It sounds foolish, and I daresay it was, but this challenge to me as a gentleman provoked me to step out into what might have been harm’s way. Instead, I almost stepped into the arms of a masterful-looking woman of perhaps forty years walking toward me, dressed in male western fashion, but rather attractive withal.
“Whoa!” she said, holding up a leather-gloved hand. “Put up that shootin’-iron if you don’t mind. Ain’t I already told you there’s nobody but us women, now you’ve plugged poor Tom?”
“Tom Dennis?” I bellowed. “How badly is he hurt? I’m a doctor!”
She lifted one fine grey eyebrow. “You ain’t much of one fer your Hippocratic Oath, are you? Or do you plug ’em first and then charge to mend ’em?”
“Don’t bandy pleasantries when someone’s bleeding!” I snapped. “My name is Watson. I
The woman sagged against the mountain wall. “Not Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s friend?” she asked in a weak voice, and also, I noticed, a suddenly more cultured accent. “I thought-we thought-you were from the Church… Tom’s over here.” She gestured toward a space behind the nearest tent, where I saw several young women huddled. “You only winged him, Doctor. He’s more hurt from the fall.”
As she led me where our long-sought quarry was now stretched upon a camp cot, she turned her fine profile to me over her shoulder and added, almost as an afterthought, “I’m Lucy Ferrier Hope.” The words stunned me, and for a moment I simply stared in amazement. Her face, however, was filled with concern for the wounded man, and I realized that explanations would have to wait. Gathering myself, I knelt by the cot to attend to my patient.
Dennis was in considerable pain until I administered some morphia and he drifted off. My shot had been lucky for both of us, for I had stopped his shooting without doing him much harm beyond breaking his thumb, but he had broken his ankle in his fall from the eminence where he’d been doing guard duty for the camp. Just what the camp’s purpose was, I had yet to find: were these young women the “contraband” Dennis was running?
After I had made my patient as comfortable as possible, my hostess led me to a set of canvas camp chairs at her campfire, offered me a mug of barbarous American coffee, and we talked a bit as we awaited the arrival of Sherlock Holmes, which I assured her was imminent.
“You notice I don’t use that fiend Drebber’s name, Doctor,” she said quietly. “I don’t count that as a marriage but as an abduction, of course.”
“I quite understand,” I told her. “But how did you escape? Hope told us he saw you stretched out dead on your bier.”
She smiled in a way that made me shiver. “Why, so he did. Didn’t he tell you also that he used to be the sweeper-out of the laboratory at York College, and learned a thing or two about drugs and medicines?”
“Poisons, you mean,” I corrected her.
“Oh, poisons, too,” she admitted. “But what he gave me was more like what Romeo’s friar gave Juliet-a potion to give me ‘A thing like death to chide away this shame, that cop’st with death himself to scape from it.’ Something to make me sleep till he burst in and carried me off amongst all those ‘mourning’ Drebber wives. Oh, and wasn’t I glad when I woke up!”
I was stunned, not for the first or last time in this case. “But he told us he only came in to take the ring off your finger!”
“I know,” she replied calmly. “He told me when I visited him in prison. But that was one of his tallest ones! Why on earth should he have wanted the ring Drebber gave me? Jeff and I both hated Drebber.”
My mind was swimming-each new revelation prompted at least two questions.
“How could you visit him in prison? He only lived one night! He wanted the ring for revenge, didn’t he?”
“Oh, Doctor!” She shook her head, and her still-beautiful tresses, chestnut mingled with grey, fell about her solemn face as the hint of a reminiscent smile lit it. “Don’t you think I’d been improving my time all those months we’d been in London? I was very active helping the Visitation Society, and it was no problem for me to get permission to visit Jeff. I’ll tell you this, about those ‘poisons’ you mentioned: Jefferson Hope never poisoned anybody. But I wasn’t about to let the man I loved languish in prison to die a lonely death from a burst heart, or at the end of an English noose for murders he never did. He taught me about drugs and poisons too! So there’s my confession, and if you and Mr. Holmes want to take me back to London for it, I’ll go quietly, after I’ve finished the work I’m about today.”
My mother tried to raise her sons properly, but I have a dreadful feeling that my mouth was hanging agape at this point. I certainly wondered if it was I who was mad, or the lady speaking to me. “But Hope confessed,” I said at last.
“I know that,” she reiterated, as if she were explaining to a child. “He did that because he knew he didn’t have long to live anyway.” She wiped away a tear sliding down her sunburnt cheek. “And because he wanted to shield Tom.”
The sun was now high in the Utah sky, and at last the light began to dawn in my foggy English brain as well. “Dennis killed them both,” I said.
“Of course,” Lucy nodded. “He hated Drebber and Stangerson far worse than Jeff or I did. You see, he hadn’t been able to save the girl he loved. She really was dead.”
“Sally Sawyer,” I whispered.
Lucy looked at me, surprised. “How did you know?”
“Never multiply names unnecessarily,” I recited, recalling Holmes’s dictum as if from a dream. “Dennis told us the name himself, in the story he prattled when he came to try to get the ring from us. But come-how did Hope know of that visit?”
“Oh, goodness, Doctor!” Lucy laughed, for the first time, and I saw she was still a handsome woman. “What chatterboxes you and Inspector Gregson were in that cab on the way to Scotland Yard! Jeff told me all about it!”
I must have looked hurt, because she added, in a kindly tone, “Jeff said Mr. Holmes let slip a hint or two, also… and you have to admit that my Jeff was a resourceful man.”
“More even than we credited,” I agreed sincerely. Seeing sudden misery in her face, I reached across the distance between our two chairs and clasped her wrist. “You must miss him sorely.”
“Every day!” she cried, raising her overflowing eyes to the empty sky, then turning them back to me. “But we had near two happy decades ranching in Wyoming before Jeff learned Tom was on Drebber’s trail in Cleveland. Jeff determined to stop him from doing murder. He couldn’t bear for Tom to have that sin on his conscience or his soul, no matter what the provocation.” Now she was caught up in the full onrush of her story, and had to tell all.
“And I couldn’t bear him to go without me, so we went together. We couldn’t find Tom in Cleveland, but that foul Drebber spotted Jeff and had him jailed for a trumpery nonsense-and I couldn’t bail him out at first for fear that Drebber would see me! By the time Drebber was gone and I’d got Jeff out, it was too late to stop Tom. That was how it went, across half the world, it seemed, using up our resources and Jeff getting more and more desperate, until finally we came to London.
“Jeff tried to do double duty hunting for Tom and guarding Drebber and Stangerson, while I did what I could, too-though it wasn’t much because I daren’t let them see me.
“At last, at Lauriston Gardens, Jeff was too late by moments to stop Tom. It nigh broke his heart.” She looked at me fiercely as if daring me to deny it.
“He wasn’t too late to be observed by the constable,” I pointed out. “And his presence there created all kinds of compromising physical evidence, although I always said that Holmes was too quick to theorize about a crime scene which he himself compared to the aftermath of a buffalo stampede.”
“Jeff made up that stuff about going back for the ring,” she said. “After you told him about ‘Mrs. Sawyer’ coming to your rooms for it, it was easy enough for him to figure out that Tom had lost Sally’s ring there. Tom really wanted it back, you know; it was the one he’d given Sally himself, not like the one in my case.”
“You mean Dennis and Sally had really been married before Drebber had taken her away?” I exclaimed. “But that’s infamous!”
“Oh yes,” she sighed. “It’s not unknown among the polygamists, you know. Sometimes plural wives are passed around-it’s awful. Anyway, Jeff was too late again when Tom got to Stangerson, and I guess you know the rest.”
“But why did the two of you go through all this to save Tom Dennis?” I asked, running my hand through my hair distractedly. “It’s noble, of course, and I commend you both for it, but why should Hope risk the happiness of the woman he loved to save Dennis?”
