the danger to the country was ended before the secret could do its worst harm. 　　Colonel Walter was sentenced and later died in prison during the second year of his punishment. Holmes, his work done, returned calmly to his learned study of old music. Some weeks later he came back from Windsor with a splendid emerald tie-pin, which he said had been given to him by a gracious lady for an earlier service. He would say no more, but I thought I could guess well enough from whom the gift had come. 　　So ended the case of the Bruce-Partington plans. It began with a dead young man on the railway and the shadow of treason over his name. It ended with his honour saved, the real traitor exposed, and a foreign spy shut safely behind British bars. Holmes himself seemed most pleased not by reward or praise, but by the simple fact that the game had been worth playing. The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot Part 1 　　In the spring of 1897, Holmes’s health had begun to fail under the strain of constant work. A doctor in London ordered him to stop taking cases and to rest completely if he wished to avoid a total breakdown. Holmes himself cared very little about his own condition, but at last he agreed to leave London for a time. So we went together to a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, at the far end of Cornwall. 　　It was a wild and lonely place, well suited to Holmes’s dark and thoughtful mind. From our little white house on the headland we could see the dangerous curve of Mounts Bay, with its black cliffs and reefs where many ships had come to grief. Inland there were empty moors, old stone remains, and small villages that seemed to belong to another age. Holmes spent much of his time walking alone and thinking, and for a while our life there was quiet and healthy. 　　That peace ended suddenly one Tuesday morning after breakfast. We were smoking quietly before going out upon the moor when the local vicar, Mr. Roundhay, rushed into our sitting room. With him came his lodger, Mr. Mortimer Tregennis, a thin, dark man with glasses, a stoop, and a sad, closed face. The vicar was deeply shaken, and even Tregennis, though more controlled, showed fear in his twitching hands and bright eyes. 　　Holmes told them to sit and speak in order. The vicar explained first that Tregennis had spent the previous evening with his two brothers, Owen and George, and with their sister Brenda, at their house called Tredannick Wartha. He had left them a little after ten o’clock, sitting at the table, playing cards, and all in good spirits. Early the next morning he had gone out for a walk and met Dr. Richards, who had been called in haste to that same house. 　　Tregennis had gone back with the doctor and found a scene of horror. His brothers and sister were still seated where he had left them. The cards still lay on the table, and the candles had burned down to the ends. Brenda was dead in her chair, while the two brothers were alive but had gone mad, laughing, shouting, and singing with empty minds and faces twisted by fear. 　　Nothing in the room seemed stolen or disturbed. The old housekeeper, Mrs. Porter, said that she had slept heavily and heard no sound in the night. There was no sign that any stranger had entered the house. Holmes said very little while he listened, but I knew at once from his eyes that our rest in Cornwall was over. 　　We set out at once for Tredannick Wartha. The house stood on the moor near the old stone cross, lonely and open to the grey Cornish air. Inside, the doctor and others had already done what they could. The two brothers had been taken away to an asylum carriage by force, while Brenda still lay upstairs where we could see her. 　　We first went to the dead woman’s room. Brenda Tregennis had been a handsome woman, though no longer young, and even in death one could see the strength of her face. Yet what remained strongest was not beauty, but terror. The fear that had killed her still showed in her features, and it was dreadful to look at. 　　From there we went down into the sitting room where the tragedy had happened. The burned ashes of the fire still lay in the grate. On the table were four candles, all burned low, and the cards still lay scattered where the game had stopped. Holmes moved through the room with quick, light steps, pulling chairs into place and trying to rebuild the scene exactly as it had been in the night. 　　He examined the fireplace, the floor, the ceiling, and the view toward the garden. He sat in different chairs to test what each person could have seen. At one point he asked why there had been a fire in so small a room on a spring evening. Tregennis answered that the night had been cold and damp, so the fire had been lit after he arrived. 　　Still Holmes found nothing that satisfied him. I watched his face closely, but I never saw that sudden brightness which meant he had found a clue. At last he said that there was nothing more to learn there for the present, and that we should return to our cottage. He promised to think the matter over and to send word if any new idea came to him. 　　He did not speak again until we had been back at Poldhu Cottage for a long time. He sat curled in his chair, almost hidden in blue tobacco smoke, with his brows drawn low and his eyes fixed on nothing. Then suddenly he stood up and said that we had too little material, and that forcing the mind to race ahead without facts would only break it. He suggested that we go out along the cliffs and walk while he put in order the very little that we truly knew. 　　As we walked by the sea, Holmes began his first careful reckoning. He said that we must put aside any foolish idea of the supernatural. Three people had clearly been struck down by some human agency, and the effect had come almost at once after Mortimer Tregennis left the room, since the cards still lay on the table and the chairs had not yet been pushed back for the night. That, Holmes said, was firm ground. Everything else was still dark, and for the moment the Cornish horror remained one of the strangest problems he had ever faced. Part 2 　　Before the case turned in its darker direction, one other person entered it in a marked way. This was Dr. Leon Sterndale, the famous African explorer, a huge, hard, deeply lined man with fierce eyes and the rough look of long life in wild places. He was known in the district, lived alone in a lonely bungalow, and was said to be connected through his mother’s side with the Tregennis family. He came to see Holmes and spoke with unusual eagerness, saying that he had already reached Plymouth on his way back to Africa when a telegram from Mr. Roundhay recalled him at once. Holmes answered him cautiously and would not yet say where his suspicions lay. 　　Sterndale left in some anger when he found that Holmes would not speak more freely, and Holmes himself went out soon after him. I did not see my friend again until evening, when he returned looking worn and dissatisfied. Yet the true change in the case came the next morning before breakfast, when Mr. Roundhay rushed in once more, his face full of fresh alarm. He brought terrible news: Mortimer Tregennis had died in the night, and the symptoms were exactly the same as those which had struck his brothers and sister. Holmes sprang up at once and ordered that we go with the vicar before anything in the room could be disturbed. 　　Mortimer lived in two rooms at the vicarage, one above the other, looking out over the lawn. By good fortune we arrived before either doctor or police, so the scene was untouched. The room had a horrible, heavy, poisoned feel, even though the servant had already opened the window. A lamp still stood smoking upon the table, and beside it sat Mortimer Tregennis, dead in his chair. 　　He was fully dressed, though it was clear that he had dressed in a hurry after leaving his bed. His thin dark face was twisted into the same dreadful terror that I had seen on his dead sister’s features. His beard pointed forward, his spectacles had been pushed up on his forehead, and his hands and limbs were drawn into a final convulsion of fear. Whatever had killed him had not struck like a knife or bullet, but like some horror seen and felt in the very air around him. 　　The moment Holmes entered that room, all signs of weariness fell away from him. He became all energy, moving with such speed and purpose that I could hardly follow him with my eyes. He was out on the lawn, back through the window, round the room, and up the stairs into the bedroom in a rush. There he examined everything quickly, and when he opened the bedroom window he gave small cries of excitement, as if some expected sign had at last appeared. 　　He then came down again and threw himself flat upon the grass outside, studying the ground beneath the windows. After that he returned to the sitting room and examined the lamp with the greatest care, even measuring its bowl. He also looked closely at the shield above the chimney, scraped away a little ash that clung there, and sealed it up in an envelope. By the time the doctor and police arrived, Holmes had already finished the most important part of his work. 　　Holmes would not stay to discuss the matter with the police. Instead, he asked the vicar to tell the inspector to look very carefully at two things: the bedroom window and the lamp in the sitting room. Taken together, he said, they were almost enough to prove the direction in which the truth lay. Then he led me quietly away, and for the next two days no message came from the official investigators. Either they disliked outside help or they believed they had a theory of their own. 　　During those two days Holmes worked in silence. He spent some hours dreaming and smoking in our cottage, but even more time walking alone across the country. One clear sign showed me what he was thinking about. He obtained a lamp exactly like the one in Mortimer Tregennis’s room, filled it with the same oil, and timed how long it would burn. It was plain that the lamp, and the air in the room, had become central in his mind. 　　At last he explained part of his reasoning to me. In both cases, he said, the people who first entered the room had been struck by the same thing before they even understood what they were seeing: the air itself. Dr. Richards had almost dropped into a chair when he entered the Tregennis house after the first tragedy. Mrs. Porter had fainted there and later opened the window. In Mortimer’s room, the servant who entered first had grown so ill from the atmosphere that she had taken to her bed. 　　Holmes said that these facts all pointed to a poisonous condition of the room. In each case something had been burning: in the first house, a fire; in the second room, a lamp. The fire had been natural, but the lamp, Holmes noted, had burned on well into daylight, which meant it had been lit for some special purpose. From this he formed a working theory: some substance had been burned, and its fumes had driven people mad or killed them outright. 　　The difference between the two attacks also helped him. In the first case, where the substance had been thrown upon a fire, some of the poison would have escaped up the chimney, so the effect had been less complete. Brenda had died, but the two brothers had only gone mad. In the second case, with the fumes held more closely in a shut room and fed by the lamp, the result had been final. Holmes did not yet know the exact substance, but he was now sure that the deaths had not come from fright alone. 　　Then he turned at last to Mortimer himself. There had been, Holmes reminded me, an old quarrel within the family, followed later by a supposed peace. Mortimer had also been the one who suggested, on the earlier morning, that someone might have moved in the garden, a remark which had drawn attention away from the real cause in the room. And since the first disaster had happened immediately after Mortimer left the card table, Holmes saw no one else who could have placed the poisonous substance on the fire. I said that this seemed to make Mortimer guilty, and therefore his own death might be suicide. Holmes answered that this was possible, but not enough. There were strong reasons against it, he said, and only one man in England could tell the whole truth. He had already arranged for that man to come to us that very afternoon. Part 3 　　Holmes now told me why he had taken part of the brown powder from Mortimer Tregennis’s lamp. He had left the rest behind for the police, but he meant to test the substance for himself. He set a second lamp in our cottage, opened the window, left the door partly open, and placed our chairs so that we sat at equal distance from the flame and could watch each other. Then he shook the powder from the envelope onto the hot lamp and told me that we had only to wait. 　　The result came almost at once. Even years later, Watson says, it was an experiment he could never forget. Holmes later referred to it by saying that we had nearly added one more chapter to the Cornish horror, and that our little room was hardly fit for visitors after what we had done there. Whatever rose from that powder was not common smoke, but something far more dreadful, something that struck the mind as well as the body. 　　We escaped, but only narrowly. That was enough for Holmes. He now knew that the thing he had imagined was real: some burned substance could poison the air of a closed room so quickly that madness or death might follow before help arrived. The experiment proved, at terrible personal risk, that the two scenes in the Tregennis case had not been tricks of fear or imagination. The danger had been chemical, though of a most unusual kind. 　　From there Holmes moved back over the facts in their new order. Mortimer Tregennis had almost certainly caused the first attack at the family card table, because the effect followed his departure at once, no outsider had entered, and his false remark about someone moving in the garden had drawn attention away from the true cause. Yet Holmes still refused to accept that Mortimer had later killed himself. He said that there were strong reasons against that idea and that one man in England knew the whole truth. 　　Holmes had already written to that man, and before long we heard the garden gate click. Dr. Leon Sterndale came up the path to our cottage and turned toward the little arbour where we were sitting in the open air. He said he had received Holmes’s note about an hour earlier and had come, though he did not understand why he should obey such a summons. Holmes thanked him for coming and explained that, after our recent chemical experiment, he preferred to speak where the air was clear and where no one could overhear us. 　　Sterndale stared at him with a hard, suspicious face and asked what private matter Holmes could have to discuss with him. Holmes answered in the calmest voice that the subject was the killing of Mortimer Tregennis. At those words the great explorer changed completely. His dark face flushed, his eyes blazed, and for a moment he sprang forward like a man ready to strike. Then, with a violent effort, he forced himself back under control. 　　He warned Holmes that he had lived long in wild countries and had become used to acting as a law to himself. Holmes replied that he had no wish to injure him and that the proof of this was plain enough: knowing what he knew, he had sent for Sterndale and not for the police. That answer struck home. Sterndale sat down heavily, shaken for perhaps the first time in many years, and demanded to know what Holmes really meant. 　　Holmes said that his next step would depend entirely on Sterndale’s own honesty. Then he stated the charge clearly. Sterndale, he said, had killed Mortimer Tregennis. Sterndale tried first to laugh it off as bluff, but Holmes answered him sharply and said that the bluff was not on his side. He then began to lay out the path by which he had reached the truth. 　　First, Holmes said, he had tested Sterndale’s own story and found it true in form, though not in meaning. The explorer had indeed turned back after reaching Plymouth, and some of his baggage really had gone on toward Africa. That proved not innocence, but strong feeling. A man does not abandon such a journey and hurry back to Cornwall unless something there has great power over him. Holmes had seen that thread early, and after Mortimer’s death it became impossible to ignore. 　　Then Holmes brought the reasoning closer. Mortimer had the clearest motive in the first crime, but Sterndale had the strongest motive in the second. He had returned the instant the family tragedy became known. He had questioned Holmes with unusual eagerness. And when Holmes named Mortimer’s death, Sterndale’s whole body had answered before his tongue could form a lie. Holmes had not yet spoken the final explanation, but the line from the poisoned rooms to the African explorer was now direct and unmistakable. 　　For a few moments Sterndale sat motionless, breathing hard, his great hands opening and closing upon his knees. The calm of the Cornish afternoon made the scene even more tense. Holmes watched him without moving and waited, not like a policeman pressing a prisoner, but like a judge who already knows enough and wants only the last truth from the man himself. It was clear to me that the case had reached its turning point. What remained was not discovery, but confession. Part 4 　　Holmes now carried his accusation to the point where denial became useless. He said that after Sterndale had thrown gravel at Mortimer Tregennis’s window, Mortimer had come down and admitted him into the sitting room. There had been a short meeting there. Then Sterndale had gone back outside, closed the window, and waited on the lawn while the end came. Sterndale sprang up in shock and cried that Holmes must be the devil himself to know so much. 　　Holmes answered him very calmly and said that now was the moment for full truth. For some time Sterndale sat with his face in his hands. Then, with a sudden motion, he pulled a photograph from inside his coat and threw it onto the table between us. Holmes bent over it and at once spoke the name. It was Brenda Tregennis. 　　Sterndale then opened his heart. For years, he said, he had loved Brenda, and for years she had loved him. That was the secret behind his lonely life in Cornwall and his repeated returns from Africa. He could not marry her because he already had a wife from whom he had long been separated, yet whom English law did not allow him to divorce. So both of them had waited, hoping without hope and living close to the thing they could not possess. 　　He went on to say that he had remained on civil terms with the Tregennis brothers only for Brenda’s sake. Mortimer, however, was a sly and dangerous man, and Sterndale had never fully trusted him. A short time earlier Mortimer had visited Sterndale’s cottage, where Sterndale had shown him a number of African objects and curiosities. Among them was a powder taken from the root of a rare plant, known in those regions as the devil’s-foot root. Sterndale had even explained its strange power: when burned, it attacked the centres of the brain connected with fear, and the victim was driven either mad or dead. 　　Sterndale told us that he had spoken too freely. Mortimer had asked many questions about how much of the powder was needed and how fast it worked. At the time, Sterndale had thought little of it. But later he became certain that, while he was bending to open boxes and cabinets, Mortimer had managed to steal some of the powder without being seen. European science, Sterndale said, would be almost powerless to identify such a poison, and this too Mortimer had learned from him. 　　When the telegram from the vicar reached him at Plymouth, Sterndale understood almost at once what had happened. He came back because no other explanation seemed possible to him. Mortimer, he believed, had used the stolen powder upon his own family, hoping perhaps that if the others were dead or mad he would control the family property himself. In doing so he had killed Brenda, the one woman Sterndale had ever truly loved. Sterndale asked what law could possibly satisfy such a crime, and then answered his own question: none. 　　He said that he had thought of going to the police, but he had no proof that any ordinary jury would believe. The story was too strange, too unlike common crime. He feared that Mortimer might escape through disbelief, and that was more than he could bear. He had lived long, he reminded Holmes, in places where a man often becomes his own judge, and at last he had chosen to do just that. 　　So, after a sleepless night, he had gone to the vicarage at dawn exactly as Holmes described. He used gravel to rouse Mortimer, entered through the sitting-room window, and faced him as both judge and executioner. Mortimer, he said, was terrified the moment he saw the revolver. Sterndale lit the lamp, placed the devil’s-foot powder above it, and then stood outside the window, ready to shoot if the man tried to escape. Within five minutes Mortimer was dead. Sterndale ended by saying that Mortimer had suffered no more than Brenda had suffered before him. 　　When the confession ended, silence fell over the little arbour. Holmes did not speak at once. At last he asked only one practical question: what had Sterndale meant to do afterward? The explorer answered that he had planned to return to central Africa and bury himself once more in his unfinished work there. Holmes considered this for a moment and then gave his decision. He told Sterndale to go and finish that work, because he, at least, would not stand in his way. 　　Sterndale rose slowly to his full great height, bowed gravely, and walked away from us without another word. Holmes filled his pipe and handed me the pouch. He said that after the poisonous fumes we had lately faced, a cleaner smoke would be welcome. Then he asked me directly whether I thought we ought to interfere. Our inquiry, he said, had been private, and our action could remain private as well. I answered without hesitation that I certainly would not denounce the man. 　　So ended the Cornish horror. Holmes had found the truth, but not the sort of truth that sits easily in a courtroom. Mortimer Tregennis had killed for greed and had died in the same fear he had used against others. Sterndale had killed in revenge, yet not in cold greed or profit. Holmes, who could be very hard when he wished, judged that this was one of those rare cases in which the full law and full justice did not lie on the same side. The Adventure of the Red Circle Part 1 　　One day, not long after the Cornish case, a landlady named Mrs. Warren came to Baker Street in great distress. Holmes was busy with one of his large scrapbooks and at first showed little interest. He said that he could not see why he should spend his valuable time on the strange habits of a lodger. But Mrs. Warren stood her ground. She reminded him that he had once helped another lodger of hers, and she begged him now to do the same for her. Holmes, who was never proof against flattery when it came with real trouble behind it, at last pushed back his chair and told her to speak plainly. 　　She said that the matter frightened her more each day. Her new lodger had taken rooms in her house and then shut himself away so completely that she had never once seen him clearly afterward. She heard him walking quickly about his room from early morning until late at night, yet no face ever appeared. Her husband was nervous too, but he was out at work most of the day. She herself had to remain in the house, almost alone with this invisible man, and her nerves were near breaking. 　　Holmes leaned forward and laid his fingers gently upon her shoulder in the quiet way he had when he wished to calm someone. Then he began to question her with great care. He asked first about the lodger’s arrival. She answered that he had come as an ordinary gentleman, speaking good English and paying well. More than that, he had paid extra money on one special condition: he wanted complete privacy. No one was to disturb him. His meals were to be left outside the door on a chair, and when he had finished, the tray would be set outside again. 　　He had gone out once, she said, almost immediately after taking the rooms, but after that he shut himself in and was seen no more. Whenever he wanted anything, he did not speak through the door. Instead, he printed a single word on a slip of paper and left it outside. In this way he asked for things like soap, matches, and a newspaper. Mrs. Warren produced some of these slips for Holmes to examine, and also said that the room itself had not been entered or cleaned since the lodger shut himself inside. 　　Holmes listened closely, but he did not at first treat the matter as criminal. He said that a man who paid his rent and caused no open trouble had some right to his privacy. Still, he admitted that there were points of interest. After Mrs. Warren had gone, he told me at once what first struck him. In his opinion, the person now hiding in the room might not be the same person who had originally taken it. 　　When I asked why he thought so, Holmes answered with his usual exactness. The man who engaged the rooms had spoken English well. Yet the person now inside printed only a few bare words, and even these showed signs of weakness in the language. One request used the singular form “match” when “matches” was wanted. Holmes said that such a mistake suggested someone using a dictionary and taking the first form of the word. He also pointed out that the only time the lodger had gone out was at the very beginning, and that whoever returned did so when witnesses were least likely to notice. That, to Holmes, made substitution a serious possibility. 　　We then went ourselves to Mrs. Warren’s house and examined what we could without forcing the matter too far. Holmes looked carefully at the writing on the slips, the tray arrangements, and the general position of the rooms. He also picked up a cigarette-end, which interested him more than it did me. He did not explain much on the spot, but I could see from his face that the case had begun to move in his mind. It was no longer only a story about a nervous landlady. Something hidden lay behind it. 　　Back in Baker Street Holmes sat thinking for a short time and then took down the large volume in which he kept strange notices from the newspapers. He said that if a person was shut away in a room and could not safely receive letters or visitors, then news from outside must reach him by some secret but public means. The most natural method, Holmes said, was the advertisement column of a newspaper. There seemed no other easy way. 　　He turned over the pages one by one with great speed, making dry comments as he passed foolish and sentimental messages. At last he found something that pleased him. Two days after Mrs. Warren’s lodger had taken the rooms, there appeared a short notice that read in effect: be patient, a sure means of communication would be found, and until then this column must serve. Holmes said that this sounded highly promising. The hidden person might understand English well enough to read it even if he could not write it properly. 　　Holmes kept turning the pages and soon found another message of the same kind, printed a few days later. It said that arrangements were going well, that patience and care were needed, and that the trouble would soon pass. To Holmes these were not random scraps from the agony columns at all. They were a line of private communication, cautious and brief, sent to someone who dared not show himself and could not safely be approached in the ordinary way. 　　He then leaned back and joined the facts together. We had a hidden lodger who might not be the same man who first took the room. We had broken English printed on scraps of paper. We had a strong wish for secrecy, paid for with extra money. And now we had short public messages that seemed meant for exactly such a prisoner or fugitive. Holmes said that the matter might still prove simple, but it already carried the shape of a real problem. For the first time, I felt that our strange lodger was not merely hiding from curiosity. He was hiding from danger. Part 2 　　The case soon took a darker turn. Mrs. Warren came back to us with fresh fear, for her husband had been attacked in the street by two rough-looking men. They had forced him into a cab, clearly believing him to be someone else, and only let him go when they discovered their mistake. Holmes said this proved that our hidden lodger was not dealing with harmless eccentricity. There were dangerous people in the matter now, and they were watching the house. 　　Holmes answered at once that he wanted to see the lodger with his own eyes. Mrs. Warren said that this seemed impossible, because the door was always locked and only opened after she had gone downstairs. But then she remembered a small box-room opposite the lodger’s door. By placing a mirror there, she said, we might hide in the dark and still watch the tray being taken in. Holmes praised the idea warmly and arranged to come at half past twelve, when lunch was usually served. 　　When we reached the house, Holmes pointed with satisfaction to a tall red building with stone facings farther down the street. There was a card in one of its windows saying the flat was empty. Holmes said at once that this must be the signal station, the place from which messages were being sent to the lodger. In his view, we now had both halves of the arrangement before us: the hidden person in Mrs. Warren’s house, and the secret friend or watcher across the way. 　　Our hiding place was very well prepared. Mrs. Warren brought the tray upstairs, set it down outside the closed door, and then went away with heavy steps. Holmes and I crouched in the dark and watched by means of the mirror. Suddenly the key turned, the door opened a hand’s width, and two thin hands shot out to seize the tray. 　　In that instant I saw what Holmes had expected. The face at the opening was not the face of a man at all, but that of a dark, beautiful woman, full of fear and astonishment as she looked toward our hiding place. The door shut at once and the key turned again. When we were back in Baker Street, Holmes said that his guess had been proved. There had indeed been a substitution of lodgers. 　　Holmes then looked again at the newspaper messages and placed them in their proper order. First had come the notice asking for patience and promising that a sure means of communication would be found. Then had followed another message saying that arrangements were going well and that caution was needed. Holmes now saw these clearly for what they were: a thread of secret instructions sent to a frightened woman who dared not show herself and could not safely receive a letter. 　　He also explained again why the printed word slips mattered so much. The man who first hired the room had spoken good English, but the person inside now used only the simplest printed words and even made small mistakes. That, together with the woman’s face we had just seen, made the situation plain enough. A woman had taken the place of the original lodger, and she was hidden there while someone outside tried to protect her. 　　Holmes then reminded me that learning for its own sake was part of his nature, and that a case need not bring money or public praise to interest him. By evening, he said, we ought to be one stage farther on. So we returned to Mrs. Warren’s rooms after dark and sat in the shadowed sitting room, looking out across the street toward the empty flat in the red house. One light glimmered there high above us through the London gloom. 　　Presently Holmes saw a moving shadow and a candle in the window. The figure seemed to be peering across to make sure the woman was watching from her own room. Then the candle began to move in short flashes. Holmes and I counted the signals together as they came. First we made out A, then T, then another T, and slowly the word grew under Holmes’s eye. 　　At last he gave a low laugh of sudden understanding. The message, he said, was not in a difficult code at all. It was Italian. The repeated word was “Attenta”—“Beware.” It was sent three times, with clear urgency, as if the man in the far window wished to make sure the woman could not mistake the warning. 　　Then the light began again, moving faster than before. Holmes followed it with intense concentration and caught the next word: “Pericolo”—“Danger.” He had hardly spoken the translation when the light in the opposite window suddenly vanished. The square of brightness went black at once, as if the message had been cut off in the middle by some force outside the sender’s control. Holmes sprang to his feet and said that there was serious evil at work. 　　We decided that we could not wait any longer. As we hurried down Howe Street, I looked back and saw, high at a window behind us, the fixed shadow of the woman’s head as she waited in desperate silence for the warning to continue. At the door of the red building stood a man wrapped in coat and scarf. When the hall light fell on us, he started, and Holmes cried out in surprise. It was Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard, standing there for reasons very like our own. Part 3 　　Gregson led the way up the stairs of the red house with the firm, quiet courage that never failed him in moments of real danger. The door of the upper flat stood partly open. Inside all was dark and still. When I lit Gregson’s lantern, we saw at once that something terrible had already happened. A fresh line of blood crossed the bare floor and led from an inner room straight toward us. 　　Gregson pushed open the inner door, and there lay the answer. In the middle of the empty room was the body of a huge man. His face was twisted horribly, his throat had been pierced by a deep knife-stroke, and blood had spread in a broad dark circle around his head and shoulders. Even in death he looked fierce and brutal, and the size of him matched the terrible figure seen earlier at Mrs. Warren’s window. Near him lay a great dagger and a black glove. 　　The American detective who had joined Gregson cried out that the dead man was Black Gorgiano himself, the very criminal he had followed from New York. Holmes, however, did not waste time in wonder. He had already picked up the candle from the window and was moving it back and forth across the glass in a deliberate pattern. Then he blew it out and said quietly that this would be useful. A few moments later his plan succeeded. 　　The door opened behind us, and the mysterious lodger from Mrs. Warren’s house entered the room. She was a tall and beautiful Italian woman, white with fear, and for an instant she believed that we had killed the man on the floor. Then she understood. Joy broke over her face so suddenly that it was almost shocking. She danced, clapped her hands, and cried that her husband, Gennaro Lucca, must have struck down the monster with his own hand. 　　Gregson told her that if her husband had killed the man, the police would need her evidence. Holmes then said that the best service she could give Gennaro was to tell us the whole truth. Since Gorgiano was dead, she answered, there was nothing left to fear. So we locked the room as we found it and went with her back to her lodging, where she began her story. 　　Emilia Lucca said that in Italy she had fallen in love with Gennaro, though her father had forbidden the match because the young man had neither money nor rank. They fled, married, sold her jewels, and began a new life in New York. At first fortune seemed kind. Gennaro entered the service of a rich Italian merchant named Castalotte, who trusted him, promoted him, and treated him almost like a son. Emilia believed their troubles were over. Then Gorgiano appeared. 　　Gorgiano, she told us, was not only a huge and violent man, but one with power over others through fear. Gennaro had once, in reckless youth, joined a secret Italian society called the Red Circle, and Gorgiano had been one of its most terrible leaders. The society raised money by threats and violence. Worse still, Gorgiano became obsessed with Emilia herself and one night attacked her in her own home, only fleeing when Gennaro returned and fought him. From that moment, they knew he would never forgive them. 　　Soon after this came the worst order of all. Castalotte had refused to yield to the society’s blackmail and had turned their threats over to the police. At a meeting of the Red Circle, it was decided that his house should be blown up with dynamite as a warning to others. Lots were drawn, and by design or trick the fatal task fell to Gennaro. He was to murder the man who had protected him, or else bring danger upon himself and Emilia from the society. Instead, he warned Castalotte, gave what help he could to the police, and fled with Emilia to London. 　　In London they hid separately for safety. Gennaro first took the room at Mrs. Warren’s house and then secretly placed Emilia there in his stead, because a woman shut away indoors would draw less notice than a hunted man. He himself took rooms in the red house across the street. The newspaper advertisements and the candle signals were the only safe way they could keep in touch. Holmes’s reading of the messages had therefore been exact from the beginning: the hidden woman was waiting for warnings and instructions from the husband who watched over her from the opposite window. 　　At last Gorgiano followed them even to London. Emilia did not know every movement of that final evening, but enough was plain. Gennaro must have seen the danger closing in and sent the warning “Beware” and then “Danger” before the message broke off. He either followed Gorgiano into the red house or met him there, and in the fight that followed he killed the man who had darkened their lives for so long. Gregson had seen three people leave the building while he waited below, and Holmes believed that the last of them, a dark man of middle height, had been Gennaro slipping away after the struggle. 　　So the whole strange business stood clear at last. The invisible lodger, the printed slips, the newspaper notices, the light-signals across the street, the attack on Mr. Warren, and the dead giant on the floor all belonged to one chain of fear and pursuit. With Gorgiano dead, the power of the Red Circle over the Luccas was broken. The matter that remained belonged to Gregson and the law, but for Holmes the real puzzle was solved. What had seemed at first a small oddity in Bloomsbury had opened, as such things often did with him, into a story of secret violence stretching from Italy to New York and ending at last in a dark room in London. The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax Part 1 　　Holmes began this case in a way that was very like him. He first spoke in general terms about the dangers that surround a woman who lives alone and moves from place to place. Such a woman, he said, is often lost among hotels and boarding houses and is easily swallowed up without notice if evil men set their eyes upon her. Then he came down from the general to the particular and named the person in question. It was Lady Frances Carfax. 　　She was, Holmes explained, the last direct survivor of the family of the late Earl of Rufton. Though not poor, she had only limited means, and she lived a wandering life from one hotel to another. She also carried with her some very fine old Spanish jewellery of silver and strangely cut diamonds, which she valued too much to leave in a bank. Holmes said that this habit alone made her a tempting target. 　　The immediate cause for alarm was simple and serious. For four years Lady Frances had written every second week to Miss Dobney, her old governess, who now lived quietly in Camberwell. Nearly five weeks had passed without a word. Her last letter had come from the Hôtel National at Lausanne, and after leaving there she had given no address at all. The family had become deeply anxious and had asked Holmes to find out what had happened. 　　Holmes said that one source of information in such matters is almost always reliable: the bank. A single lady’s pass-book, he remarked, is often a compressed diary. He had already examined Lady Frances’s account and found that her bill at Lausanne had been paid in the normal way. Since then only one cheque had been drawn. It was for fifty pounds, made out to Miss Marie Devine, her maid, and cashed at the Crédit Lyonnais in Montpellier less than three weeks earlier. 　　Marie Devine, Holmes added, was the very woman whom I must now trace. Since he himself could not leave London, he gave the task to me and sent me off on what he called a health-giving journey to Lausanne. Holmes promised, with his usual dry humour, that if his advice should ever be worth so high a price as twopence a word, I might have it any hour by telegram. Two days later I found myself at the Hôtel National, determined to show that I too could conduct an inquiry in a proper and orderly way. 　　At Lausanne I was received most politely by M. Moser, the manager. He told me that Lady Frances had stayed there for some weeks and had been much liked by everyone who met her. She was, he said, still handsome, though past her youth, and her maid Marie had been just as popular as her mistress. The heavy trunk in Lady Frances’s room had always been kept carefully locked, though M. Moser could say nothing certain about jewels. More useful still, he was able to give me Marie’s address in Montpellier, for the girl had been engaged to one of the hotel waiters and had not hidden where she was going. 　　Yet one part of the matter remained in shadow. Lady Frances had seemed quite content at Lausanne and had all but settled there for the season. Then, with only a day’s notice, she had left, though the sudden move cost her a week’s useless rent. Why had she fled so quickly? On this point only one man could help me further, and that was Jules Vibart, the waiter who loved Marie. 　　From Vibart I learned the thing that first gave shape to the mystery. During Lady Frances’s stay at Lausanne there had appeared a missionary clergyman, Dr. Shlessinger, with his wife. He was said to be recovering from an illness caught in South America, and Lady Frances had been much moved by his piety, his weakness, and the work he claimed to be doing on the Holy Land. She had even helped Mrs. Shlessinger nurse him while he lay upon a veranda chair with the two ladies beside him. When he grew stronger, the clergyman and his wife returned to London, and Lady Frances left in their company. 　　There was one more detail, and it seemed more alarming still. M. Moser told me that I was not the only person making inquiries about Lady Frances. A week or so before my arrival, another Englishman had come seeking her trace. He was described as a large, sunburned, bearded fellow of rough and dangerous appearance, more like a man from the wild country than a guest of a fine hotel. At once I built the obvious theory. Lady Frances, I thought, had been pursued from place to place by a violent man, had fled from him at Lausanne, and had sought the protection of the good missionary and his wife. 　　Full of this idea, I wrote to Holmes and reported how swiftly I had got to the roots of the affair. In reply I received one of his curious telegrams asking for a description of Dr. Shlessinger’s left ear. I confess that I thought it an ill-timed joke and paid no attention to it. By then I had already continued the chase to Montpellier in order to find Marie Devine herself. 　　I had no difficulty in discovering the girl, and she gave me her story with every sign of honesty and feeling. She said that she had only left her mistress because she believed Lady Frances to be in safe hands and because her own marriage would soon have separated them in any case. Lady Frances had, it is true, shown some impatience with her in Baden and had even once spoken as if she suspected her honesty. This had made the parting easier than it might have been. Still, Marie remained deeply devoted to her mistress, and the fifty pounds had been a wedding present, not hush money or blackmail. 　　More important was what Marie thought of the great bearded Englishman. She distrusted him completely. With her own eyes she had seen him seize Lady Frances’s wrist violently on the public walk by the lake. He was, she said, a fierce and terrible man. She believed that it was largely from fear of this pursuer that Lady Frances had accepted the escort of the Shlessingers to London. Lady Frances had not said so openly, but many small signs had shown the maid that her mistress lived in a state of continual nervous apprehension. 　　Marie had reached this point in her narrative when she suddenly sprang from her chair and cried out in fear. Through the open window I saw a huge dark man with a black beard walking slowly along the street and staring hard at the house numbers. It was plain that he too had followed Marie here. Acting on impulse, I rushed out and stopped him at once. 　　I asked whether he was an Englishman and then demanded his name. He answered me in the roughest way and refused to explain himself. So I came directly to the point and asked where Lady Frances Carfax was and why he had pursued her. At this the fellow gave a furious cry and sprang at me like a wild beast. 　　We fought there in the street until the police and passers-by pulled us apart. Then the strange man, breathing hard and glaring murderously at me, suddenly changed his tone when he learned that I too was looking for Lady Frances. He was not, as I had thought, a blackmailer or kidnapper, but a man named Philip Green, who had loved Lady Frances for years and was seeking her with savage anxiety rather than evil intent. His manner was violent enough, but beneath it was a desperate concern which I could not mistake. That new fact altered the whole shape of the case. The missionary pair no longer seemed certain protectors, and the rough pursuer no longer seemed certain villain. The road now led back to Holmes, and I knew that the next stage must be taken in Baker Street. Part 2 　　The violent scene in Montpellier might have ended very badly for me if help had not come in time. My rescuer appeared to be a rough French workman from a little place across the street, but the moment the struggle was over he turned to me and spoke in a voice I knew at once. It was Holmes. He had come after me in disguise, guessed the next natural stage of my search, and had been watching events from the opposite side of the road. 　　When we were alone, he gave me a sharp but fair rebuke. He said that I had managed to warn every possible villain without learning enough in return. Then, to my surprise, he showed me that he had done much more than I had. He had already seen Philip Green and had learned that the man was not a simple criminal pursuer at all, but someone with a long and painful history with Lady Frances. 　　Green himself soon told the rest. He had once hoped to marry Lady Frances, but his own wild and violent life had lost him her trust. Years later, after making money in South Africa, he had tried to find her again and win back some part of her good opinion. She had softened a little, he believed, but her will remained strong, and she had left Lausanne before he could repair the past. He had followed not to injure her, but because he feared danger around her. 　　Holmes listened to him with grave attention and then gave him clear instructions. Green was to return to the Langham Hotel and stay ready in case he was needed. Holmes did not offer him comfort, but he did promise that everything possible would be done for Lady Frances. I could see that Holmes no longer regarded the bearded man as the main threat. His mind had now fixed itself firmly on the false missionary and his wife. 　　When we reached Baker Street, a telegram was waiting. Holmes read it with sudden interest and then handed it to me. It contained only two words: “Jagged or torn,” sent from Baden. I stared at it without understanding, but Holmes reminded me of his earlier question about Dr. Shlessinger’s left ear. Since I had failed to answer, he had sent the same question to the manager in Baden, and this brief reply had confirmed all his suspicions. 　　Holmes then told me the truth about our pious invalid. Dr. Shlessinger, he said, was really a notorious criminal called Holy Peters, one of the most dangerous rogues Australia had produced. His special method was to trap lonely women by appealing to their religious feelings, and the woman who passed as Mrs. Shlessinger, an Englishwoman named Fraser, was his able partner in the work. The bite-mark on his ear had helped prove the identity. 　　Holmes spoke very plainly now. He said that Lady Frances was in the hands of an infernal couple who would stop at nothing. She might already be dead. If not, she was almost certainly being held somewhere against her will and prevented from sending any message to Miss Dobney or to anyone else. Since London was the easiest place in which to hide such a prisoner, Holmes believed she had never truly vanished at all. She had simply disappeared into the city. 　　Holmes had already been working on the trail while I was abroad. He had discovered that Lady Frances had certainly reached London, and he had followed the line of the jewels as far as possible. At last the path led us that same evening to a great dark house in Poultney Square. A tall woman opened the door, and when Holmes asked for Dr. Shlessinger, she first denied that any such man lived there. But Holmes forced the matter, and in another moment the master of the house came in to face us. 　　He was now clean-shaven and bald, with a large red face and a soft, oily manner which sat badly upon his cruel mouth. Holmes named him directly as Henry Peters, formerly the so-called Dr. Shlessinger, and Peters saw at once that disguise was useless. Still, he showed no fear. He coolly claimed that Lady Frances had attached herself to him and his wife at Baden, that he had paid her expenses to London, and that she had then vanished, leaving only a pair of old pendants to cover her debt. Holmes answered that he meant to search the house until he found her. 　　Peters demanded a warrant. Holmes half drew his revolver and said that it would have to serve until a better one came. Then, before the man could stop us, we pushed past him into the hall. Holmes asked at once where the coffin was that had been brought into the house, and Peters tried to block us. But we were too quick for him. We entered the dining room and found the coffin lying on the table under the gaslight. 　　Holmes raised the lid, and for one instant I thought the whole case was solved. But the body inside was not Lady Frances. It was the body of a very old and wasted woman, so aged that no cruelty or illness could have changed Lady Frances into such a shape. Holmes showed both surprise and relief, and Peters at once began to mock him. 　　Peters then gave a full and apparently lawful explanation. The dead woman, he said, was Rose Spender, an old nurse of his wife’s whom they had taken from the Brixton Workhouse Infirmary. They had brought her home, called in Dr. Horsom, nursed her carefully, and after her death arranged for Stimson and Co. of the Kennington Road to bury her at eight o’clock the following morning. Peters enjoyed Holmes’s mistake and laughed openly at what he called a foolish blunder. 　　Before Holmes could search farther, a sergeant and constable arrived, called in by Peters’s wife. Since we had no warrant, we had to leave. Once outside, however, Holmes did not waste a minute in self-pity. We rushed first to the infirmary, where Peters’s story proved true so far as the old woman was concerned. Then we went to Dr. Horsom, who confirmed that he had seen the woman die and had signed the certificate in proper form. Yet he added one small remark that stayed in Holmes’s mind: for people of that class, it was strange that they kept no servant. 　　By the time we returned, Holmes was outwardly calm, but I knew him well enough to see that he was deeply disturbed. Somewhere, he said, he had dismissed too lightly a strange sentence or a curious fact. The night would not let him rest. We had found a dead old woman, a coffin, a fixed funeral hour, and a criminal pair who lied too smoothly. Holmes felt that the true danger had not passed at all, but had only changed its form. The next morning, before that funeral could leave the house, we would have to act with all speed. Part 3 　　Holmes passed a sleepless night, turning the whole affair over again and again in his mind. By his own account, he felt that some small clue had been seen and then wrongly pushed aside. At last the thing came back to him with full force: Dr. Horsom had said that Peters and his wife kept no servant. Holmes saw at once what that meant. A helpless old dying woman had been lying in that house, and yet there had been no servant to nurse her. Therefore some other woman must have been there to do that work, and that woman could only have been Lady Frances herself. 　　Once Holmes had recovered that clue, the rest followed with terrible speed. If Lady Frances had been in the house, then Peters had lied when he claimed she had gone away. If she had not been brought openly to a doctor, then she could not have died in an ordinary way. Holmes reasoned that the criminals must have meant to remove her under cover of the perfectly lawful funeral already arranged for the dead old woman. In some manner they had made the doctor’s certificate serve one death while hiding another crime beneath it. 　　Early in the morning Holmes dragged me from bed, and within a short time we were racing through London in a cab. He was in one of those moods of cold excitement when his mind runs far ahead of his words. He said only that every minute mattered now and that delay might mean the difference between life and death. He had already sent for Lestrade and a warrant, but he did not mean to wait for the law to move at its usual pace. We were going straight to Poultney Square to stop the funeral itself. 　　Even so, we were nearly too late. The hearse was already standing outside when our cab drew up at the house, and at that very moment three men were carrying out the coffin. Holmes sprang forward and barred their path with a force that stopped them in their tracks. Peters, red-faced and furious, demanded once again to see a warrant, but Holmes answered that the warrant was coming and that the coffin would not leave the house before it arrived. The bearers hesitated only a second, and the command in Holmes’s voice was enough. They turned back and carried the coffin inside again. 　　Holmes shouted for speed. A screwdriver was found, and he thrust it into my hand while promising money to any man who helped quickly. The screws came out one after another under our hands, and then together we tore off the lid. The instant it opened, a thick, sickening smell of chloroform burst into the room and nearly drove us back. Inside lay a woman’s body, the head wrapped round with cotton soaked in the drug. Holmes snatched away the padding and revealed the face beneath. It was Lady Frances Carfax. 　　Holmes caught her in his arms and raised her into a sitting position while I examined her with all the skill I had. For some dreadful minutes I believed we had failed. She had been half suffocated by the close air of the coffin and overcome by the chloroform fumes. Yet we did not stop. We used artificial respiration, ether, and every means medical science could then offer. At last there came the first faint signs of returning life: a quiver of the eyelids, the dimmest breath upon a glass, a small movement where before there had been none. 　　While we worked, another cab arrived outside. Holmes looked through the blind and saw that Lestrade had finally come with the warrant, but he added grimly that the birds had already flown. Peters and his wife had taken advantage of the confusion and escaped before the law could put a hand upon them. Almost at once another heavy step sounded in the passage. It was Philip Green, who had been summoned at the right moment and who now had a far better claim than either Holmes or I to remain beside Lady Frances and care for her. 　　Holmes then spoke one of those dry sentences that carried both relief and irony together. The funeral, he said, might now proceed after all, for the poor old woman still lying in the coffin could go at last to her true burial. In that way the final horror of the case stood plain. The coffin had held not one body but two: the dead nurse below, and Lady Frances laid above her, drugged and hidden so that she might be carried out as a corpse and buried alive without noise or suspicion. The legal funeral had been the very cover of the intended murder. 　　That evening Holmes reviewed the whole case with unusual frankness. He said that if I chose to record it, I should present it as an example of the temporary eclipse that may fall even upon a balanced mind. He did not pretend that he had moved through the affair without error. On the contrary, he said that greatness lies not in never slipping, but in seeing the slip and repairing it before all is lost. In this case he had very nearly failed to do so in time. 　　I did not argue with him, but I thought his self-criticism harsher than justice required. He had found the truth where the police saw nothing, had corrected his own mistake in a single night, and had reached the house just in time to save a woman from one of the most dreadful deaths imaginable. Still, Holmes cared little for praise, even when it was deserved. For him the important thing was that Lady Frances lived, that Peters’s smooth lie had been broken, and that a clue once missed had at last been understood. So ended the disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, not with an elegant deduction in Baker Street, but with splintering wood, chloroform in the air, and life dragged back by force from the edge of the grave. The Adventure of the Dying Detective Part 1 　　Mrs. Hudson had endured more from Sherlock Holmes than most landladies would have endured from any man alive. Strange visitors came at all hours. Chemical smells drifted through the house. Music sounded when decent people were trying to sleep. At times there was pistol practice indoors, and always there hung round him an air of danger and disturbance. Yet she was loyal to him, feared him a little, and cared for him a great deal, so when she came to me in the second year of my married life I knew at once that something serious had happened. 　　She burst out at once that Holmes was dying. For three days, she said, he had been growing worse, and she doubted whether he would live through the day. He had refused to see any doctor, but that morning his face had become so terrible that she had finally defied him. She told him plainly that she would fetch a doctor whether he allowed it or not. To that he had answered only that, if one must come, it should be Watson. 　　I was shocked that no word had reached me earlier. As we drove back to Baker Street, I pressed Mrs. Hudson for every detail she knew. Holmes, she said, had been working on a case down in Rotherhithe, in some riverside alley, and had brought the illness back from there. Since Wednesday afternoon he had lain in bed without moving. No food and no drink had passed his lips for three days. 　　When I asked why she had not called another doctor in secret, she answered me in tears that Holmes had simply overruled her. No one who knew him could doubt how hard that would be. Even in ordinary health he had a will strong enough to master most people around him. In illness, with fever and suffering added, he had still kept that harsh control. Mrs. Hudson could only repeat that I would understand everything the moment I saw him. 　　He was indeed a dreadful sight. In the half light of that foggy November day the room itself looked dark and unhealthy, but the figure in the bed was worse than the room. His face had fallen away to bone and skin, his lips were dark and dry, and his eyes shone with a terrible fever-brightness out of hollow sockets. A red patch burned on each cheek, while his thin hands twitched restlessly upon the coverlet. For a moment the shock of his appearance was so great that all my training nearly left me. 　　I stepped forward at once, meaning to take his pulse and begin a proper examination, but Holmes stopped me with a violence that startled me almost as much as his condition. In a voice broken by weakness but sharp with command, he ordered me to stand back and not touch him. He said that I knew nothing of this disease and might only make matters worse. I tried to reason with him, reminding him that I was not only his friend but a medical man, yet he would not yield an inch. His mind, though wandering at moments, still held fiercely to one clear purpose. 　　Little by little, between attacks of weakness, he explained what he wanted from me. There was only one man in London, he said, who had truly studied this disease and understood its nature. That man was Culverton Smith of Lower Burke Street. Holmes spoke the name with effort, as if even saying it cost him strength, and added that Smith’s knowledge of such illnesses had become his dearest hobby. If anyone could save him, Holmes insisted, it was Smith and Smith alone. 　　He then gave me very exact directions. I was to go to Smith, tell him just how Holmes lay, and make him understand that this was no ordinary sickness but the last stage of a dying man. Holmes said that there was no goodwill between them. Smith’s nephew, Victor Savage, had died horribly, and Holmes had once allowed Smith to see that he suspected foul play in that death. Because of that, Smith hated him. So I must soften the man, plead with him, beg him, and somehow bring him to Baker Street. 　　When I answered that I would bring Smith in a cab even if I had to drag him there by force, Holmes objected strongly. No, he said, I must persuade him, not force him. And when Smith finally agreed to come, I was not to return in the cab beside him. I must get back first by some excuse or other and leave Smith to follow alone. All this he said in broken bursts, sometimes falling into wild talk before dragging himself back to the point. The contrast was painful beyond words: the same great mind, still giving exact orders, yet already slipping at the edges into fever and delirium. 　　At last I could do no more but obey him. Holmes gave me the key, and I took it with me, thinking it safer that he should not lock himself in again while Mrs. Hudson stood helpless outside. As I went down the stairs, I heard behind me his high weak voice drifting into strange and wandering speech. In the passage Mrs. Hudson was trembling and weeping openly. A moment later, in the fog below, I met Inspector Morton in plain clothes, who asked in a curious tone how Holmes was. I answered only that he was very ill, called my cab, and drove away toward Lower Burke Street, with Holmes’s dreadful face still burning before my eyes. Part 2 　　Lower Burke Street proved to be a line of fine houses between Notting Hill and Kensington. At the one I wanted, a servant tried to stop me and said that his master saw no one. I answered that the matter was urgent beyond all usual rules and pushed my way in. Presently I was shown to a room where a thin, yellow-faced man with sharp features and cruel eyes turned on me with instant annoyance. This, beyond doubt, was Culverton Smith. 　　He asked my business in a hard dry voice, and I told him plainly that Sherlock Holmes lay at the point of death. At first the name seemed only to harden him. He said that Holmes had treated him badly in the matter of his nephew Victor Savage and that he had no reason to go out of his way for such a man. There was something in his manner that chilled me. He was not merely offended. He was interested in the news in a way no friend would have been. 　　Still, when I gave him Holmes’s message exactly as it had been spoken to me, his resistance began to weaken. He listened most closely when I described the symptoms and especially when I said that Holmes believed no one but he understood the disease. Smith’s face changed as I spoke. His resentment did not disappear, but another feeling grew stronger than it. He began to question me rapidly and in detail, as though each answer gave him a dark kind of pleasure. 　　He asked whether Holmes was really very near the end, whether he was delirious, and whether he had spoken of anything unusual in the first hours of his illness. I repeated Holmes’s wild broken phrases as faithfully as I could. Smith nodded more than once and seemed almost satisfied. At last he said that, after all, he might come. Not for Holmes’s sake, he added, but because no man should be allowed to die when a little knowledge might still save him. The words sounded humane, but the tone beneath them was cold and wrong. 　　Remembering Holmes’s instructions, I was careful not to press him too hard. I said that I would return ahead of him, since the poor fellow might not survive another delay. Smith answered that he would follow soon after and that he needed only a little time to prepare himself. As I left the house, I looked back once and saw him standing in the doorway with a face that was thoughtful, eager, and anything but compassionate. I drove back through the fog with a heavier heart than before. 　　When I reached Baker Street and let myself in with Holmes’s key, I found him still in bed, but now more master of himself than when I had left. He spoke in the same weak voice, yet his mind was fully alert. He asked at once whether I had brought Smith and whether I had left him to come alone. When I answered yes to both, Holmes showed real relief. Then, to my surprise, he said that I was not to leave the room after all. I was to hide in it. 　　He pointed out a narrow space behind the head of the bed, hidden by the position of the bedstead and the shadows of the room. There, he said, I could hear everything without being seen. I protested that such concealment was unworthy, and more than that, I was deeply troubled by the state in which I still believed him to be. Holmes only answered that the case had reached its turning point and that I must trust him for a little longer. His tone, though faint, had the old command in it, and I obeyed. 　　I had scarcely taken my place when we heard the step upon the stair. A moment later the door opened, and Culverton Smith entered softly, closing it behind him. For a short while he stood looking down at the figure in the bed without speaking. Then he came nearer, and in the half-darkness I heard his voice, very low and very harsh, asking whether Holmes knew him. Holmes answered from the bed in a weak whisper and begged for a little water. Smith gave it to him, but with no kindness in the act. 　　What followed made my blood run cold as I listened. Smith bent over the bed and began to speak not like a doctor, but like an enemy who had at last found his victim helpless. He asked whether Holmes remembered anything unusual at the start of his illness. Had anything come in the post? Had there perhaps been a little box? Holmes seemed to grope slowly toward memory and then gasped out that there had indeed been such a box, with a sharp spring inside it. Smith answered with savage triumph that it had been no joke at all. 　　He then spoke even more plainly. Holmes, he said, had crossed his path and had paid the price. Victor Savage had died because he stood in the way, and Holmes had now been sent to follow him. There was the truth, Smith hissed, and the last piece of proof would leave the room in his own pocket. Then he said that Holmes was near the end and that he himself would sit there and watch him die. Hidden behind the bed, with my hands clenched and my heart beating hard, I realised that the trap had closed at last. Part 3 　　Hidden behind the bed, I listened with every nerve straining while Culverton Smith leaned over Holmes and enjoyed what he thought was a helpless victim’s last minutes. He pressed Holmes again and again to remember the little box that had come by post. Holmes, still sounding faint and broken, said that he did remember it now. There had been an ivory box, and when he opened it a sharp spring inside had drawn blood from his finger. Smith answered with cruel pleasure that this was no joke, and that Holmes had only himself to blame for crossing his path. 　　Then came the words Holmes had wanted. Smith said openly that he had killed Victor Savage and had sent Holmes to share the same fate because Holmes knew too much. He added that he would take away the box so that the last piece of evidence would disappear with him. At that point I could hardly keep my place. Every instinct in me cried out to spring forward and seize him. But Holmes had his own plan, and in the next moment the whole scene changed. 　　Holmes, still in the weak whisper of a dying man, asked for one thing more. Would Smith turn up the gas? The room was darkening, he said, and the shadows were falling. Smith agreed readily, glad to see better the death he expected to watch. He crossed the room, turned up the gas, and then asked whether any other little service would be useful. Holmes answered in a tone so natural that I nearly cried out in pure astonishment. He asked for a match and a cigarette. 　　For a long second there was silence. Then Smith asked in a dry, shocked voice what the whole thing meant. Holmes replied with cool satisfaction that the best way to act a part successfully is to become it. He assured Smith that for three days he had taken no food or drink in order to make the deception perfect, though the lack of tobacco had been the hardest part of all. Then he lit his cigarette and calmly asked whether that was not the step of a friend outside the door. 　　At once the door opened and Inspector Morton came in. Holmes said quietly that all was in order and that this was the man. Morton gave the proper warning and arrested Culverton Smith for the murder of Victor Savage. Holmes then added, with a dry little chuckle, that the charge of the attempted murder of Sherlock Holmes might also be included. He explained that, to save an invalid unnecessary effort, Smith had kindly given their signal by turning up the gas. 　　Holmes also warned the inspector that Smith carried a small box in the right-hand pocket of his coat and that it should be handled carefully. Morton recovered it at once. Smith made one sudden violent rush and there was a brief struggle, followed by the click of handcuffs. Then the prisoner, now snarling like a trapped animal, shouted that it was all a trick and that Holmes could invent whatever story he pleased. He insisted that his own word was as good as Holmes’s. 　　At that, Holmes gave a sudden exclamation and said that he had completely forgotten one important person. He turned toward my hiding place and apologized warmly. Then he brought me out and presented me, with much amusement, to Culverton Smith as a witness who had heard the whole exchange from start to finish. The prisoner’s last defence fell to pieces in an instant. My presence had turned Holmes’s trap into proof. 　　Smith was taken away, and as soon as the room was clear, my own feelings found voice at last. I told Holmes plainly that he had gone too far. To frighten me as he had done, to refuse my medical help, and to make Mrs. Hudson believe him truly dying seemed to me close to cruelty. Holmes listened with more patience than usual and then admitted that I had some right to be angry. Still, he could not resist pointing out that the plan had succeeded perfectly. Smith had come, had incriminated himself, had handled the evidence, and had stepped directly into the hands of the law. 　　He then explained the details he had hidden from me. The illness had been wholly false, though he had made it convincing by long fasting, by a little grease-paint, by keeping the light low, and by using his own actor’s skill. He had not dared let me examine him too closely, because as a doctor I would at once have seen through the deception. That was why he had driven me away so violently whenever I tried to touch him. Once Culverton Smith had arrived, however, Holmes needed me nearby to hear the confession, and so the cruel little play had to continue until the proper moment came. 　　As for the disease itself, Holmes said that Smith had once used an eastern poison, unknown to ordinary medical practice, against Victor Savage and had tried to use the same method against him by means of the tiny spring concealed in the ivory box. The box was not only the means of attack but also the physical link that would help tie Smith to both crimes. Holmes had known enough to suspect the man but not enough to convict him. That was why the confession mattered so much. 　　Looking back, I could not deny the brilliance of the plan even while I still resented my part in it. Holmes, pale from his fast but quite himself once more, sat smoking in bed with quiet satisfaction. The dreadful dying face, the wandering speech, and the glassy fevered eyes had all vanished as completely as a stage costume after the fall of the curtain. In their place was once again the alert, amused, dangerous mind that could turn even apparent death into a weapon. So ended the adventure of the dying detective, with Holmes very much alive, Culverton Smith in irons, and my own feelings divided between relief, anger, and admiration. His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes Part 1　　 　　It was an August night in 1914, and two Germans stood together on the terrace of a lonely house above the sea. Behind them rose the long, low building where Von Bork had lived for four years, hidden in plain sight among the English. Before them lay the dark beach and the great chalk cliff, white even in the night. Their cigars glowed red in the darkness as they bent their heads close together and spoke in low, secret voices. 　　One of these men was Baron Von Herling, a high official from the German legation in London. He had come down in his great motor-car to visit the other, and now he spoke warmly of the success of Von Bork’s work. So far as he could judge, he said, events were moving quickly, and within a week Von Bork would likely be back in Berlin. When that happened, he added, the welcome given to him would be very great indeed, for the highest people in Germany knew exactly what he had achieved in England. 　　Von Bork answered with easy confidence. The English, he said, were not hard to deceive. To him they seemed a simple and obedient people. Von Herling, however, was more careful. He said that the English did indeed look soft on the surface, but a stranger soon found that there were limits beyond which one could not go. Their odd customs, their idea of good form, and their deep national habits had to be respected, or a man could easily ruin years of secret work through one careless mistake. 　　To make his point, the Baron told a story from his own first days in England. He had once spent a weekend at the country house of a cabinet minister and heard very free political talk there. Like a good servant of his country, he had sent a full report to Berlin. But the German government had used the information too openly, and suspicion had fallen back at once upon him. He said that it had taken him two full years to recover from that one blunder. In England, he warned, one must move lightly. 　　Von Bork laughed and said that his own method had been better. He had not merely acted the part of an Englishman who liked sport. He really was that sort of man, or near enough to it to make the pose natural. The shooting, the riding, the easy social manner, and the country-house friendships had all come easily to him, and through them he had entered circles that would have remained closed to a colder and more formal spy. His success, he suggested, came from making his disguise part of himself. 　　The Baron did not deny it. He said openly that Von Bork’s English mission had become the most important of all such missions and that no one had done it better. Yet now it was ending. The hour was near when masks would be thrown aside and hidden labour would show its value in war. The feeling between the two men was not only that of friendship, but of triumph. They spoke like gamblers who believed that all the cards were at last in their hands. 　　When at length Von Herling took his leave, Von Bork remained master of the lonely house and full of satisfaction with himself. He was a strong, ruddy, self-contained man, and he had good reason, as he thought, to be pleased. For years he had gathered military and naval secrets, built a network of useful men, and kept his work hidden under the face of ordinary English country life. Now England stood on the edge of war, and he believed that he had helped prepare a great blow against her. 　　Inside the house, he turned to the private trophies of his success. The secrets he had gathered were not lying loose in a drawer or hidden in some poor box which any common thief might force. He had a special safe made for them, and he was proud of it. When he later explained it, he spoke almost affectionately of its strength. It was not enough to have metal and a key. This safe required both letters and numbers. The outer circle held a word, and the inner circle held the figures. 　　The choice he had made for that word and those numbers pleased him greatly, because it showed how long he had looked ahead. Four years earlier, when he had the safe built, he had chosen August for the word and 1914 for the numbers. Now, as he boasted, the appointed month and year had come at last. Tomorrow morning, he said, he would shut the whole business down and leave England behind him. To him, the date was not only a combination. It was proof of foresight, patience, and victory. 　　Yet even in this hour of confidence, a faint shadow touched the edge of his success. There had been losses among the agents under him. Some had failed, some had gone mad, and some had fallen into the hands of the British. When the name of Steiner was later raised, Von Bork was visibly shaken, which showed that beneath his calm there still lived the fear common to all secret men: the fear that one weak point, once touched, may spread ruin through the whole design. For the moment, however, he kept control of himself. He still believed the game was his, and the night still seemed to belong to Germany. Part 2 　　Before his visitor from Berlin left, Von Bork showed him one last proof of his success. He drew back a curtain in the study and revealed the great brass-bound safe. Inside were rows of pigeon-holes, each marked with a subject and each full of papers and plans. The German secretary stared at the labels with open admiration, for they covered every sort of military and naval matter that an enemy might wish to know. 　　Von Bork pointed with special pride to an empty space marked “Naval Signals.” The papers already there, he said, were old and useless, because the Admiralty had changed the codes. That loss had been one of the worst blows of his English mission. But all would be repaired that night, he added, thanks to a man named Altamont, who was bringing the new material. 　　The secretary looked at his watch with impatience, for affairs in London were moving quickly and he could not stay much longer. He had hoped, he said, to carry back word of this final triumph. Von Bork then showed him a telegram from Portsmouth that promised Altamont would come without fail that night and would bring “new sparking plugs.” The secretary smiled at the phrase, and Von Bork explained that it was part of their code. In this private language, “sparking plugs” meant naval signals. 　　The secretary asked what price Altamont would receive for such a service, and Von Bork answered that he was to have five hundred pounds for this job besides a regular payment. The secretary called him a greedy rogue, but Von Bork defended him warmly. Altamont, he said, always delivered what he promised. More than that, he was not really a traitor to England in the German sense. He was, according to Von Bork, a bitter Irish-American, and his hatred of England ran deeper than any German patriot’s. 　　When at last the secretary rose to go, Von Bork tried to tempt him with Tokay wine, saying that Altamont had a good taste in such things and liked to be treated well in small matters. The secretary refused, but not without noting that his host seemed ready for a celebration. Then the two men walked out to the terrace once more, where the great motor-car waited with its chauffeur at the far end. The secretary cast one last glance at the peaceful English coast and remarked that it might soon look very different under war. 　　As he spoke, his eye caught the one lighted window in the house. Inside sat an old housekeeper in a country cap, knitting quietly beside a large black cat. Von Bork said that this was Martha, the only servant he had left. The secretary laughed and said that she might almost stand for old England herself, so calm and sleepy did she look in the warm circle of light. Then he climbed into the car and drove away into the darkness. 　　Left alone at last, Von Bork went back into the study and began to finish his preparations for flight. He noticed that the old housekeeper had now put out her lamp and gone to bed, and he was glad to think that the whole wide house was almost empty. A leather bag stood beside the table, and into it he packed the contents of the safe with neat and careful hands. The papers that had taken him four years to collect were now ready to cross the sea with him. 　　He had hardly done this when his sharp ear caught the sound of another car in the distance. At once his face brightened. He strapped the leather bag, shut and locked the safe, and hurried out to greet his expected guest. A small Ford came up to the house, and from it stepped a man unlike the smooth diplomats of Berlin. He was rough, loud, broad-shouldered, and full of American slang. This was Altamont. 　　The newcomer began almost at once to complain. He spoke of men who had fallen into trouble while working for Von Bork and grumbled that their employer had not done enough to protect them. He mentioned one after another and then came to the name of Steiner. At that name Von Bork started violently and turned paler under his healthy colour. Altamont then dropped his news in a hard, careless way: Steiner had been seized, his papers taken, and he now sat in Portsmouth jail. 　　The blow shook Von Bork more than he wished to show. He asked how the police could have got on Steiner’s track, but Altamont only shrugged and pressed his own point. He wanted to get out of England as soon as Von Bork did. A British policeman, he said, cared very little whether a man called himself an American citizen or anything else. England, in his view, was no place to remain once the trouble began. 　　Yet for all his rough talk, Altamont had brought what he promised. He was shown into the study, where Von Bork soothed him with drink and confidence. The German explained again how strong the safe was, boasting that no common thief could force it and that both a word and a set of figures were needed to open it. Altamont pretended admiration, and Von Bork, pleased by his own cleverness, repeated the combination with great self-satisfaction. 　　By now the evening had turned fully in Von Bork’s favour. The Berlin secretary had praised him, the papers were packed, the final signal-book was expected, and even the bad news about Steiner seemed only one more reason to leave England at once. Altamont, with his rough humour and apparent greed, seemed exactly what Von Bork believed him to be: a useful hater of England, easy to manage with money and good wine. So the German relaxed at last, talked more freely than a wise spy should ever talk, and never guessed that the hour of his success was also the hour of his fall. Part 3 　　Von Bork had relaxed too far, and that was the end of him. In the very moment of his confidence, the man he called Altamont turned on him with sudden force. The next instant a sponge of chloroform was held over his face, and all resistance was useless. When he woke again, he found himself bound upon the sofa while the supposed Irish-American sat calmly at the table and offered Tokay to another man in the room. That second man, to my great pleasure, was myself. I had come in the little Ford and had played my own small part in the trap. 　　Holmes, for of course Altamont was Holmes, stood before the open safe examining the documents one by one and packing them carefully into Von Bork’s own bag. He told me not to hurry, for there was now no danger of interruption. The old housekeeper, Martha, had served England as faithfully as Holmes had. He had placed her in the house long before, and that evening she had given the signal when the secretary had at last gone and the coast was clear. 　　Martha came to the door for a moment, smiling quietly but still a little nervous at the sight of her master lying helpless on the sofa. Holmes thanked her and arranged for her to report to him next day in London. She also told him that Von Bork had posted seven letters that day and that she had kept the addresses as usual. Holmes was pleased, since even now the case continued to widen under his hands. Once Martha had gone, he said that these papers might not all be of the highest importance, because the facts in many of them had already been sent to Germany. Even so, they would show Britain what the enemy believed and what falsehoods they had been made to believe. 　　Holmes added, with dry amusement, that not everything in the safe was dangerous to England. On the contrary, some of the information had passed through him and was thoroughly false. He said it would brighten his later years to imagine a German cruiser trying to use the mine-field plans he had supplied. Then, while Von Bork glared and cursed in helpless fury, Holmes kept searching the papers with quick steady hands. At one point he gave a sharp little cry of satisfaction and declared that he had found something that would put another bird in the cage. Even in victory, his mind was already moving on to the next arrest. 　　When the search was nearly done, Holmes turned fully back into himself and greeted me as an old friend rather than as a helper in a dangerous operation. He asked how the years had treated me, and I told him honestly that I had seldom felt happier than when his wire had called me to Harwich with the car. I remarked that he himself had changed very little, except for the dreadful little goatee. Holmes laughed and tugged at it, saying that these were the sacrifices one makes for one’s country and that by tomorrow it would be only an ugly memory. 　　I reminded him that we had all heard he was retired, living alone among bees and books on his small farm on the South Downs. Holmes answered by picking up the book from the table and reading out its long title on bee culture and the queen. That, he said, was the fruit of his peaceful later years. But peace had not lasted. When both the Foreign Minister and even the Prime Minister pressed him to return, he had found that he could not refuse. Von Bork, he said, was too able a man for ordinary methods, and Britain needed the hidden centre of the whole German system exposed. 　　Holmes then gave me, in a few quick sentences, the outline of the long work behind this single night. He had begun far away in America, moved through Irish secret circles, and caused trouble enough in various places to attract the notice of one of Von Bork’s lesser agents. In this way he had slowly risen into the confidence of the German master-spy himself. The labour had cost him two years, but they had not been dull years. Five of Von Bork’s best agents, he added with satisfaction, were already in prison because he had watched them patiently and taken them one by one when the time was ripe. 　　All this while Von Bork listened in helpless rage. When at last he found breath enough to answer, he burst into furious German abuse. Holmes hardly looked at him and only remarked that, while German might not be musical, it was certainly expressive. Then, once the papers were packed, the two of us brought him slowly down the garden walk which he had paced so proudly only a short time before. After one last struggle he was lifted into the spare seat of the little car, with his precious bag pushed in beside him. 　　Holmes was in excellent humour now and could not resist treating the prisoner with cold politeness. He asked whether he might light a cigar for him and hoped that he was as comfortable as circumstances allowed. Von Bork answered that if the British government supported such treatment, then it was an act of war. Holmes tapped the bag of papers and replied that Germany had taken a good many liberties of its own. When the German protested that he had been kidnapped and robbed without any legal authority, Holmes agreed quite cheerfully that this was perfectly true. 　　Holmes went on to say that if Von Bork shouted for help in the village, he might discover that the English temper was no longer so calm as before. Better, Holmes advised, to go quietly to Scotland Yard and send for his diplomatic friends there. Then he turned to me and said that, since I was again joining my old service, London would not be out of my way. Before we started, however, he wanted one last quiet talk with me upon the terrace. 　　So we stood together for a few minutes and spoke, as old friends do, not only of the case just ended but of the years that lay behind us. Then Holmes looked out over the moonlit sea and grew suddenly thoughtful. He said that an east wind was coming. I answered, half laughing, that I thought not, for the night was very warm. But Holmes shook his head and said that it was coming all the same, a wind such as had never yet blown upon England. It would be cold and bitter, he said, and many of us might wither in its blast. Yet it was God’s own wind, and when the storm had passed, a cleaner, stronger, better land would lie in the sunshine. 　　Then he told me to start the car, because it was time for us to be on our way. He added with a last touch of dry humour that he had a cheque for five hundred pounds which should be cashed early, since the man who wrote it would surely stop payment if he could. And so the final story in this volume came to its true end: with Holmes once more in the service of his country, with the enemy’s hidden papers taken out of his hands, and with the old friendship between Holmes and Watson standing firm before the storm of war.