===============

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: The Valley of Fear
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Source: Project Gutenberg
https://www.gutenberg.org/

Full text available at:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3289/pg3289.txt

The original text is in the public domain.

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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.

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Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear (Simplified Edition, Adapted and Simplified by ChatGPT)

Part 1

　　“I think—” I began.
　　“You should think,” said Sherlock Holmes, in a sharp voice.
　　I was used to Holmes’s strange ways, but even I felt a little hurt at that answer. “Really, Holmes,” I said, “you can be hard to live with at times.” He did not answer at once. He was leaning over the breakfast table, though he had not touched his food. In his hand was a small slip of paper, and beside it lay the envelope in which it had come.
　　Holmes held the envelope up to the light and studied it with great care. Then he looked again at the writing on the paper. His eyes had that bright, deep look they always had when his mind was moving quickly. “This is Porlock’s writing,” he said at last. “I have seen it only twice before, but I am sure of it. If Porlock has written to me, then this matter is important.”
　　“Who is Porlock?” I asked.
　　“Not his real name,” said Holmes. “Only a false name. The man himself is small and not important. But he stands close to someone who is very important indeed. Think of a little fish that swims beside a shark, or a jackal beside a lion. That is Porlock. He matters because of the great and dangerous man behind him. You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?”
　　“Yes,” I said. “The great criminal who is unknown to the public.”
　　Holmes gave a dry little smile. “That is well said, Watson. Unknown to the public, and yet the brain behind half the evil in this city. He is a famous scholar, a writer of difficult books, and a man the law cannot touch. If you called him a criminal in public, he could take you to court and win. That is what makes him so dangerous. He hides behind respectability.”
　　Holmes put the paper flat upon his plate and motioned me closer. A line of strange marks and numbers stood on it. There were numbers, a letter and number together, and then two words written plainly: DOUGLAS and BIRLSTONE. The whole thing looked useless and mad. I read it twice and understood nothing.
　　“What can it mean?” I asked.
　　“It is a message in code,” said Holmes.
　　“But without the key it is no use.”
　　“In this case, yes. But many codes are easy enough. This one is different. It points to words in a book. Until we know the book and the page, we can do nothing. The words Douglas and Birlstone were not in the printed text, so Porlock had to add them himself.”
　　“Then why did he not send the name of the book too?”
　　Holmes looked up at me. “Because that would be foolish. If one letter were lost, everything would be known. No, he meant to send the key separately. Our second post is late. I expect another letter at any moment.”
　　He was right. Within a few minutes Billy, the page, brought in a second envelope. Holmes opened it quickly. For an instant he looked pleased, because it was again in the same hand and this time signed. But as he read, his face darkened.
　　“Bad,” he said quietly. “Very bad. Listen to this, Watson. Porlock says he will go no further. It is too dangerous. The other man suspects him. He says he was just about to send me the key to the code when that man came in suddenly. He hid the paper in time, but he saw suspicion in the visitor’s eyes. So he begs me to burn the message, for now it is useless.”
　　Holmes sat for a little while without speaking. He turned the letter over in his fingers and stared into the fire. At last he said, “Perhaps there is no real danger to Porlock. A guilty man often imagines he has been found out. Still, when one of Moriarty’s people says ‘he,’ there can be no doubt who is meant.”
　　“What can Moriarty do?” I asked.
　　Holmes gave a slow shrug. “Almost anything. He has a great brain, and behind him stand men ready for every dark act. But notice this, Watson. The writing on the envelope is firm. The writing of the second note is shaking and unclear. Porlock was badly frightened after the visit.”
　　I picked up the coded paper again. It was maddening to think that a serious warning might be before our eyes, and yet we could not read it. Holmes had pushed away his breakfast now and filled his old black pipe. When he smoked that evil-smelling thing, I knew that he was thinking with all his strength.
　　“Let us reason it out,” he said. “The first number is 534. That must be the page. So the book is a large one. Then comes C2. What is that? Not chapter two, surely, for if page 534 were in the second chapter, the first chapter would be far too long. No, it must be column two. So we now have a large book, printed in double columns.”
　　“That is something,” I said.
　　“More than something. One of the word numbers is 293, so each column is long. What else? If the book had been rare, Porlock would have sent it. Instead, he expected me to have it already. Therefore it must be common. A large common book in double columns, with fixed page numbers the same in every copy.”
　　“The Bible?” I said.
　　“No. Too many different editions. The page number would not match. It must be a standard book. Something many people keep at hand.”
　　“Then perhaps an almanac,” I said.
　　Holmes sat up at once. “Excellent, Watson. That may be it.” He crossed to his shelf, took down Whitaker’s Almanac, and opened it at page 534. “Now let us see.” He began to count the words. His face quickly fell. “No good. The words make no sense. We have the wrong volume.”
　　For a moment I thought the matter lost. Then Holmes sprang up again with a sudden cry. He hurried to a cupboard and returned with an older yellow book in his hand. “Of course!” he said. “We are using the new almanac because it is already January. But Porlock may have used last year’s copy.”
　　He opened it with eager hands and began once more to count. As he moved down the column, his long finger touched each word, and his eyes grew brighter and brighter. “‘There’... ‘is’... ‘danger’...” he said. “Write that down, Watson. Then ‘may’... ‘come’... ‘very’... ‘soon’... ‘one’... then Douglas... then ‘rich’... ‘country’... ‘now’... ‘at’... Birlstone... ‘House’... Birlstone... ‘confidence’... ‘is’... ‘pressing.’”
　　I wrote as fast as I could. The message looked broken and rough, but its meaning was plain enough. There was danger. It might come very soon. It threatened a man named Douglas, a rich country gentleman living at Birlstone House. Holmes leaned back with the quiet pride of an artist pleased with his own work.
　　“A little reason can still do something in this world,” he said. “Porlock has done as well as he could. He could only use the words that stood on the page before him. The sense is clear. Some attack is planned against this Douglas, and the danger is close.”
　　He was still smiling over the success when Billy opened the door once more and announced Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard. I had met MacDonald before. He was a strong, silent Scotsman, still a young man, but already respected in the Yard. He had sharp eyes, a hard voice, and a plain, honest way about him. Holmes liked him better than he liked most officials.
　　“You are early, Mr. Mac,” said Holmes. “I hope that means interesting work.”
　　“If you said you hoped so, Mr. Holmes, you would be nearer the truth,” said the inspector. He came in with the cold morning air still on his coat. “I have little time. The first hours of a case are the most important. But—” He stopped suddenly and stared at the paper on the table. “Douglas? Birlstone?” he cried. “What is this? How did you get those names?”
　　Holmes looked up in surprise. “It is only a message which Dr. Watson and I have just solved. Why do those names trouble you?”
　　MacDonald turned from Holmes to me and back again. His face showed real shock. “Because,” he said slowly, “Mr. Douglas of Birlstone Manor House was murdered last night.”

Part 2

　　Holmes lived for moments like that. He did not jump up in fear, and he did not cry out in surprise. His mind became even calmer than before. I felt a chill when I heard that Douglas had been killed, but Holmes looked like a man who had just seen a hard problem begin to open before him.
　　“Remarkable,” he said. “Very remarkable.” MacDonald stared at him. “You do not seem surprised, Mr. Holmes.” Holmes folded his hands and answered in a quiet voice, “I am interested, Mr. Mac, but not surprised. A warning came to me from a source I know to be important. An hour later I hear that the danger has already become real. That is not surprise. It is a line of cause and result.”
　　He then told the inspector about Porlock, the coded message, and the way we had read it. MacDonald listened with both hands under his chin and his heavy brows pulled together. When Holmes had finished, the inspector said, “I came here this morning to ask if you and Dr. Watson would come with me to Birlstone. But after hearing this, maybe our real work should be done in London. If we find Porlock, we may find the whole answer.”
　　Holmes shook his head at once. “I do not think so,” he said. “How will you find him? The letter was posted in Camberwell. The name is false. We know almost nothing.” MacDonald turned the letter over in his fingers. “You sent him money, you said. Did you never try to see who came for it?” Holmes answered, “No. I had given my word that I would not try to follow him, and I keep my word.”
　　The inspector looked surprised. He was a good police officer, and he found it hard to understand a man who would not use every chance to track a suspect. “Then you truly believe there is another man behind Porlock?” he asked. “I do not believe it,” said Holmes. “I know it.” MacDonald gave a small smile. “This is the professor again, I suppose.”
　　“Yes,” said Holmes. “Professor Moriarty.” The inspector glanced at me before he answered. “I will speak openly, Mr. Holmes. Some of us in the C.I.D. think you are too fixed on this professor. I made my own inquiries. He seems a learned and highly respectable gentleman.” Holmes smiled in a way that showed both pleasure and scorn. “I am glad, at least, that you have seen his talent.”
　　MacDonald settled deeper in his chair and began to tell us about his meeting with Moriarty. He had visited him, spoken with him, and even listened to him explain eclipses by means of a globe and a lantern. The professor had spoken with such ease and knowledge that MacDonald had almost felt like a schoolboy before a great teacher. “He would make a fine minister,” said the inspector. “Thin face, gray hair, quiet voice, and such a serious manner. When he put his hand on my shoulder, it felt like a father sending me out into a cold world.”
　　Holmes laughed softly and rubbed his hands. “Excellent,” he said. “And this fine meeting took place in the professor’s study?” MacDonald said that it had. Holmes then asked where the lamp had stood, where the inspector had sat, and whether he had noticed a picture hanging above Moriarty’s head. The inspector, now a little puzzled, said that he had indeed seen such a picture: a young woman looking sideways, her head resting on her hands.
　　“That painting,” said Holmes, “was by Jean Baptiste Greuze.” MacDonald tried to look interested, though it was plain that he saw no reason for this lesson in art. Holmes went on as if he were speaking in a lecture room. He told us that Greuze was a French painter of high value and great reputation, and then he stopped and looked steadily at the inspector. MacDonald shifted in his seat and said, “I may be slow, Mr. Holmes, but what has that to do with Birlstone?”
　　“Everything may matter,” said Holmes. “A detective should not throw away any piece of knowledge. That picture was sold for a great sum. Yet Moriarty’s known income is only seven hundred pounds a year. He is not married. He has no rich family. His brother is only a station master. And yet he owns a Greuze. How did he pay for it?” MacDonald’s eyes sharpened at once. “Then you mean,” he said slowly, “that the man has another income, and that it must come from crime.”
　　“Exactly,” said Holmes. “The picture is only one thread. There are many others. I have followed them as far as I can. They all lead towards the same center, where a very dangerous creature sits still in its web.” MacDonald leaned forward now, his doubt fading. “But what kind of crime? Forgery? Burglary? Blackmail? Where does the money come from?” Holmes answered him with a question of his own. “Have you ever read about Jonathan Wild?”
　　MacDonald said that the name sounded familiar, but he could not place it. Holmes explained that Wild had been a master criminal of an earlier time, a man who organized others and lived from their crimes. “The wheel turns,” said Holmes. “Things come back in new forms. Moriarty does the same kind of work on a larger scale. He uses minds, methods, and men. He is not the hand that strikes. He is the brain that plans.”
　　The inspector listened now with full respect. Holmes told him that Colonel Sebastian Moran stood next to Moriarty in that hidden organization. He even named Moran’s yearly pay. “Six thousand pounds,” said Holmes. “That is what Moriarty gives to the man he needs most. It tells you both how rich he is and how large his business must be.” MacDonald gave a low whistle. Holmes continued and spoke of checks he had traced, ordinary checks for ordinary expenses, drawn on six different banks. “He does not want one bank clerk to know too much,” he said. “He spreads his money like a careful general spreading his forces.”
　　For a little while MacDonald forgot the murder in his interest in Moriarty. Then the practical side of his nature took hold of him again. “He may keep for the moment,” he said. “The important point is this. You think the warning through Porlock links Moriarty to the death of Douglas. Can we go any further than that now?” Holmes nodded slowly. “Only a little. But even a little may help. There are two possible reasons. Douglas may have betrayed Moriarty in some way, and this killing may be punishment. Moriarty rules his people through fear, and the punishment for betrayal is death.”
　　“That is one way to see it,” said MacDonald. “And the other?” Holmes answered at once. “The other is simple business. Moriarty may have been paid to arrange the murder. If there was robbery, that would point more in that direction. If there was no robbery, either idea may still be true. But in either case, the answer is not here in London. It is waiting in Birlstone.” He rose as he spoke, and the matter seemed settled.
　　MacDonald sprang up too and looked at his watch with annoyance. “Then we must go at once,” he said. “I can give you five minutes, no more.” Holmes was already moving toward his room to change. “That is enough,” he called back. “On the train, Mr. Mac, you can tell us all that you know.” I followed him, and within a very short time we were ready to leave Baker Street.
　　The facts MacDonald had were few, but they were strange enough to wake Holmes completely. For weeks he had been restless from lack of work. Now I saw the old fire return to him. His pale face had more color, and his eyes were bright with life as we rode in the cab. He leaned forward and listened to every word the inspector said, hungry for each small detail.
　　White Mason, the local detective in Sussex, had sent an urgent private note before the formal request for help. MacDonald read it aloud to us in the cab. It said that the case was a wild one, almost too strange to believe, and that Holmes should come if possible, because it was the kind of matter that would suit him exactly. There was a dead man in the middle of it all, the note said, or else they might have thought the whole thing had been arranged for the stage.
　　“Your friend sounds sensible,” said Holmes. MacDonald nodded. “He is a quick man.” Holmes asked whether there was anything more. The answer was no. The official report only said that John Douglas had been shot in the head near midnight, that the case was certainly murder, that no arrest had been made, and that several strange features had already appeared. That was all.
　　Holmes sat back for a moment after hearing this. Then he spoke in the calm voice he used when he was fixing his thoughts in order. “Let us go no farther than the facts allow,” he said. “To build a theory too early is one of the great dangers in our work. At present I see only two certain things. There is a great and evil mind in London, and there is a dead man in Sussex. What lies between them is the path we must now follow.”

Part 3

　　For a little while, I must step back from my own place in the story. Some things happened before Holmes, Inspector MacDonald, and I reached Birlstone, and I learned them only later. I can best explain this strange case if I first show the village, the house, and the people who were living there when death came.
　　Birlstone was a small old village in the north of Sussex. It had stood there for centuries, with its old timber houses and quiet country air, and until recent years it had changed very little. Now, however, richer people had begun to settle near it, and new houses could be seen among the trees. Small shops had appeared as well, and it seemed possible that the old village might slowly grow into a little town.
　　About half a mile from the village stood Birlstone Manor House, deep in a park with huge old trees. The place was very old indeed. Long before, in the days of the Crusades, there had been a strong building on that ground, and later, after fire and rebuilding, a large country house had risen there. What remained in our own time was a long, low Jacobean house, old but still strong, with many gables and small diamond windows.
　　The strangest thing about the house was the moat around it. In earlier times there had been two moats, but one had dried up and become a kitchen garden. The inner moat still remained. It was not very deep, but it ran round the whole house, and a small stream kept the water moving, so it never became a foul ditch.
　　The only way into the house was over a drawbridge. The old chains and wheel had once fallen into ruin, but the latest owners had repaired them. Every evening the bridge was raised, and every morning it was lowered again. In that way the Manor House became an island during the night, and that old custom had everything to do with the mystery which was now beginning.
　　The people living there were few. The master of the house was John Douglas, and his wife lived there with him. Douglas was about fifty years old, strong and active, with a rough face, gray eyes, and a short grizzled moustache. He looked like a man who had seen many kinds of life and not all of them gentle.
　　In the village he had become well liked. He gave money freely when there was some local need, went to village gatherings, and sang there with a fine tenor voice. He was said to have made money in the California gold fields, and from many small things people understood that he had spent an important part of his life in America.
　　He had another quality that people remembered. He seemed almost careless of danger. He rode hard though he was not a skilled rider, and he would risk a bad fall rather than give up. Once, when the vicarage caught fire, he ran back into the burning building after others had given up hope, and that one act alone made many people admire him deeply.
　　Mrs. Douglas was also liked by the few neighbours who knew her. She was a beautiful dark woman, tall and slender, and much younger than her husband. She had met him in London, after he had become a widower, and by all outward signs their marriage was a happy one. She lived quietly, cared for the house, and seemed deeply devoted to him.
　　Yet there were small things that people noticed. She either knew very little of her husband’s earlier life, or else she chose not to speak of it. Some thought that a shadow lay over him, and that she felt it too. If he stayed away longer than expected, she often showed real fear, and in a quiet country place that kind of fear did not pass without talk.
　　There was also a frequent visitor at the Manor House, Cecil James Barker of Hales Lodge, Hampstead. He was the one man from Douglas’s earlier life who was seen often in Birlstone. Barker was English, but he had first known Douglas in America, and the two men had clearly once been very close. He was wealthy, unmarried, and often stayed at the house.
　　Barker was a strong, dark man of about forty-five, tall and broad, with bold black eyes and the look of someone who could fight if he had to. He did not ride or shoot, but spent his days walking through the village, smoking his pipe, or driving with Douglas through the country. He was friendly and easy in manner, though there was something powerful in him that made servants think it would be wise not to cross him.
　　He was not only close to Douglas. He was also very friendly with Mrs. Douglas. At times this seemed to trouble her husband, and even the servants noticed it. Thus, when the terrible event came, there were really three important people in the house: John Douglas, his wife, and Cecil Barker. Besides them, there were the butler Ames, the housekeeper Mrs. Allen, and several other servants who had nothing direct to do with that night’s events.
　　The alarm first reached the local police station at a quarter to twelve. Cecil Barker came there in great excitement and rang furiously. He said that a terrible thing had happened at the Manor House, and that John Douglas had been murdered. Sergeant Wilson at once took the necessary steps and then hurried to the house himself.
　　When he arrived, the drawbridge was down, the windows were bright with light, and the whole house was in confusion. Frightened servants stood together in the hall. Ames, the butler, was pale and shaken. Barker, however, though greatly moved, seemed the only man present who still had full control of himself, and he led the sergeant straight toward the room where the crime had taken place.
　　At that very moment Dr. Wood from the village also arrived, and the three men entered the room together. The dead man lay on his back in the middle of the floor, his arms thrown out. He wore a pink dressing gown over his night clothes, with slippers on his feet. One look was enough for the doctor to see that nothing could be done.
　　Across the dead man’s chest lay a strange weapon, a shotgun whose barrels had been cut short. It had been fired at very close range. The whole charge had struck Douglas in the face, and the injury was so terrible that no one looking at him could doubt that death had come in an instant. The two triggers had been tied together with wire so that both barrels would fire at once.
　　Sergeant Wilson, who was only a country policeman, was deeply shaken by what he saw. He said that nothing must be touched until men above him arrived. Barker answered that nothing had been moved and that the room was exactly as he had first found it. He then explained that he had been sitting in his own room, not yet undressed, when he heard the shot at about half past eleven.
　　The sound had seemed rather dull, yet clear enough to bring him running. He had reached the room within half a minute, perhaps less. The door had been open, Douglas was lying there, and a candle from Douglas’s bedroom had been standing on the table. Barker himself had later lit the lamp.
　　He had seen no murderer. But he had heard Mrs. Douglas coming down the stairs behind him, and he had rushed out again to stop her from entering. Mrs. Allen had then taken her away upstairs. When Barker and Ames came back into the room, the scene was as the police later saw it.
　　The great question was how the killer could have escaped, since the drawbridge had been raised. Barker answered this by pulling back the curtain and showing that one of the windows stood open. On the sill there was a mark made by blood, like the print of a boot. So, he said, the man must have escaped through the window and crossed the moat.
　　Sergeant Wilson saw the point, but the thing still puzzled him. If the bridge had been raised near six o’clock, then any stranger must have entered the house earlier and hidden inside for hours. It seemed the only possible answer. Barker agreed. Douglas, he said, had the habit of going through the house each night before bed, and that must have brought him into the room where the murderer waited behind the curtain.
　　More strange details then appeared. Near the body lay a card with the letters V.V. and the number 341 written on it. A hammer was found on the rug, but Barker explained that Douglas had used it the day before while moving pictures on the wall. Behind the curtain there were marks of muddy boots, which seemed to support the idea that someone really had been hiding there.
　　Then Dr. Wood noticed a curious mark on Douglas’s arm, a branded sign shaped like a triangle inside a circle. Barker and Ames both said they had seen it many times before, so it clearly was not new. But it added yet another dark and secret touch to the dead man’s past, a past that no one in Birlstone truly understood.
　　Last of all came the oddest detail of all. Ames suddenly cried out that Douglas’s wedding ring was missing. He still wore the other rings on that hand, but the plain gold wedding ring, which had always been beneath one of the others, had been taken away. That meant that someone had first removed another ring, then the wedding ring, and then put the other ring back again.
　　Faced with the open window, the blood on the sill, the short American gun, the card, the hidden place behind the curtain, the old brand on the arm, and the missing wedding ring, Sergeant Wilson could only shake his head. This was far beyond an ordinary village crime. He said openly that the case was too deep for him, and that before it was done they would surely need the best help that London could send.

Part 4

　　At three in the morning the chief detective from Sussex arrived at Birlstone after Sergeant Wilson’s urgent message. By the early morning train he had already sent word to Scotland Yard, and by noon he was waiting for us at the station. This was White Mason, a country detective with a red face, strong legs, and the look of a farmer more than a police officer. Yet from the first moment it was plain that he was quick, cheerful, and fully awake to the strange nature of the case.
　　He welcomed us warmly and led us first to the inn, where rooms had been prepared for us. Before taking us to the Manor House, he gave a short and lively account of all that had happened since the night before. More than once he repeated that the case was the strangest he had ever known. Holmes listened to him with the deep stillness of a man who is already arranging facts inside his mind. White Mason was pleased by Holmes’s interest and spoke with even more energy when he saw it.
　　After a short rest we walked down through the quiet village street and then out toward the old house. The winter day was cold and clear, and the moat around the Manor House shone in the pale light. The building itself looked dark and old, with its low front, pointed roofs, and many small windows. It seemed to me that no place could have been better made for fear, secrecy, and sudden death.
　　White Mason showed us the very window through which the killer was supposed to have escaped. It was the one nearest the drawbridge, still open as it had been found. Holmes at once went to the edge of the moat and looked long and carefully across it. He studied the stone border, the grass, and the water itself, and then asked several short questions about the depth and the usual state of the moat.
　　The water, White Mason said, was only two feet deep at the edges and about three feet in the middle. It was muddy because of the clay in the stream that fed it, and there were no marks at the farther side to show where a man had climbed out. Holmes seemed interested but not surprised. Whatever had happened, he was already thinking less about what was possible in the water and more about what men in the house had said about it.
　　We crossed the drawbridge and entered the house. Ames, the butler, admitted us, still pale and shaken by the shock. The village sergeant was still there on duty, and the room of the crime had been kept untouched for us. White Mason asked that the servants and others remain near at hand, since they might be needed later, and then turned to the business before us.
　　He wished first to tell us the theory he had formed. Holmes agreed at once, and he did so in a serious and respectful way that pleased the country detective greatly. White Mason spoke clearly and in good order. He was not one of those men who throw out half-formed ideas. He had thought deeply about the evidence, and he wanted us to see not only his conclusion but the road by which he had reached it.
　　He began with the simplest question of all. Was it suicide or murder? To him, suicide was impossible. If Douglas had killed himself, then he must also have taken off his own wedding ring, hidden it, opened the window, placed blood on the sill, made marks behind the curtain, and laid out every other strange sign that pointed to another man. White Mason said that such a thing could not be believed, and on that point we all agreed with him at once.
　　So the death was murder. Then came the second question. Had the murderer been someone already inside the house, or someone from outside? White Mason argued strongly against the first idea. If a person in the house had done the deed, that person must have chosen the worst possible weapon, one certain to wake and alarm everyone. In the same short minute after the shot, that same person would then have had to make all the false signs by the window and curtain, remove the wedding ring, and arrange the rest. White Mason said this could not have been done.
　　Therefore, he said, the killer must have come from outside. A stranger could have entered the house between the late afternoon and six o’clock, while the bridge was still down and while visitors had recently come and gone. He could have slipped into the first room and hidden behind the curtain until Douglas came in on his nightly round. The candle on the table helped this idea. Since it had burned only a little, Douglas could not have been long in the room before he was attacked.
　　White Mason rebuilt the scene in this way. Douglas entered, carrying the candle. He set it down on the table. Then the hidden man stepped out with the shotgun and demanded the wedding ring for some reason that no one could yet explain. Douglas either gave it up or resisted, perhaps reaching for the hammer on the floor, and then the man shot him at close range and escaped through the window into the moat.
　　Holmes listened without interruption and gave only a small nod from time to time. But Inspector MacDonald was not satisfied. He had a harder, more suspicious mind, and he did not like the outside theory. He said that if a man planned murder inside a house surrounded by water, he would surely choose a quiet weapon. Yet here we had the loudest kind of weapon possible, one that would bring the whole house running before the killer could get far.
　　This was a strong objection, and White Mason knew it. Still, he did not abandon his ground. He answered that strange men sometimes do strange things when they are driven by fear or hatred. Perhaps the weapon had some special meaning. Perhaps the murderer wanted to make certain that he would not miss. Or perhaps, White Mason suggested, the man had first planned to shoot Douglas outside the house and had only changed his method later when that chance failed.
　　Holmes then asked about the far side of the moat again and whether any trace at all had been found there. None had been seen. He asked also whether the muddy water might hide what would otherwise be clear. That, too, seemed possible. He did not say much, but I could tell that he was weighing not only the evidence itself but the weaknesses in each explanation. He never loved a theory merely because it was neat.
　　White Mason continued to defend the outside view because, in his eyes, the inside view was still more difficult. He returned to the question of time. The whole household had been in motion within a minute of the shot. Barker had been there almost at once. Ames had followed. Others were near. It was hard to imagine that one of them had arranged everything in those few moments with such care. A stranger already hidden in the room still seemed to him the least impossible answer.
　　MacDonald remained unconvinced. He spoke of common sense, of human action under danger, and of the oddity of bringing such a weapon into such a place. Holmes let the two men state their cases fully. He seemed to enjoy hearing clear minds disagree. To him, a case often grew brighter when able men pushed against one another from different sides. He had not yet chosen to show his own full hand.
　　For my own part, the matter only became darker as they argued. The open window, the blood, the missing ring, the card by the body, the hidden place behind the curtain, the raised bridge, and the terrible American gun all pointed in different directions at once. Each fact seemed to fit one theory and resist another. It was exactly the kind of case that pulled Holmes forward, for it was tangled enough to interest him and yet orderly enough to promise an answer.
　　At last White Mason paused and looked toward Holmes, hoping to hear either approval or correction. Holmes did not reject the theory, but neither did he fully accept it. He only said that it had been clearly put and that every point must be tested in the light of what we should later learn. That was like him. He never rushed to close a door while there was still even the smallest crack of doubt beneath it.
　　So we stood there in the old room, with the dead man’s story still hidden from us and the cold daylight lying across the floor where the candle had burned in the night. Outside, the moat surrounded the house as it had done for centuries. Inside, we had a murder and more than one possible path to it. We were still in darkness, and Holmes, I could see, was only beginning to enjoy it.

Part 5

　　The next step was to hear from the people in the house. Facts about the room and the window could only take us so far. After that, we had to turn to the men and women who had lived with Douglas, served him, or stood near him in the last moments before his death. It soon became clear that the case was not only about blood and footprints. It was also about silence, old fear, and feelings that no one wished to name.
　　Ames, the butler, spoke first. He was still trembling from the shock, but he gave his account in a careful and honest way. He said that Mr. Douglas had never seemed like a frightened man. On the contrary, he had always looked fearless. In Ames’s opinion, the bridge was raised each night simply because it was the custom of the old house and because Douglas liked old customs. Yet Ames had noticed one unusual thing on the day before the murder. Douglas had gone to Tunbridge Wells, and when he returned he had been restless, impatient, and not at all like himself.
　　Ames had not gone to bed that night. He had been in the pantry at the far back of the house, putting away the silver. Because of the long passage and several closed doors, he had heard no shot. What brought him out was the violent ringing of the bell. Mrs. Allen, the housekeeper, came from her room at the same time, and the two of them hurried toward the front of the house together.
　　As they reached the foot of the stairs, Ames saw Mrs. Douglas coming down. He said that she was not running, and that she did not seem wild with fear. At that very moment Barker rushed out of the study and stopped her. He cried out that poor Jack was dead and begged her, again and again, to go back to her room. After a little persuasion she did go back. She made no loud cry. She gave no scream. Then Mrs. Allen took her upstairs while Barker and Ames returned to the room of the murder.
　　Ames said that the room was then exactly as the police later saw it. The lamp was burning, though the candle was not. He and Barker looked out into the dark through the open window, but they could see and hear nothing. After that they hurried into the hall, Ames lowered the drawbridge, and Barker went off for the police. That was all Ames could tell us. Yet even in that plain account there were one or two small things that stayed in my mind. Douglas had been uneasy that day, and Mrs. Douglas, by Ames’s account, had shown less outward shock than one might expect.
　　Mrs. Allen came next, and she confirmed much of what Ames had said. She had been getting ready for bed when the bell rang out sharply through the house. She was a little hard of hearing, and she had not noticed the shot itself. Still, she remembered hearing a sound earlier, perhaps half an hour before the bell. At the time she had thought it was only a door being shut somewhere in the house. She could add no more than that, but even so the detail was curious, for it suggested movement in the house before the murder was discovered.
　　She too had seen Barker come out of the study, white-faced and excited. She saw him stop Mrs. Douglas on the stairs and urge her to go back. Mrs. Allen could not hear the lady’s answer, but she obeyed. The housekeeper then took her upstairs and tried to comfort her. Mrs. Douglas, she said, was trembling all over and deeply shaken, yet she did not try again to go down. She sat in her dressing gown by the fire with her head in her hands, and Mrs. Allen remained with her for most of the night. The other servants, who slept in the far back part of the house, had heard nothing at all until the alarm spread. 
　　Cecil Barker was the next to speak, and from the first he gave the impression of a strong man holding himself tightly under control. About the events of the night, he said little that was new. He remained sure that the murderer had escaped by the window. The blood on the sill seemed final proof to him, and since the bridge had been up, he said there was no other way out. He could not explain what had become of the man afterward. Nor could he explain why the bicycle had been left behind, if indeed it belonged to the killer. Still, he would not move from the belief that a stranger had come, had killed Douglas, and had gone back across the moat.
　　Barker also offered a theory about the reason for the crime. Douglas, he said, had always been a reserved man where some parts of his past were concerned. He had left for America very young, had done well there, and Barker had first known him in California, where they had worked together at a mining place called Benito Canyon. Barker believed that the explanation of the murder must lie in those hidden years. Some old enemy from America, he thought, had found Douglas at last and struck him down in England. He also said that Douglas had carried a revolver with him at all times, so serious had this old danger once been. Only by bad luck, because he was in his dressing gown, had he been without it on that final night. 
　　Then the questions became sharper. MacDonald asked Barker about time, about his return from America, and about his closeness to the household. Barker admitted that he had come back to England about a month before Douglas married, and that he himself had stood as best man at the wedding. He also admitted, with growing anger, that he had seen much of Mrs. Douglas since then. At once the inspector pressed him farther. Had Douglas always approved of this friendship? Barker’s strong face changed at that question. He first refused to answer, and in refusing he gave more away than he meant to.
　　At last he spoke plainly. Douglas, he said, had one fault, and that fault was jealousy. He loved his wife deeply and was very fond of Barker as a friend. He was always inviting Barker to the house. Yet if he ever thought there was too much feeling or understanding between Barker and Mrs. Douglas, jealousy would suddenly rise in him and he would speak wildly. Barker said that more than once he had planned never to return for that very reason, but Douglas always wrote such warm and sorry letters afterward that he came back. It was a painful admission, and one could see that he made it only because he felt resistance would now do more harm than good.
　　Last of all came Mrs. Douglas herself. She was pale, dark, and self-controlled, and there was something in her face that suggested both suffering and strength. She confirmed that she had not entered the study after the shot. Barker had stopped her on the stairs and begged her to go back. She had put on her dressing gown when she heard the sound and had come down at once, but by the time she reached the stairs he had already met her. She could not say how long her husband had been downstairs before the shot. He always made his round of the house at night, she said, because he was nervous of fire. That was the only fear she had ever openly seen in him.
　　When she was asked about America, her answers changed the whole feeling of the inquiry. Yes, she said, she had long known that some danger hung over her husband. He would not explain it to her, not because he did not trust her, but because he wished to spare her fear. Yet a wife, she said with a quick little smile, can feel what her husband never says. She had seen it in his silences, in his caution, in his watchfulness when unexpected strangers appeared, and in the fear that rose in her own heart whenever he was late returning home. She had been sure for years that enemies were somewhere behind him and that he was never truly safe.
　　Holmes asked her what words had given her that impression. She answered at once. Her husband had sometimes spoken of “the Valley of Fear.” He had told her that he had been in it and was not yet out of it. When she had asked whether they would ever escape it, he had sometimes answered that perhaps they never would. She believed it was a real place, some valley in which a terrible thing had happened to him. He had never told her more, but once, during a fever after a hunting accident, he had spoken one name again and again with anger and horror. That name was McGinty, or more exactly, Bodymaster McGinty. She had asked him later who this man was, but he had only laughed and refused to explain.
　　Then MacDonald asked the question about the missing wedding ring. If this was truly the act of some old enemy from America, what could the taking of that ring possibly mean? At that moment I thought I saw the faintest shadow of a smile pass over Mrs. Douglas’s face. It vanished at once, and she answered that she could not tell. But I was almost certain that the expression had been real. If so, then she knew more than she was willing to say. Holmes saw it too, I think, though he gave no sign.
　　So the chapter of witnesses ended, and instead of bringing us nearer to the truth, it made the mystery richer and deeper. We now had an uneasy husband, a jealous heart, an old danger in America, a dark phrase called the Valley of Fear, the name of a man called Bodymaster McGinty, and a widow who seemed to hide knowledge behind self-control. The room of the murder still stood before us with all its strange signs. But now the people of the house had become as strange as the room itself, and Holmes had begun, I could tell, to look less at the window and more at the living faces around him.

Part 6

　　Before I left the Manor House, one more small event changed the whole shape of the case. Holmes asked Ames what Barker had been wearing on his feet when he first came into the study after the shot. Ames answered that Barker had worn bedroom slippers, and that they were still lying under a chair in the hall. Holmes took them at once to the study window, examined the blood upon their soles, and then pressed one slipper down upon the mark on the sill. It fitted exactly.
　　MacDonald gave a cry of triumph. The broad stain on the sill had not been made by the boot of a stranger at all. It had been made by Barker himself. So the window clue, which had seemed the strongest proof that the killer escaped through the moat, was suddenly worth nothing. Holmes said little, but his quiet look told me that one false sign often means many more.
　　The three detectives then remained busy with their own inquiries, and I returned alone toward the inn. On my way I walked for a little while in the old garden beside the house. Ancient yew trees stood there in strange shapes, and there was a wide lawn with an old sundial in the middle. After the horror of the study, the place seemed so peaceful that for a moment I could almost forget what had happened there. 
　　But it was in that quiet garden that I saw something which troubled me more deeply than any stain of blood. At the far end, hidden by a thick yew hedge, there was a stone seat. As I came near it, I heard a man’s voice and a woman’s low laugh. The next moment I turned the corner and found Mrs. Douglas and Cecil Barker sitting together.
　　What shocked me was not simply that they were together. It was the look upon their faces. In the dining room Mrs. Douglas had seemed full of grief and self-control. Now all that had gone. Her eyes were bright, and her face was still alive with amusement, while Barker leaned toward her with a smile upon his strong, handsome face. When they saw me, both changed at once and put on serious expressions, but the change came too late. 
　　Barker rose and came toward me with a polite word, and then the lady herself spoke. She said that I must think her cold and hard. I answered that it was no concern of mine. Yet she begged me to stay for one question. Since I knew Holmes better than anyone there, she wished to ask whether a matter told to him in confidence must always be passed on to the police.
　　Barker too was eager for the answer. They wanted to know whether Holmes was truly independent or whether he worked wholly with the officials. I told them what I believed to be the truth. Holmes was his own master and acted by his own judgment, but he was loyal to the police when they were honestly at work on the same case. He would not hide anything that would help them to bring a criminal to justice. After saying this, I left them, and when I looked back, they were still speaking earnestly together about our conversation.
　　Holmes returned to the inn about five o’clock with a fine appetite for tea, eggs, and toast. I told him what I had seen in the garden and what they had asked me. He only laughed in his dry way and said that he wanted none of their private secrets, for such secrets become awkward things if one must later arrest people for conspiracy and murder. When I asked whether he truly thought it might come to that, he answered with more cheerfulness than comfort.
　　He said that the whole matter now turned on one thing which no one else seemed to value properly. It was not the gun, the bicycle, or even the missing ring. It was the missing dumb-bell from the pair that ought to have been in the study. Holmes made a joke of it, speaking of the terrible danger to the body of a man who trained himself on one side only, but beneath the joke I could see that he was entirely serious. When Holmes laughed over a small point, it often meant that he had already found its place in the chain. 
　　At last he lit his pipe and began to speak more openly. The first truth, he said, was simple. Barker had lied. Mrs. Douglas had supported the lie, and therefore she also was lying. The question now was not whether there had been false evidence, but why those two people were trying so hard to hide the real course of events.
　　Holmes then explained why the common story could not possibly be true. Barker had said that after the shot the killer had less than a minute to escape. But in that minute, according to the story, the man must have removed the nugget ring, taken off the wedding ring beneath it, put the nugget ring back again, laid the strange card by the body, and gone out through the window. Holmes said that no reasonable mind could believe such a chain of actions in so short a time. The whole thing was a clumsy invention. 
　　Nor could the ring matter be explained by saying that it was taken before the murder. The candle on the table had burned only a very little, so there had not been a long talk after Douglas entered the room. Was Douglas, a bold and strong man, likely to hand over his wedding ring at once because a stranger asked for it? Holmes thought not. His own view was that the man who faced Douglas had been alone with him for some time, with the lamp lit, before the final shot was fired.
　　That led to Holmes’s next point. If the shot had truly killed Douglas, then it must have been heard at the real moment of death. Yet Barker and Mrs. Douglas had both given an account which made the time too late. Holmes believed that the murder had taken place not at a quarter past eleven, but at least half an hour earlier. In that case, Barker and Mrs. Douglas had reached the room long before the alarm was given and had therefore possessed time enough to change the scene. 
　　Holmes supported this by using the servants’ evidence. Until half past ten, people were still moving about the house. After that, the place grew quiet. Mrs. Allen had heard what she thought was a door slamming about half an hour before the bell rang, and Holmes believed that this sound mattered. He also reminded me that Douglas usually put on his dressing gown around a quarter to eleven and then made his nightly round through the house. All this pointed, in Holmes’s mind, to a crime committed earlier than anyone had admitted.
　　Later that evening Holmes also told me what MacDonald had built from the inquiries at Tunbridge Wells. A man calling himself Hargrave had come there with a bicycle and a valise, and he matched in a general way the appearance of a hard American of about Douglas’s age and build. He had worn a gray suit and a short yellow overcoat, and a sawed-off shotgun might easily have been hidden in his luggage or beneath that coat. MacDonald believed that this man had ridden to Birlstone, hidden his bicycle among the bushes, and meant at first to shoot Douglas outside the house.
　　When Douglas failed to appear, MacDonald thought, the man had entered by the lowered bridge, slipped into the first room, hidden behind the curtain, and waited until Douglas came in upon his usual round. Then he had fired, fled, and abandoned the bicycle because it would be too easy to trace. Holmes admitted that this was clear enough as one half of the matter. But his own half was darker. Barker and Mrs. Douglas, he said, had almost certainly helped the murderer to escape, or at the very least had reached the room before he had escaped and had then covered his track by lowering the bridge and inventing the story of the window.
　　White Mason and MacDonald both found this hard to accept. Why would an English lady shelter an American killer? Holmes answered that he freely admitted the difficulty. Yet difficulty was not impossibility, and the false window mark had already proved that a lie existed at the heart of the case. He then said he meant to make a small investigation of his own that night. For it, he said, he needed only darkness, my umbrella, and the help of the faithful Ames.
　　It was very late when Holmes came back to our room at the inn. I was half asleep when I heard him enter. He stood beside my bed for a moment with his candle in his hand and then bent down toward me. In a low voice he asked whether I would be afraid to sleep in the same room with a madman, a man whose mind had gone soft. I answered in surprise that I would not be afraid at all.
　　“That is lucky,” said Holmes. He gave me no more than that. He put down his candle, and though I was now more awake than before, I could get nothing further from him. So ended that strange day, with Holmes full of secret thought, the Manor House still hiding its truth, and the one missing dumb-bell somehow standing at the center of it all. 

Part 7

　　The next morning, after breakfast, we found MacDonald and White Mason in close talk over a pile of letters and telegrams. Reports of the bicyclist were coming in from many towns at once. It seemed that half England was full of men in yellow coats, and in more than one place the police had already arrested the wrong person. Holmes looked at the papers with cheerful sympathy and then calmly told them to stop. He said they were wasting their strength on the wrong hunt.
　　This advice was not well received. MacDonald grew sharp and angry and said that Holmes was keeping too much to himself. Holmes admitted that he was indeed holding something back, but only until he had proved one last point. He then surprised us still more by talking about a little printed history of the Manor House which he had bought from the village shop. Out of that old history, he said, one might learn a useful thing: such houses often had hidden places built into them.
　　Holmes then spoke more plainly. The missing dumb-bell had led him on. He had gone again to the study the night before, with the help of Ames, and had found what he was looking for. He still would not tell us exactly where or what it was, but he said enough to make it clear that the bicyclist was no longer the center of the case. According to Holmes, we did not yet understand what crime we were really examining. 
　　At last he told MacDonald to write a note to Barker. The note was to say that the moat would be drained the next morning, because something important might have been thrown into it. MacDonald protested that no such draining could actually be done, but Holmes brushed the objection aside and insisted that the letter be sent all the same. Then he told us to meet him again before dark. Until then, he said, the case had reached a pause.
　　When evening came, we gathered again and followed Holmes through the grounds until we reached a thick shrubbery facing the drawbridge and the study window. There we crouched in the cold and waited. Holmes was in high spirits and spoke, as he sometimes did, of the dramatic side of our work. MacDonald, who was freezing and losing patience, said that he would prefer less drama and more plain meaning. Holmes only told him to wait and keep quiet.
　　It was a bitter watch. The moat gave off a damp cold that seemed to go through our bones. Most of the house was dark, but the study still showed a steady light. We waited so long that even Holmes seemed uncertain how much longer it would be. Then at last a shadow passed before the lamp, the window was opened, and a man leaned out carefully into the darkness.
　　We could hear the soft sound of water being stirred. The man was moving something below the window. A moment later he pulled a heavy round object up through the opening, like a fisherman pulling in a catch. At once Holmes sprang to his feet and ran for the house, and the three of us rushed after him. Ames opened the door in astonishment, and Holmes pushed past him without a word.
　　In the study stood Cecil Barker with the lamp in his hand. On the floor near the writing table lay a wet bundle tied with cord. Holmes bent over it at once and said that this was what he had expected to find: a bundle weighted with the missing dumb-bell and hidden in the moat. Barker stared at him in complete amazement and asked how he could possibly have known. Holmes answered that he had not only known of it, but had taken it out the night before and then put it back.
　　Holmes then explained the whole trick. Since one dumb-bell was gone and water was close at hand, he had guessed that something heavy had been sunk in the moat. With Ames’s help and the curved handle of my umbrella, he had pulled up the bundle and examined it in secret. Then, in order to prove who had hidden it, he had sent the false message about draining the moat. As he had expected, the guilty person had tried to recover the bundle that very night, and we had all seen him do it.
　　Holmes untied the bundle and laid its contents out before us. There was the missing dumb-bell, a pair of American boots, a long knife in its sheath, underclothes, socks, a gray suit, and a short yellow overcoat. That coat was the most important thing of all. Its inside pocket had been lengthened so that a cut-down shotgun could be hidden there, and the tailor’s mark showed that it had been made in Vermissa, in the United States. Holmes at once linked this with the card marked V.V. and with the dark phrase Mrs. Douglas had heard from her husband: the Valley of Fear.
　　Barker tried for a moment to fight Holmes with silence and bitter words, but Holmes told him that enough had already been shown. Then the deadlock was broken by Mrs. Douglas, who entered the room from the doorway where she had been listening. She said that Barker had done enough and that the time had come to stop. Holmes answered her with respect and urged her to trust the police and ask Mr. Douglas to tell his own story. At that, to our total astonishment, a man stepped out from a dark corner of the room itself.
　　Mrs. Douglas ran to him at once, and Barker caught his hand. It was John Douglas, alive and well. For a moment even I could do nothing but stare. He had been hidden in the house, in one of those old secret spaces of which Holmes had spoken. He handed me a packet of papers and said that they contained the long story of the Valley of Fear, but Holmes said that the past could wait. First, we needed the story of the present. 
　　MacDonald could hardly contain himself. If this was John Douglas, then whose death had we been studying? Holmes answered that once he had found the clothes in the moat, the answer had become clear. The dead man could not be Douglas at all, but must be the unknown bicyclist from Tunbridge Wells. Since the house had old hiding places and since Barker and Mrs. Douglas had clearly been helping someone, Holmes had concluded that Douglas himself was concealed somewhere under that very roof. 
　　Douglas then began to speak. He said that powerful enemies had hunted him for years and would never let him rest while he lived. On the day before the supposed murder, he had gone to Tunbridge Wells and there caught sight of the most dangerous of them all, a man named Ted Baldwin. Douglas came home ready for trouble, and for the rest of that day he kept close watch. Still, he never imagined that Baldwin had already entered the house and was waiting inside it. 
　　That night, when Douglas entered the study on his usual round, he at once felt that danger was near. Then he saw a boot under the curtain and understood. He put down his candle and snatched up the hammer. Baldwin rushed him with a knife, but Douglas struck at him, and the knife fell. The two men then struggled over the shotgun. At some point during that desperate fight, the gun went off, and both barrels struck Baldwin full in the face.
　　Barker came down at once, and Mrs. Douglas was close behind him, but Douglas stopped her before she could enter. Since the servants had heard nothing, only the three of them knew what had happened. Then Douglas saw the branded mark of the lodge on Baldwin’s arm, the same mark he himself carried. In that instant he formed a bold plan. Baldwin was close enough to him in build that, with his face destroyed, the body might pass for his own.
　　He and Barker acted quickly. They dressed the dead man in Douglas’s clothes and put Douglas’s rings on his hand as well as they could. But the wedding ring would not come off, and so that one detail had to be left wrong. Douglas also put a bit of plaster on the dead man’s face to match a plaster he himself was wearing, though there had really been no wound beneath it. Baldwin’s own clothes, boots, knife, and overcoat were tied into a bundle, weighted with the dumb-bell, and thrown into the moat. The card Baldwin had meant to leave by Douglas’s body was left beside Baldwin’s own instead. 
　　After that, Barker opened the window, made the false blood mark on the sill, and rang the bell loudly for the household. Douglas slipped into the hidden place and stayed there while the police searched for a dead man who was not dead. He said openly that he had hoped by this trick to escape British law and, more importantly, to make his enemies believe that he had at last been killed. If they believed Baldwin had done his work, they might stop hunting him. That, he said, was why he had agreed to so desperate a plan.
　　When Douglas had finished, he asked one direct question: how would English law judge him? Holmes answered that English law was in the main a just law and that Douglas need not fear more than he deserved. But Holmes’s own face had grown grave. He asked how Baldwin had learned where Douglas lived, how he had entered the house, and who had guided him so exactly. Douglas could not answer. Then Holmes gave a final warning. The danger, he said, was not over. Worse trouble might still be coming, and Douglas must remain on his guard.

Part 8

　　The story now moved far away from the quiet English house and back into an older and darker world. We were no longer in Sussex, but in a valley in America where smoke, fire, and fear lay over the land. Into that place there came one evening a young man from Chicago, John McMurdo, carrying a leather bag and wearing both confidence and danger upon him. He was quick in speech, hard in manner, and ready at every moment for trouble. Even before he reached his new home, it was plain that he was not a man who would pass unseen through any town. 
　　He sat in a railway car among miners and workmen while two policemen rode there as well. The talk turned, as talk often does among strangers, to where a man has come from and what he means to do. McMurdo said that he had come last from Chicago, that he was new to those parts, and that he had heard there was always work for a willing man. He also showed from the first that he carried a weapon and knew how to use it. When another man noticed this and asked about it, McMurdo answered with a short smile that a man sometimes needed such things where he came from.
　　The workman beside him then asked whether he belonged to the union. McMurdo answered yes. That was enough to settle one matter, for in that coal and iron country a union man could usually find a place. When he was asked whether he had friends there, he said not yet, but added that he had the means to make them. Then he explained what he meant. He belonged to the Eminent Order of Freemen, and in any town with a lodge, he said, he could count on finding brothers ready to receive him.
　　Those words changed the whole tone of the conversation. The man beside him became careful and secretive at once. He looked around to make sure no one else was truly listening, moved closer, and tested McMurdo with a sign and answer known to the order. McMurdo answered correctly and without hesitation. So the stranger gave his own name as Brother Scanlan of Lodge 341 in Vermissa Valley and welcomed him there as a fellow member. At once the two men spoke with an ease and trust that had not been there before.
　　Scanlan asked why a clever and active man had left Chicago when there had surely been work enough there. McMurdo answered darkly and nodded toward the policemen in the car. He made it plain that he had left trouble behind him, deep trouble, perhaps even something worse than prison. When Scanlan asked whether it had been a killing, McMurdo did not deny it. He grew sharp when too many questions were put to him, and his gray eyes flashed out from behind his glasses in sudden anger. Yet this only seemed to raise him in Scanlan’s opinion, not lower him.
　　As the train moved deeper into the valley, the night outside grew more terrible. Furnaces flamed in the darkness, smoke drifted over the land, and the whole country seemed full of fire and labor. One of the policemen looked out and said that hell itself could hardly look worse. Then he turned to McMurdo and warned him to be careful in choosing his companions. There were men in that region, he said, whose company could ruin any newcomer. McMurdo did not take the warning kindly. He answered in a rough voice, and when the officer spoke of the great criminal power in the district, he did not shrink back from the subject as most men would have done. 
　　A little later the train stopped and Scanlan got out, but before he left he gave McMurdo advice which was clearly meant in earnest. If he ever found himself in trouble in Vermissa, he was to go straight to the Union House and ask for Boss McGinty. McGinty, Scanlan said, was Bodymaster of Lodge 341, and nothing in those parts could move unless Black Jack McGinty wished it. The words were simple, but they carried the full weight of the place. They showed that behind the common life of the town there stood another power, larger and more feared than the law.
　　Soon afterward the train reached Vermissa itself, the largest town on the line. McMurdo stepped down into darkness and mud, and one of the miners at once offered to show him the road to his lodging. Even before he had set foot properly in the town, his sharp tongue and bold answers to the police had made him noticed among the men. Vermissa was even uglier than the valley around it. The broad street had been beaten into wet, dirty tracks by constant traffic, the sidewalks were rough and narrow, and the gas lamps only made the long row of wooden houses look poorer and meaner.
　　Yet this ugly place was not merely poor. It was dangerous. As the miner guided him through the street, he pointed out the Union House, a large saloon and hotel, and said that McGinty ruled there. When McMurdo asked what sort of man he was, the miner seemed surprised that any stranger could fail to know the name. He lowered his voice and said that the whole country had heard of him because of “the affairs.” When McMurdo pressed him, the guide at last named the true subject: the Scowrers.
　　McMurdo answered that he had read of them in Chicago and had heard them called a gang of murderers. At this the guide stopped in alarm and begged him not to speak so openly in the street. A man could lose his life there for less than that, he said. He did not openly deny the charge. On the contrary, his fear seemed almost to admit it. In Vermissa, murder was not merely a crime that happened from time to time. It was something men expected, feared, and tried not to name.
　　At last they reached the house where McMurdo meant to stay. It belonged to Jacob Shafter, and it was a boarding house on Sheridan Street, recommended to him by a man in Chicago. McMurdo knocked, and the door was opened by a young woman. She was Ettie Shafter, the daughter of the house, and from the first moment her beauty struck him deeply. She welcomed him in, saying that her father would soon return, and invited him to sit by the stove until terms could be arranged. Her mother was dead, she said, and she herself looked after the house.
　　Jacob Shafter soon came in, a heavy older man, and McMurdo explained why he had come. He had the address from Chicago, was ready to pay in advance, and made no trouble over price or conditions. Old Shafter, finding that the new lodger had money enough and seemed satisfied with the terms, agreed at once. For seven dollars a week, paid beforehand, McMurdo was to have both board and lodging under that roof. The agreement was simple and practical, but it marked the true beginning of all that followed.
　　So John McMurdo, a young man with a hidden past, a quick temper, and friends already waiting for him among dangerous brothers, entered the house of the Shafters. Behind him lay Chicago and some dark trouble there. Before him lay Vermissa, the Union House, Boss McGinty, and the power of the Scowrers. He had reached the valley into which, years later, John Douglas would say that he had once gone and never fully escaped. 

Part 9

　　McMurdo soon became the most noticeable man in the Shafter house. There were many boarders there, but most of them were quiet and ordinary men, while he had brightness, daring, and force enough for ten. In the evenings his talk was the liveliest, his jokes the quickest, and his songs the best. Men liked him at once, yet they also learned to be careful with him, for beneath his charm there was a fierce temper that could leap out in a moment. He also showed open hatred for the law and for policemen, and in that rough valley such hatred won him both respect and approval from some of the men around him.
　　From the first days under that roof, he made no secret of his love for Ettie Shafter. He told her almost at once that she had won his heart, and after that he repeated the same message again and again with cheerful boldness. If she said that there was another man, he only answered that this was bad luck for that other man and not a reason for him to give up hope. He had a smooth tongue, a warm manner, and the kind of half-hidden past that often draws a woman’s sympathy before it draws her love. Soon Ettie was listening to him with pity, wonder, and an affection that she could no longer fully hide from herself.
　　He spoke to her of Ireland, of green valleys and distant hills, and of the beauty of his native land seen through memory from a place of smoke and dirt. He spoke also of the northern cities, of camps and mills, and at last of Chicago, where strange things had happened to him, things too close and too dangerous to be fully told. There was romance in his silences and danger in his hints, and these worked upon Ettie’s imagination. Yet he did not live only on speech. He found temporary work as a bookkeeper, for he was an educated man, and so he had at least the look of someone who could build a life as well as talk about one.
　　Still, there was one duty he had neglected. He had not yet gone to report himself to Boss McGinty, the head of the local lodge. One evening Mike Scanlan came to remind him of this failure, and he did so with more urgency than friendship alone could explain. He said plainly that McMurdo had been foolish not to go to the Union House at once and make himself known. If McGinty heard of a stranger brother living in the district and not presenting himself, the matter would not end well. There was a dark meaning in Scanlan’s warning, and when McMurdo said that the order must surely be the same in Vermissa as it was in Chicago, Scanlan looked at him in a way that suggested the opposite.
　　That same evening another conversation pushed him in the same direction. Old Jacob Shafter called him aside and told him directly that his interest in Ettie was useless. Someone else had come before him. When McMurdo pressed for the name, the old man at last gave it: Ted Baldwin. Even then the name would have mattered little to a newcomer, but Shafter added something more serious. Baldwin, he said, was one of the bosses of the Scowrers. At that word the whole atmosphere of the room changed, for the old man lowered his voice at once, as every man did when he spoke of that terrible society.
　　McMurdo asked what the Scowrers were, and Shafter answered with bitter force that they were in truth the local form of the very order to which McMurdo belonged. Elsewhere, McMurdo said, the society was known only for charity and good fellowship. In Vermissa, replied the old man, it was a murder society. He pointed to the many killings in the valley as proof and declared that every man and woman in the district knew it. McMurdo demanded facts and not gossip, but Shafter would not change his ground. He said that if McMurdo stayed long enough, he would see proof for himself.
　　The talk ended badly for McMurdo. Shafter, frightened for his daughter and deeply suspicious of any man connected with that order, told him that he could not remain in the house after that night. The young man then found Ettie alone and poured out both his love and his trouble. He told her that he cared little for losing his room, but he could not bear the thought of losing her. She answered with pain and honesty. She had already said that she could promise no one else because of the earlier claim upon her, yet when he asked whether he might have had a chance if he had come first, she broke down and cried that she wished with all her heart he had.
　　McMurdo fell to his knees beside her and urged her to trust her heart rather than an old half-promise. He took her hand and begged her to say that she would be his, and for one moment it seemed that she might agree if only he would take her away from the valley. But at that point his face hardened. He refused to leave. He would not go like a man driven out by fear, and he declared that he could hold her against the whole world there in Vermissa itself. Ettie tried to make him understand that he did not yet know Baldwin or McGinty or the true power of the Scowrers, but he answered that he did not fear them and did not even fully believe in them.
　　It was in the middle of this talk that Ted Baldwin himself came in. He entered like a man who thought he already owned the place and the woman in it. He was young, bold, handsome in a hard way, and dangerous in every line of his face. Ettie rose in alarm and tried to smooth the meeting over by introducing the two men, but the effort failed at once. Baldwin asked who McMurdo was and then openly declared that the girl was his. McMurdo answered that he had heard of no such claim, and from that point the quarrel became open. Baldwin told him to go out and leave them. McMurdo answered that he had no wish to walk anywhere. When Baldwin then offered a fight, McMurdo sprang up with pleasure and welcomed the proposal. 
　　Ettie was in despair. She begged Baldwin to be kind and reasonable, and she begged McMurdo not to go forward. But the men were already measuring one another. McMurdo suggested that they step outside to settle things. Baldwin, however, chose a more threatening course. He said that he would have his revenge without dirtying his hands and that McMurdo would wish he had never entered that house. With that promise hanging in the air, he turned and went out, and the danger became far greater because it had moved from a plain fistfight to the darker methods of the valley. 
　　Ettie then told McMurdo the truth as fully as she could. Baldwin, she said, had pressed her for marriage for a long time, and both she and her father feared him because of the men behind him. That was why she had never truly given her heart to Baldwin, but had only put him off as best she could. She begged McMurdo again to leave with her and take her father too, so that all three might escape the valley and its wicked men. Once more a struggle passed across his face, and once more he mastered it. He promised that no harm should come to her or to her father, but he would not yet go. At last he said that if she would wait, he would try to find an honorable way out within some months, perhaps within a year. It was not all she wanted, but it was enough to give her some small hope.
　　After this, McMurdo went at last to the Union House to meet Boss McGinty. The place was a saloon, noisy and rough, and McGinty himself stood there like a king in his own court. He was a huge black-bearded man, broad and powerful, with thick eyebrows and cruel eyes. Yet he also had political standing in the town, for men called him Councillor as well as Bodymaster. McMurdo did not approach him humbly. He spoke with bold ease, praised his appearance in a joking way, and gave the secret sign of the order as he drank to their better acquaintance. This pleased and irritated McGinty at the same time, and he took the newcomer behind the bar for a private test. 
　　In the little room behind the bar, McGinty tried him hard. He questioned him on the details of lodge membership, and McMurdo answered every test correctly. Then McGinty drew a revolver and warned him that if he was playing any false game, he would die where he stood. McMurdo did not lose color. Instead, he answered with dignity, then with daring. When pressed about his past, he at last showed a newspaper cutting about the killing of a man in Chicago and admitted that he himself had done it. He added that before that he had worked as a counterfeiter, making false dollars and passing them into use, and that he had come to the coal country because he had heard men there were not too particular. McGinty, far from being shocked, was delighted.
　　McMurdo then went even further. He produced counterfeit coins from his own pocket and showed how perfect they were. McGinty saw at once that such a man could be useful. When he asked whether McMurdo had been afraid of the drawn gun, the Irishman answered that the danger had been McGinty’s rather than his own, for he too had been holding a cocked pistol ready in his pocket all the while. This won the Bodymaster completely. McGinty laughed with admiration and said that the lodge had not had such a bold recruit in many years.
　　At that very moment Ted Baldwin burst into the room and demanded to speak about McMurdo. Holmes once said that the worst men often hate those most who resemble them, and so it seemed here. Baldwin was furious, but McMurdo at once insisted that the matter be spoken openly and not behind his back. The quarrel over Ettie was laid before McGinty, who ruled in a rough and ready way that the girl was free to choose between them. Baldwin, mad with anger, challenged the ruling itself, and in an instant McGinty flew at him with the violence of a wild beast. He seized him by the throat and flung him across a barrel, and would have killed him then and there if McMurdo had not helped to pull him off.
　　After that terrible outburst, McGinty became cheerful again as quickly as a storm passing. He brought out wine and made both men drink the lodge’s peace toast with the proper words and signs. Baldwin had to take McMurdo’s hand under the watchful eye of the Bodymaster, though the hatred in him remained plain. McGinty ended the matter by saying that the girl must choose for herself and that the question lay beyond even a Bodymaster’s power. Then he told McMurdo that he must be formally received into Lodge 341 on Saturday night. They had their own methods in Vermissa, he said, unlike those in Chicago, and after that meeting McMurdo would be made truly free of the valley.

Part 10

　　The day after his meeting with Boss McGinty, McMurdo left old Shafter’s house and moved to the Widow MacNamara’s on the far edge of the town. Soon afterward Scanlan moved in with him, and the two men found there the freedom they wanted. The old Irish widow let them alone, asked few questions, and was content so long as her rent was paid. McMurdo still went often to the Shafters for meals, however, and so his meetings with Ettie were not broken off. On the contrary, they became more frequent and more intimate as the weeks passed.
　　In his new room McMurdo felt safe enough to bring out the coining tools which he had hidden until then. Under promises of silence, several members of the lodge were allowed to see them. They watched with delight as he struck false dollars so perfect that they could pass anywhere without fear. The brothers admired his skill deeply, and many of them carried away examples in their pockets. They could not understand why a man with such an easy illegal gift bothered to work honestly at all, and he answered that a man who lived with no visible income would quickly draw the eye of the police.
　　By now he was a familiar and welcome face at McGinty’s saloon. The rough men who filled the place called one another “the boys,” and McMurdo fitted among them at once. His bold tongue, his fearlessness, and the speed with which he had already beaten one man in a saloon fight had made him respected. He was becoming one of them, and the approval of such a gang was not lightly won.
　　Then came an incident which raised him higher still in their eyes. One evening, when the saloon was crowded, a man entered in the blue uniform of the mine police, that special force raised by the railways and coal owners because the ordinary law could not control the violence of the valley. There was a hush when he came in, though McGinty himself showed no outward surprise. The newcomer gave his name as Captain Marvin and spoke in a calm, practical tone, as one man of authority to another.
　　McGinty answered him coldly and with open dislike. He called the mine police tools of the capitalists and said that Vermissa had no need of imported law. Marvin did not argue much, but as he turned to go his eye fell upon McMurdo, and he broke into a grin of recognition. He said that here was an old acquaintance from Chicago. McMurdo at once met him with hatred, declaring that he had never been friend to any policeman in his life.
　　The captain pressed him, however, and said openly that he was Jack McMurdo of Chicago and a known crooked man there. The words were dangerous, for they linked the newcomer not only with crime in general but with the police by name. Yet McMurdo did not shrink from the charge. He admitted who he was and answered blow for blow in hard language, until the whole saloon seemed to draw close around them. In the end Marvin went away, but the scene left behind it exactly the impression that helped McMurdo most. He had stood up to the law in public and shown no fear.
　　The effect of this upon the lodge was immediate. Men now believed all the more strongly in his dark past and in the hardness of his nature. So when Saturday night came and he entered Lodge 341 to be formally received, there was already a feeling in the room that he was no common recruit. The meeting was thick with smoke, loud with rough talk and drunken laughter, and full of the brutal faces which ruled the valley from behind secrecy and terror. McGinty sat in his place like a king among wolves, while Baldwin and the others watched the newcomer with keen and hostile eyes.
　　The initiation itself was no harmless game. In Chicago McMurdo had already known the outer forms of the order, but in Vermissa the brethren had harsher methods. There were signs, questions, and dark jests, and there was also a cruel physical test which left its mark upon him. When it was done, he had been made free of Lodge 341 in the valley’s own fashion, and the fresh brand upon his arm would remain with him as proof. Later he was to wake with that arm swollen and painful, but he had passed through the business without complaint and had therefore risen yet further in the opinion of the men around him.
　　On that same night he saw more clearly than ever what kind of brotherhood this was. The lodge did not meet merely to drink, boast, and exchange signs. It met to judge crimes and order new ones. A case was brought before them about payment for the shooting of an old man, and it was discussed not with shame but with the dry interest of men speaking of wages honestly earned. That alone showed McMurdo what sort of world he had entered.
　　Before long another matter came up which was even more immediate. The local newspaper, the Vermissa Herald, had written strongly against the Scowrers and the terror under which the valley lived. For that reason its editor, old Stanger, had been marked down for punishment. McGinty did not want him killed, because murder of a newspaper editor might bring too much public anger. But he wanted the man badly beaten as a warning, and Ted Baldwin eagerly offered to lead the party. Several others were named to go with him, and because McGinty had promised the new brother a place, McMurdo was included as well.
　　They left the saloon late on a bitter cold night and made their way in twos and threes through the empty streets so as not to attract attention. At last they gathered in a yard facing the newspaper office. Light shone from the windows, and the sound of the press could be heard within. Baldwin placed McMurdo and another man below at the entrance while he led the rest up the stairs. Even at that moment Baldwin’s hatred for McMurdo was plain, for he gave the order in a rough and insulting way. McMurdo, however, held his temper and did as he was told.
　　What followed came quickly and violently. There was a cry from above, the crash of movement, and then old Stanger rushed out onto the landing in terror. He was seized at once. His spectacles fell ringing down the stairs, and in another second he was on the floor with half a dozen sticks beating upon him. The attack had all the savage joy of men long used to violence. They struck again and again, and the old editor writhed helplessly under their blows. 
　　Baldwin was the worst of them all. Even after the others had done enough, he kept striking with a cruel smile on his face, choosing each exposed part of the old man’s body and head. Blood was already in the white hair of the victim when McMurdo could bear no more. He rushed up the stairs, shoved Baldwin back, and cried that they would kill the man if they continued. Baldwin turned on him in fury and raised his stick, but McMurdo had his pistol out in an instant and swore he would blow Baldwin’s face in if he came a step nearer.
　　That sudden stand changed the whole scene. One of the others admitted that McMurdo was right, and below them a warning voice cried that lights were appearing in the windows all up the street. The town was waking. There was no more time for quarrels. Leaving Stanger half dead upon the landing, the gang rushed down and out into the frozen night. Some returned boldly to the Union House, where witnesses could later swear they had been there all evening. Others, including McMurdo, slipped away through side streets and reached their homes by longer paths. 
　　The police, however, moved faster than usual. Whether from courage, anger, or public pressure after the attack on the Herald, they struck back the next day. McMurdo was sitting with McGinty when Captain Marvin and armed men burst into the room. This time the charge was clear. He was accused of taking part in the beating of old Editor Stanger. McGinty protested loudly, but the captain would not be turned aside. He disarmed McMurdo, searched his house, and marched him through the darkening streets to the police station while bystanders shouted curses after the prisoner and called for the lynching of the Scowrers. 
　　Yet even inside prison walls the power of the lodge still reached him. Baldwin and several others were already there, and that same night a jailer brought them whisky, glasses, and cards hidden among their bedding. It was as if the law itself had become only another room in which the Scowrers held their own rough club. The prisoners laughed away the night and went to court next morning with little fear of what was to come.
　　Their confidence was justified. The men from the newspaper office could not clearly identify the attackers in the poor light and confusion, though they believed the accused were among them. Old Stanger himself had been taken too much by surprise to describe more than that the first man who struck him wore a moustache. Against this stood the smooth and unfailing alibi prepared by McGinty. Witnesses, including the Councillor himself, swore that the accused men had been at a card party in the Union House until long after the attack. Under such testimony the court could do little. The prisoners walked free.
　　So McMurdo ended his first full step into the life of Lodge 341 stronger than before. He had been received by the brotherhood, had borne its mark on his body, had shared in one of its crimes, had defied Baldwin, and had then come safely through the hands of the law. In the eyes of the valley’s dark rulers, he was now truly one of them. And yet, even in that success, there had been one small break in the black current. When the old editor lay helpless under the blows, it was McMurdo and not another who had stopped the beating before it turned to murder. 

Part 11

　　When McMurdo woke the next morning, he had no need to be told that he had entered a new life. His head ached from drink, and the fresh mark on his arm was swollen and burning. He stayed away from work, wrote a long letter, and then read the Daily Herald. There he found a report of the outrage at the newspaper office, with the paper openly naming the secret society as the cause and declaring that the law might once again fail to punish the guilty.
　　He had hardly finished the report when a note was brought to him by a boy. It was unsigned and asked him to come at once to Miller Hill, to the flagstaff in the public park, because the writer had something important to say. The hand was educated and clearly masculine, and that alone made the matter more curious. After a little hesitation McMurdo decided that he must see it through. 
　　Miller Hill lay bleak and empty in winter, though in summer it was a place of music and crowds. From its height one could see the whole blackened town, the mines, the factories, and the snowy ridges beyond. When McMurdo reached the bare flagstaff, he found there not an unknown enemy or a romantic stranger, but Brother Morris, the very man who had already shown signs of fear and weakness in the lodge. Morris had his hat pulled low and his coat collar turned up, like a man who feared even the cold air might carry his words to other ears.
　　Morris began in a nervous and broken way. He said that in times like those a man could trust no one fully and that even a thought seemed to find its way back to McGinty. McMurdo answered sharply that only the night before he had sworn loyalty to the Bodymaster and that he could not be asked to break such an oath at once. But as he watched the older man’s trembling face, he softened and said that he would listen, though he promised neither help nor agreement. 
　　Then Morris spoke from the very heart of his misery. He said that he was a good Catholic, yet even the priest would not speak with him now that he was known as a Scowrer. He had lost peace, faith, and self-respect, and he could see McMurdo moving toward the same dark end. Was the young man ready, he asked, to become a cold-blooded murderer also, or could anything still be done before it was too late?
　　McMurdo asked him what he himself would do, and Morris answered at once that he would never inform, for that would mean certain death. But that did not make the evil less real. He pointed down into the valley and said that the smoke from the chimneys was not the darkest cloud there. Over the whole place hung another cloud, lower and heavier, the cloud of murder and terror. This, he said, was truly the Valley of Fear, and anyone who lived there long enough would learn it in his own soul.
　　McMurdo did not laugh at him, but neither did he yield. He said that Morris was too weak for such a country and that the wiser course for him would be to sell his business, take what little he could get, and leave the valley forever. Still, he promised that what had been said would go no farther. The two men then agreed on a false story in case their meeting had been observed. Morris had offered McMurdo a clerkship in his dry goods store, and McMurdo had refused it. With that understanding, they parted.
　　The false story was needed sooner than either of them might have wished. That very afternoon Boss McGinty himself came to McMurdo’s rooms. He was all rough power, coarse good humor, and hidden suspicion, and after a few easy words and a glass of whisky he asked directly what Morris had wanted on Miller Hill. McMurdo gave the prepared answer at once. Morris, he said, thought he was short of work and had offered him a place in a store, but he had refused because he could earn far more money in his own room. 
　　McGinty accepted the answer, but only after pressing him hard. He warned McMurdo not to go about too much with Morris, for Morris was not thought loyal at heart. The lodge, he said, was watching him and waiting for the right time to deal with him. Then, with a laugh that was more threatening than cheerful, McGinty added that it was his business to know everything that happened in the township. A man living in Vermissa, he meant, should assume that eyes were always on him. 
　　This lesson had barely ended when the door crashed open and Captain Marvin entered with armed police. McMurdo reached for his pistol, but the leveled rifles stopped him. He was arrested for taking part in the beating of old Editor Stanger. McGinty shouted about the rights of honest citizens and the lawless behavior of the police, yet behind all his noise lay a fact that everyone understood. The law and the lodge had now come close enough to touch one another in open daylight. 
　　Whatever public face he showed afterward, the incident left its mark on McMurdo’s mind. He began to act like a man who truly expected sudden danger. Papers that might harm him were destroyed. He moved more carefully than before. And on his way to the lodge one evening, he paused outside old Shafter’s house and called Ettie softly to the window.
　　She saw at once from his face that something serious had happened. McMurdo told her that bad news had reached him and that the time might soon come when he must leave the valley in haste. He spoke of trouble, of pursuit, and of the need to think ahead before the blow fell. Then he asked the one thing that mattered most to him: if he went, would she go with him? Ettie answered with all her heart that she would. She would not wait behind for letters that might never come. She would go with him wherever he led.
　　That promise should have driven him away from Vermissa at once. Instead, the opposite seemed for a time to happen. Whether from pride, fatalism, or some darker purpose hidden within him, McMurdo threw himself even more deeply into the life of the lodge. He rose in favor. His courage was admired, his quick wit was valued, and his usefulness in action became plain to all. Soon he was not merely one among many, but a man on whom work could be laid with confidence.
　　As the months passed, the valley itself sank lower into horror. Orders came not only from the local lodge but from other lodges as well, and men were marked for punishment by distant brothers who had never even seen them. A young member might be “blooded” by being sent out with a pistol to kill some foreman or officer whose name had been spoken against in a meeting. The reason did not matter to the hand that struck. It was enough that the lodge had judged and the lodge had ordered.
　　More and more crimes followed one another in that terrible season. Policemen Hunt and Evans were shot because they had dared to arrest members of the society. Mrs. Larbey was shot while nursing her husband, who himself had almost been beaten to death by McGinty’s order. The elder Jenkins and then his brother were killed, James Murdoch was horribly injured, the Staphouse family were blown up, and the Stendals were murdered. The names came one after another until they ceased to sound like separate tragedies and became instead the dark music of the valley itself.
　　Among the tasks placed into McMurdo’s hands was one against Chester Wilcox, an old soldier and mine official who had become dangerous because he taught the men discipline and resistance. McMurdo studied the isolated house where Wilcox lived, went out alone first to prepare the way, and then returned with two reckless young helpers carrying a sack of quarry powder. On a windy night they crept to the door, fixed the charge, lit the fuse, and threw themselves into shelter before the whole building crashed down in a roar of ruin. It was as clean a piece of destruction as the society had yet produced.
　　Yet even that bold work failed in its true purpose. Wilcox had been warned and had moved his family only the day before to a safer place under police protection. The house they destroyed was empty. McMurdo accepted the failure with a cold determination that suited his reputation there. He said the man was still his and that he would get him in the end if he had to wait a year. The lodge thanked him for the attempt, and when news later came that shots had been fired at Wilcox from ambush, everyone knew whose patient hand was still behind the business.
　　So the rule of fear spread wider and grew heavier. Nature itself turned toward spring, with running water and the first blossoms on the trees, but for the men and women of Vermissa there was no such change. The valley remained under its other season, the season of dread. By the early summer of 1875 the shadow lay darker than ever over that grim district, and no one who lived there could doubt that they were indeed in the Valley of Fear.

Part 12

　　After his arrest and release, McMurdo rose even faster in the eyes of the lodge. The men admired his courage, his quick mind, and the easy way in which he seemed to fit into their violent world. Older members began to say that he was the very man for a hard and bloody job. Even McGinty, who already had many tools in his hand, looked at him with special approval, as if he had found a stronger and sharper weapon than the rest. Baldwin hated this rise, but he was careful, for McMurdo was as ready to fight as he was to laugh.
　　Yet while he gained favor with the brotherhood, he lost ground where it mattered more to his heart. Old Jacob Shafter would have nothing more to do with him and would not let him enter the house. Ettie still loved him too deeply to cast him off, but she could not close her eyes to what he had become. She knew now that he stood among men whom the whole valley feared. So one morning, after a night without sleep, she made up her mind to see him once more and try with all her strength to draw him away from the path on which he was going.
　　She went to his lodgings and found him in his sitting room with his back toward the door and a letter before him on the table. A sudden playful thought came into her head, for she was still very young, and she stepped softly behind him and laid her hand upon his shoulder. The effect was terrible. With the speed of a wild beast he sprang to his feet, half turned, and reached with one hand toward her throat while with the other he crushed the paper before him into a ball. For one instant he stood staring at her with such fierce alarm in his face that she herself was frozen with fear. 
　　The next moment he understood and changed completely. He begged her pardon, drew her to him, and tried to laugh the thing away, but she had seen too much to take it lightly. She asked him why he had been so frightened and what the letter was that he had hidden so quickly. He answered that the letter was lodge business and that he had sworn not to show it. As for his sudden fear, he said that a hand falling on him from behind might well have been the hand of a detective, and in these times a man had reason to jump.
　　Ettie believed that at least this part was true, and for a little while his kisses and soft words calmed her. But the pain in her heart soon returned. She told him plainly that she could never be at peace while he lived as he did. Other people were already calling him a Scowrer, and the word had cut her like a knife. He tried to make light of it and said that hard names did no harm. Yet she answered that the name was not merely hard. It was true.
　　Then all her fear and love burst out together. She threw her arms round his neck and begged him to give up the lodge and its wicked work. At last she even fell to her knees before him and pleaded for his sake, for her sake, and for God’s sake that he should leave those men forever. It was the deepest and most honest cry that had yet come to him from the world outside the brotherhood. There was no anger in it, only terror, love, and despair. 
　　McMurdo raised her gently and held her close, but he would not yield. He said that she did not understand what she was asking. To leave the lodge would mean breaking his oath and deserting his comrades, and beyond that stood an even darker truth. Men who knew the secrets of the society were not allowed to walk away free. If he tried it openly, the lodge would hunt him down. In that answer there was no boasting. For perhaps the first time, he spoke to her as a man who really saw the trap around him. 
　　Ettie had thought of that too. Her father, she said, had saved a little money, and he was tired of living under constant fear. The three of them could flee together to Philadelphia or New York. If that was not far enough, then farther west, or even to England or Germany where her father had first come from. Anywhere would be better than this black valley. McMurdo answered sadly that the lodge had a long arm and could reach farther than she believed. Yet when she spoke of Baldwin’s eyes upon her and of the terror that shadowed her whole life, something in him softened. 
　　He would not promise to go at once, but he did promise something. If she would leave him a little time, he said, he would try to find a way out which would not cover him with shame. She answered that there was no honor in such a life at all, but he still clung to that thought. At last he said that in six months, or seven, or at the very most within a year, they would leave the valley behind them. It was not all she wanted, but it was enough to light a small lamp in the darkness, and she went home happier than she had been for many months. 
　　McMurdo was also learning that the society around him was larger and more complicated than he had first believed. Lodge 341 was powerful in Vermissa, but above it stood the County Delegate, a secret officer who had authority over several lodges at once. This man was Evans Pott, a small gray-haired creature with sly eyes and a poisonous look. Even McGinty, who feared little on earth, seemed to feel dislike and unease in Pott’s presence. It was one more sign that the evil in the valley was not loose and wild only. It was organized. 
　　One day a note came from McGinty with another note inside from Evans Pott. Two trusted men, Lawler and Andrews, were being sent into the district on some secret piece of business. Since the Union House was too public a place for them, McMurdo and Scanlan were ordered to receive the strangers into their own lodging and keep them there until the time for action came. That evening the two men arrived with their bags. Lawler was older, calm, silent, and self-controlled. Andrews was still little more than a boy, cheerful, fresh-faced, and almost gay in manner. Both were sober men and, in all ordinary ways, could have passed for decent citizens. The one thing that set them apart was that they were professional killers. 
　　They spoke freely enough of murders already done. There was even in them a strange shy pride, as if they had served some noble cause. But about the new business they would say nothing. They explained that the County Delegate had ordered silence until the work was over, and they meant to obey. McMurdo tried to draw them out by naming one likely target after another, but Lawler only smiled and shook his head. Whatever was to happen, it was large enough to need care and numbers. 
　　McMurdo and Scanlan were too curious to let the matter pass. So when, very early one morning, they heard the two men creeping down the stairs, they hurried after them and followed at a distance through the snow. At a crossroads beyond the town, Lawler and Andrews met three more men, and the little party then took the road toward the Crow Hill mine. It was one of the biggest works in the district, and because of its brave New England manager, Josiah Dunn, it had kept more order than most places in those years of fear. That alone was enough to make it hated. 
　　Dawn was breaking when they reached the mine. A hundred workers stood in the bitter cold waiting for the cages to go down. McMurdo and Scanlan watched from a heap of slag. Then Manager Dunn came forward, saw the silent group near the engine house, and asked sharply who they were and what they wanted. There was no answer. Young Andrews stepped out and shot him in the stomach. Dunn bent over in agony and tried to move away, but another shot dropped him among the clinkers. Then the engineer Menzies rushed forward with a tool in his hand and was shot dead as well. 
　　The miners cried out in anger and horror, but when the killers fired over their heads, the crowd broke and scattered. By the time courage returned, the murderers had vanished into the mist, and though a hundred men had seen the crime, none could or would swear to the faces of those who had done it. McMurdo and Scanlan went back toward Vermissa with the screams of Dunn’s wife still seeming to ring in their ears. Scanlan was badly shaken, for it was the first open murder he had watched with his own eyes. McMurdo said little, and what he did say was hard. It was war, he told his friend, and in war men strike where they can. 
　　That night there was wild joy in the Union House. The murder of Dunn and Menzies was celebrated as a victory, because Crow Hill would now fall into line like the other frightened companies. But there was more to celebrate still. On the same day, by agreement with another district, three Vermissa men had carried out a second murder far away, killing a good and popular mine owner named William Hales because he had refused to bow to blackmail and threats. Baldwin had led that party, and the lodge cheered him like a hero when he told how the man had cried for mercy in the road while they shot him again and again. In that room, before those laughing men, the valley seemed darker than ever, and the promise McMurdo had made to Ettie felt both more urgent and more impossible.

Part 13

　　By this time McMurdo stood very high among the men of Lodge 341. He had become one of the most trusted members, and even older and more experienced brothers had learned to ask what he thought before they acted. His courage was admired, his quick tongue amused them, and his steady nerve in hard matters had made him useful to the very center of the gang. To the outside world, however, his name was becoming darker every month. Honest men and women in the valley had begun to speak of him with the same fear they felt for Baldwin, Cormac, and the rest.
　　Yet outside the lodge another feeling was also growing. The ordinary people of the district had suffered so long that they were at last beginning to lose even their fear. Quiet meetings were said to be taking place in back rooms and offices. Rifles and pistols were passing from hand to hand. Men who had once bowed their heads when the Scowrers went by were now muttering that if the law could not save them, they must save themselves.
　　McGinty and his chief friends laughed at all this. They had been challenged before, and each time the challenge had fallen to pieces. What could frightened shopkeepers or miners do against men used to blood and armed from head to foot? So they spoke in their pride, and in that pride they came close to the greatest danger they had yet faced. It was danger not only from brave citizens, but from a colder and more patient enemy.
　　One Saturday evening in May, as McMurdo was getting ready for lodge, Brother Morris came again to his rooms. The poor man looked more wretched than ever. His face was gray, his hands shook, and every movement showed the strain under which he had long been living. He reminded McMurdo that once before he had trusted him with a secret and had not been betrayed, and on that ground he now came to him again.
　　McMurdo gave him a glass of whisky and told him to speak plainly. Morris said that he carried news which might save the lodge or destroy it, according to how quickly it was handled. He had heard from a business friend in the telegraph service, a man who had access to private messages passing through the wires. Great companies and the railroads, said Morris, had joined hands at last and had set detectives to work in deep earnest against the Scowrers.
　　Even then he still hesitated, as if the words themselves might kill him. At last he forced them out. A Pinkerton man was already in the valley. Not an ordinary officer, not a local policeman, but one of the best agents the detective service possessed. His name, Morris said, was Birdy Edwards, and if that man were given time enough, he would gather the proof that could send half the lodge to the scaffold and the rest to prison.
　　McMurdo did not answer in alarm. On the contrary, he became harder and quieter. He asked what evidence Morris had for so grave a statement, and Morris handed over the letter he had received. It spoke clearly of the detective’s presence and of the seriousness of the attack being prepared against the brotherhood. Morris himself shivered as he watched McMurdo read, for he knew very well what the likely result would be if the news were believed.
　　When McMurdo had finished, he sat silent for some moments with the paper in his hand. Then all at once he sprang up and cried that he saw the whole business now. He said that a man had crossed his path only days before, a stranger who had called himself a newspaper reporter and had tried to buy information from him. At the time McMurdo had thought little of it, but now the thing seemed plain. That reporter must in truth have been Birdy Edwards himself.
　　Morris was terribly troubled when he heard this. He hated the lodge, yet he hated the thought of becoming the cause of a man’s death. He begged McMurdo to remember that he had spoken only to save himself from ruin and had never wished murder on anyone. McMurdo answered in the cold language of the valley that this was no matter of murder, but of self-defense. If the detective lived and worked freely, then dozens of men would die in his place.
　　Still, he promised Morris one thing. The warning should not be traced back to him. He would present the matter as if he had discovered it by his own cleverness and by the clues already before him. Morris, relieved but not comforted, at last went away. He left behind him the feeling of a man who had tried to escape one horror only by throwing another human being into it.
　　Before leaving his room that evening, McMurdo made his own preparations. He burned papers which might one day have done him harm. He checked his revolver and made sure that every chamber was ready. Then he went by the Shafters’ house and called softly to Ettie at the window, for when danger drew near, his thoughts still turned to her more quickly than to any other living soul.
　　She saw at once that something serious had happened. The lightness was gone from his face, and though he tried to speak steadily, there was a tightness in him which she had learned to fear. He told her that bad times might be very close now and that, if he sent word, she must leave everything at once and go straight to the waiting room at the depot, day or night, without question and without delay. There she was to wait for him, no matter how late he came.
　　Ettie did not ask for long explanations. She trusted him too deeply for that, and she was too used to fear to waste time on questions when action was needed. She answered that she would go wherever he led and do exactly as he said. McMurdo took both her hands and told her, with great feeling, that he would never knowingly drag her into shame or danger if he could help it. Then he left her and went on into the darkness toward the lodge.
　　The meeting was already under way when he entered the hall. The room was full of smoke, drink, and brutal faces, with McGinty in his place like a king among wild beasts. Another matter was before them, some low quarrel over money and credit for an earlier crime, but McMurdo rose and asked for immediate hearing. There was something in his face which silenced the room faster than any order could have done.
　　He then told them, in a grave and measured voice, that a great danger had come upon the lodge. A Pinkerton detective named Birdy Edwards was in the valley and was gathering evidence day by day against them all. At the name, several of the older men stirred uneasily, for they had heard of him before. The ordinary members, too, began to feel for the first time that the hand of punishment might truly be reaching toward them.
　　McGinty asked sharply whether McMurdo knew where this detective could be found. McMurdo answered that he did, though not under that name. The man, he said, was passing as Steve Wilson and lodging at Hobson’s Patch. He then told the story of the meeting on the railway car, of the false reportorial talk, of the offer of money for information, and of the telegraph office where the supposed reporter had been sending coded messages every day under cover of press business.
　　This was enough to persuade McGinty that the danger was real. Several men cried out at once that they should ride down that very night and shoot the spy wherever he lay. Baldwin was among the loudest voices for instant violence. But McMurdo raised his hand and said that such rough work might ruin all. If Birdy Edwards had already passed his information to others, killing him blindly would not save them. They must first get him alive and make him speak.
　　He also said that such a matter was too serious to discuss before the whole open lodge. If a single word escaped, the detective would be warned and vanish. This argument was at once accepted. A special committee was therefore chosen, made up of McGinty, Baldwin, Harraway, Carter, Tiger Cormac, and the two Willaby brothers, men desperate enough for anything and trusted enough for the darkest business.
　　When the ordinary members had been dismissed, McMurdo unfolded his plan. He would go next morning to Hobson’s Patch and find the man through the telegraph operator. Then he would pretend to betray the lodge for money. He would say that he possessed papers and facts too dangerous to show in daylight, but that the detective might come secretly to his own lonely house at ten o’clock that night and see everything there.
　　The plan pleased them at once, because it matched exactly the kind of trap they understood best. Widow MacNamara’s house, McMurdo reminded them, stood apart from others and was occupied only by himself, Scanlan, and a deaf old woman who could be trusted. If the seven chosen men came by nine and hid themselves, then once Birdy Edwards stepped over the door and heard the key turn behind him, he would be fully in their power. McGinty praised the scheme warmly and said that, unless fortune itself fought for the detective, there would soon be a vacancy in the Pinkerton service.
　　So the council ended in dark satisfaction. The men left one by one, believing that their worst enemy had nearly walked into his grave. Yet beneath their confidence lay real fear, and for the first time many of them could feel the law not as a distant word, but as something alive and moving toward them. The lodge broke up earlier and more quietly than usual, and over all their boasting there hung the same black thought: if this one blow failed, the Valley of Fear might at last begin to turn against its masters.

Part 14

　　As McMurdo had said, the house in which he lived was a lonely one and very well suited for the crime they had planned. It stood at the far edge of the town and well back from the road. In most cases the Scowrers would simply have called a man out into the dark and shot him down where he stood. This time, however, they wanted more than death. They wanted to know how much Birdy Edwards already knew, how he had learned it, and what had already been sent on to the men who employed him.
　　They still hoped that they were in time. If the detective had truly gathered everything, then there was little use in questioning him. Yet they argued that, if that had been so, he would not have bothered with the small details which McMurdo claimed he was eager to buy. So they comforted themselves with the thought that the work was only partly done and that one bold stroke might still save them all.
　　McMurdo went to Hobson’s Patch as agreed and returned later with the news that the bait had taken. Birdy Edwards, under his false name, had believed the story and had promised to come that night. Even this did not fully calm McGinty. He kept asking how much the man had learned and whether names had already been written down. McMurdo answered in a dark way that a Pinkerton detective who had been working for weeks in the valley could hardly have gone away empty-handed.
　　That thought lay heavy on them all as they gathered in the lonely house before ten. McGinty was there, huge and black-bearded, trying to look like the master he had always been. Baldwin was there with murder in his eyes. Harraway, Carter, Tiger Cormac, and the two Willabys completed the party. They drank whisky and spoke in low, cruel voices of what they would do to their prisoner once he was safely inside.
　　One of them laid his hands for a moment upon the hot stove and said with an oath that the iron would soon make the detective talk. Baldwin at once caught the meaning and answered that, if the man were tied there, the truth would not stay long in him. Even in that room of hardened criminals, the words had a savage force. Yet McMurdo himself, upon whom the whole weight of the affair rested, remained as calm and cool as if nothing unusual were about to happen.
　　He moved about the room tightening the curtains and making sure that no eye could spy upon them from outside. McGinty muttered that it was a pity the windows had no shutters, but McMurdo answered that the cloth was enough and that the hour was nearly come. One man said nervously that perhaps the bird had caught a scent of danger and would not come. McMurdo answered with certainty that he would come. The man outside was as eager to enter as those within were eager to receive him.
　　Then there came three loud knocks at the door. Every man in the room turned to stone. Glasses stopped halfway to their lips, hands slipped silently toward pistols, and eyes shone like those of wolves waiting for the spring. McMurdo raised one hand sharply and whispered that not a sound must be made for their very lives. Then he left the room, closing the door carefully behind him.
　　The men listened with all the force of their bodies. They heard his steps in the passage, then the opening of the outer door. There were a few low words as of greeting, then another step inside, a stranger’s step, and the sound of an unfamiliar voice. A moment later came the slam of the door and the turn of the key in the lock. Their prey, as they believed, was now safely inside the trap.
　　Tiger Cormac gave a low and horrible laugh, and McGinty clapped a great hand over his mouth in fury. Even after that, the waiting seemed long. A mutter of voices came from the next room, too low to be understood, and the suspense grew almost unbearable. Then at last the door opened and McMurdo returned with his finger on his lip.
　　He walked to the end of the table and stood looking at them one by one. A change had come over him. He no longer seemed merely one of their own number managing a dangerous task. He looked like a leader giving judgment. His face had hardened into stone, and behind his glasses his eyes burned with fierce excitement. The others stared at him in eager impatience, but for a few seconds he said nothing.
　　At last McGinty broke the silence and demanded to know whether Birdy Edwards was there. McMurdo answered slowly, “Yes. Birdy Edwards is here. I am Birdy Edwards.” For some moments after those words no man in the room seemed able even to breathe. The hiss of the kettle on the stove rose sharp in the silence. Seven white faces stared up at the man who had trapped them with a terror deeper than any they had ever given to others.
　　Then, before they could recover themselves, armed men appeared at every point. The curtains were torn aside from outside, and rifle barrels showed at the windows. Captain Marvin stood at the door with a revolver in his hand. McGinty made a rush for him like a maddened bull, but the sight of the leveled weapons checked him. Baldwin’s hand dropped toward his pistol, but Birdy Edwards warned him that the first man who moved would die where he sat. In a moment the whole gang was covered and helpless. 
　　Birdy Edwards then told them the truth in full. He said that he had entered the valley under a false name, had passed himself off as one of their own, had joined their lodge, and had gathered proof of their crimes until enough lay in his hands to break them. Only one thing had forced him to strike when he did. A letter had come into town that would have set them on his track at once. Then he had to act, and to act quickly. He ended by saying that, when his own death came, it would come more lightly because he would remember the work he had done in that valley.
　　There was little more for him to do there. The police took the captured men away, and Scanlan was given a sealed note to leave for Miss Ettie Shafter. In the early hours of the morning a beautiful woman and a heavily wrapped man boarded a special train sent by the railroad company and rode swiftly out of the land of danger. It was the last time either Ettie or her lover ever set foot in the Valley of Fear. Ten days later they were married in Chicago, with old Jacob Shafter present at the wedding.
　　The trial of the Scowrers was held far from the district where their friends and paid supporters might frighten witnesses and juries. Their money was spent like water, for the lodge had long filled its chest with wealth squeezed from the whole countryside by fear and blackmail. But all of it was useless against the cold, exact statement of a man who knew every part of their organization and every detail of their crimes. Birdy Edwards stood firm, and at last the power of the gang was broken forever.
　　McGinty met his end upon the scaffold, whining and broken when the last hour came. Eight of his chief men died with him. More than fifty others received various terms of imprisonment. The cloud that had hung for so many years over the valley was lifted at last, and the work of Birdy Edwards seemed complete. For a little while it looked as if justice had fully won.
　　Yet Birdy Edwards himself knew better than to believe that the game was over. Ted Baldwin had escaped the scaffold. So had the Willabys and several of the fiercest spirits of the gang. They served their years and came out again with one oath still burning in them: that they would have Edwards’s blood in payment for their comrades. And they worked hard to keep that oath. Twice in Chicago they came so near success that a third attempt would surely have killed him had he remained there.
　　So he fled westward under another name and hid himself in California. There, for a time, life gave him both safety and sorrow. It was there that Ettie died, and with her death the light went out of his life for a while. Once more his enemies nearly reached him, and once more, under the name of Douglas, he worked in a lonely canyon and made a fortune with an English partner named Barker. At last came another warning that the bloodhounds were near again, and he escaped, only just in time, to England. There he became John Douglas of Birlstone Manor House, and there the old hunt found him once more.

Part 15

　　The legal case against John Douglas did not end at once. First there was the police hearing, and after that the higher court considered the matter. In the end he was acquitted, because the judges accepted that he had acted in self-defense when Ted Baldwin attacked him in the study at Birlstone. Holmes, however, was not satisfied by that victory. He wrote to Mrs. Douglas and warned her that there were powers in England more dangerous than the enemies her husband had already escaped, and that England was not a safe country for him. 
　　For a time nothing happened. Two months passed, and the strange business of Birlstone began to fade a little in our thoughts, as even the most dramatic cases often do. Then one morning an odd note was found in our letter box. It contained only a few words: “Dear me, Mr. Holmes. Dear me!” There was no name and no address upon it, and I laughed at the message as a foolish joke. Holmes did not laugh. He looked grave at once and said only one word to me: “Deviltry.” 
　　That same night Mrs. Hudson brought up word that a gentleman wished to see Holmes on a matter of the greatest importance. The visitor was Cecil Barker, and one glance at his face showed us that some new blow had fallen. He was worn, shaken, and pale with grief. Holmes looked at him steadily and said that he had feared as much. Barker then asked whether Holmes had already received a cable. Holmes answered that he had not received a cable, but he had heard from someone who had. 
　　Barker then told us the news. He reminded Holmes that Douglas and his wife had set out for South Africa in the ship Palmyra three weeks before. The ship had now reached Cape Town, and that very morning Barker had received a cable from Mrs. Douglas. It said that Jack had been lost overboard in a gale off St. Helena and that no one knew how the accident had happened. Barker still called him Jack Douglas of Benito Canyon, whatever other name he had once carried, and one could hear in his voice how deeply he had loved his old friend. 
　　Holmes listened without surprise. He said quietly that he had no doubt the whole thing had been carefully arranged. Barker stared at him and asked whether he truly believed there had been no accident at all. Holmes answered that there had been none in the world. Douglas, he said, had surely been murdered. Barker cried out bitterly against the old Scowrers and the men from America who had hunted Douglas for so many years, but Holmes stopped him at once. 
　　Holmes said that this was not the work of rough men with shotguns and revolvers. There was a master hand behind it. He said that he knew the mark of Professor Moriarty as surely as a painter knows the work of another painter. This crime, he declared, came from London and not from America. The Americans may have begun the hunt and may have had old blood-feuds of their own, but the final stroke bore the sign of a greater and colder intelligence. 
　　Barker could not understand why Moriarty should trouble himself with one man such as Douglas. Holmes answered that Moriarty was a man who could not allow himself to fail. His whole position rested on the fact that whatever he touched must succeed. If Americans with a private hatred had asked his help in an English matter, then from the moment he agreed, Douglas’s fate was sealed. First Moriarty’s people would use their network to trace the victim. Then they would advise how he might best be reached. And when a first attempt failed, the great man himself would give the final touch which made failure impossible. 
　　Holmes reminded Barker that the very first warning in the whole affair had come through one of Moriarty’s own underlings. That fact now seemed even more important than before. It showed that Moriarty’s organization had been close to the case from the beginning. Holmes said that he had warned Douglas at Birlstone that the danger still to come might be greater than the danger already behind him, and now his warning had come true. Douglas had escaped Ted Baldwin in Sussex, only to be reached later by the larger power that stood above Baldwin and all the rest. 
　　Barker sat with his head in his hands while Holmes spoke. To him the matter was simple grief, but to Holmes it was one more sign of the reach and discipline of Moriarty’s hidden empire. A man might flee from America to California, from California to England, and from England even to the sea itself, yet still that great hand could close upon him. Douglas had escaped violence many times by courage, quick action, and change of name. In the end none of that was enough against an enemy who could wait, plan, and strike anywhere. 
　　For myself, I felt again the cold shadow that always came over me when Holmes spoke in that way of Moriarty. The Birlstone case had seemed solved. We had seen the hidden room opened, the false death exposed, the long past of the Valley of Fear brought out into the light, and justice done at last upon the men who had blackened Vermissa. Yet even then the deepest villainy had not finished its work. The story had begun with a warning, and it ended with the proof that the warning had never truly stopped being true. 
　　So the life of John Douglas, once Birdy Edwards, came to its end not in open battle, but under the dark reach of old hatred guided by a colder brain. He had broken the Scowrers, escaped their valley, changed his name, made a fortune, and tried twice to build a peaceful life. Even then the past found him. The Valley of Fear had not been only a place in America. It had been the long shadow that followed him to the end. 
　　Holmes said little more after Barker left us. He sat for a long time with that far-away look in his eyes which meant that his thoughts had already gone beyond the dead man on the ship and toward the greater conflict still ahead. I did not know then how near that conflict was. But I have never forgotten the heavy feeling in our room that night, nor the certainty in Holmes’s voice when he spoke the name of Moriarty. It was the voice of a man who had recognized, beyond all doubt, the hand of his greatest enemy.