Sherlock Holmes In America

other side of our second adventure before such reticence vanished from our relationship forever.

Our crossing was not uneventful, despite calm seas; but the affair of the American industrialist and the Swedish stowaway presents facets of its own, and its appearance in these pages would only distract the reader from the circumstances I am about to relate. It is a story the world may be prepared to hear, but which I am unprepared to tell. As many times as Holmes has explained to me how a disparity between a ship’s bells and the time on a pocket watch, both equally accurate, can coexist, I remain ignorant as to how he brought the matter to a satisfactory conclusion before we arrived in the Port of New York.

Ironically, the very questions that had brought us from our hemisphere and across the vast reaches of the North American continent proved easier to answer than the conundrum aboard ship. Suffice it to say that a minor but crucial player in the Hope tragedy lied to dissemble a sordid personal peccadillo, and that most of the burden fell to me as I struggled to turn a half-penny hurricane into four columns in the Times. They were printed, and our fare and lodgings were paid for without complaint, but from that day to this I have not received another invitation to submit so much as a line to that august institution.

We were left with a wealth of time and opportunity to broaden our experience of the world’s curiosities. I circumnavigated the gargantuan lake in a hired launch, and Holmes made copious entries in his notebook about the practice of polygamy for a monograph upon the subject, but we were both eager to add to our education and were soon off to Denver.

On the way we were detained in a muddy little hamlet whose police force had been forewarned of a visit by the remnants of the Jesse James gang of notorious reputation, suspected because of our British accents and European clothes as bandits in disguise. While awaiting word from Washington, D.C., confirming the material in our travel documents, we were placed under house arrest in the town’s only hotel. One of our guards was a friendly fellow with swooping moustaches and a revolver the size of a meat-axe, who taught us the rudiments of the game of faro. By the time we were released, Holmes had become an expert, and I had learned just enough to swear off playing ever again for the sake of my army pension.

Having lost several days, we elected to forego Denver as just another large city like St. Louis and turned south towards the territory of Arizona. There among weird rock formations and cactus plants shaped like tall men with arms upraised, I remarked to my companion that I was disappointed not to have seen a red Indian yet, to add to my observations of the aborigines upon three continents.

“In order to make an observation, one must first observe,” said Holmes. “Those silhouettes are not the product of erosion.”

I followed the direction of his pointing finger, but we had nearly drawn beyond range before I identified what had looked like broken battlements atop a sandstone ridge as a group of motionless horsemen watching the train steam past.

“Apaches, if my preliminary reading is accurate. Zulus are peace lovers by comparison.” He laid aside his Rocky Mountain News and uncocked the Eley’s pistol he was holding in his lap.

“You might have said something. I’m no babe in the woods, you know.”

“Quite the opposite, Doctor. A seasoned warrior like yourself might have responded from instinct and training. That would in all likelihood precipitate an action we should all regret.”

“I am not a hothead.” I fear I sounded petulant.

“You’ve given me no reason to think otherwise. Now that you have so informed me, as one gentleman to another, I shall not repeat the mistake.”

Ours was a difficult getting-acquainted period, as I’ve said. Even my dear late wife and I had an easier time of it; but then I’d had the advantage of having saved her life early in the courtship. I can’t recommend a better approach when it comes to breaking the ice.

The gypsy life deposited us at length in the city of Youngblood, some forty miles north of Tucson. I’m told the place no longer exists, with nary a broken bottle nor a stone upon stone to indicate it ever did. I do not grieve over this pass.

Why we alighted in this vagabond jungle of canvas and clapboard, with an open sewer running merrily down its main street, is a question I cannot answer with certainty. We had not paused thirty seconds to take on water when Holmes shot to his feet and snatched his Gladstone bag from the brass rack overhead. Perhaps it was the scenery which inspired him. I vividly recall a one-eyed mongrel performing its ablutions on the platform and an ancient red Indian wrapped in a filthy blanket attempting to peddle an earthenware pot to everyone who stepped down from the train. A place so sinister in appearance seemed an ideal location for a consulting detective to practice his trade; then again, he may simply have been drawn to its perfect ugliness through some aesthetic of his own.

“Well, Doctor?” He stood in the aisle holding out my medical bag. His eyes glittered.

“Here?”

“Here forsooth. Can you picture a place further removed from Mayfair?”

For this I could offer no argument, and so I took the bag and hoisted my army footlocker from the rack.

Approaching the exit, Holmes nearly collided with a man boarding. When Holmes asked his pardon, the fellow started and seized him by the shoulders. “There’s no call, stranger, if that accent’s real and it belongs to Sherlock Holmes.”

The reader will indulge me if I remind him that at this juncture in his long and illustrious career, my companion was no more public a figure than the thousands of immigrants then pouring into the frontier in pursuit of free land, precious metal for the taking, and the promise of a new life. To hear one’s associate addressed by name so far from home was as much a surprise as to be struck by a bullet on some peaceful corner, and one nearly as unsettling. My hand went to the revolver in my pocket.

“I believe you have the advantage,” said Holmes stiffly.

He did indeed. The stranger was as tall as my fellow lodger, and a distinct specimen of the Western type, with long fair hair, splendid moustaches, and a strong-jowled face deeply tanned despite the broad brim of his black hat. He wore a Prince Albert coat of the same funereal hue over a gaily printed waistcoat, striped trousers stuffed into the tops of tall black boots, and a revolver every bit as large as our erstwhile jailer’s on his hip. I left my much smaller weapon in its pocket-albeit gripping it tightly-in the sudden certainty that any swift move by me would be met by one much swifter on his part, and far more deadly.

To my surprise, the man released his grip upon Holmes’s shoulders and stepped back, dipping his head in a show of deference. “No offense meant. I feared I’d missed you, and charging square into you like a bull buffalo set my good manners clear to rout. Wyatt Earp, sir, late of Tombstone, and headed I-don’t-know-where, or was anyway till I set foot in this hell.”

The name signified nothing to me and was so unusual that I took it at first as a statement interrupted by gastric distress: “Why, at-urp!” was how I received his introduction. Having sampled in Colorado the popular regional fare of beans and hot peppers stewed and served in a bowl, I had been suffering from the same complaint for several hundreds of miles.

Holmes did not share this delusion, and he, who in later years would treat kings and supercriminals with the same cordial disdain, became deferential on the instant. “I am just off reading of your exploits in the Rocky Mountain News. This business in a certain corral-”

“It wasn’t in the O.K., but in an alley down the street next to the photo studio of C.S. Fly; but I don’t reckon ‘The Shoot-out in Fly’s Alley’ would make it as far as Denver. It cost me a brother last March, and crippled another one three months before that. I’m not finished collecting on that bill, but it’s not why I met this train. I saw a piece about you being in jail up north-”

It was Holmes’s turn to interrupt. “Hardly a jail, although the condition of the hotel linens was a crime in itself. I’m curious as to the process by which you deduced I would proceed south from there, instead of east to Denver.”

“You’re a detective, the piece said, vacationing from England. I’m in sort of that line myself, tracking stagecoach robbers and such, and it occurred to me nobody who’s truly interested in crime and them that commits it would bother with a place where there’s a policeman on every corner. I wouldn’t give a spruce nickel for a blue- tick hound that didn’t head straight for the brambles.”

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