stealthily at Holmes. He stood there turning the wheel like a seasoned sailor.
Suddenly, as I looked at him, with his eyes he was indicating something at a distance. At this point the Volga widens. I looked at the side Holmes was looking at and there, on the right bank, men were working on a barge. We were nearly parallel to it. It was probably being unloaded.
I was hardly able to get a good look at it, when I heard a noise from the bridge, ‘Where, where are you going?’ It was the captain and in an unnatural voice he was yelling, ‘Turn the wheel to the left, to the left!’
The wheel began to spin madly. But the ship, instead of turning left, continued straight on, if anything, more to the right. The helmsman and Holmes appeared anxious and lost. The captain himself leaped to the wheel and began to turn it in a frenzy. But the impossible was happening. Instead of veering left, the ship headed straight for the sandbank.
‘Stop! Back! Back!’ the captain yelled through the megaphone at the engine room.
But it was too late. A crackling noise came from beneath our feet, we felt a light shudder, and our ship ploughed up the sandbank virtually at full steam. There was an incredible rumpus. The engines were put into reverse, but did not obey. No matter what the captain and his crew undertook, the ship wouldn’t budge.
‘Watch out!’ Holmes whispered.
The captain now gave orders for distress signals to be raised. These were seen from the barge by the shore. Soon enough, a crowded longboat glided away from it in our direction. As it approached, Holmes began to count the number of labourers aboard it coming to help. There were twenty-three of them, ordinary porters, and the overseer.
The captain and the men in the longboat agreed on the remuneration and the overseer ordered twenty of the men up on the ship. The longboat was by the right-hand ladder. Holmes and I scrutinized carefully everyone coming on board, but nobody excited our suspicion. This is when the interpreter came up to me.
‘Be prepared,’ Holmes whispered to him. ‘Point me out to the sentries and order them to obey my orders. Prepare to lower a boat. The outcome is at hand! Hurry!’
The interpreter rushed off to do as he was told.
In the meantime, work on the ship went on at a furious pace. After two hours of intensive effort, the ship somehow shifted from the sandbank and the barge labourers began to go down the ladder to their longboat. I began to count them again. One after another, twenty men went down that ladder.
And suddenly Holmes whispered anxiously, ‘Look! Look! There’s twenty-four leaving.’
I hastily recounted the number of men in the longboat. To my amazement, I noticed there was just that one extra man aboard. This was all the more surprising, because I had personally counted that out of the twenty-three originally in the long-boat, twenty had come up and twenty had gone down.
‘Yes! Yes!’ Holmes whispered anxiously. ‘He got out from under. That’s what the business with the cofferdam was all about. Under water there must be an exit leading into a cofferdam affixed to the bottom of the ship. He went out through that!’
And turning round, he shouted loudly, ‘Arrest the sailor Skalkin. Guard! Into the boat!’
The alarm was raised. Skalkin was instantly seized, tied with ropes, while a minute later, together with the sentries, we were speeding in pursuit of the longboat on its way at a fast clip. The heavy longboat began to slow down. With every minute, the distance between us lessened.
‘Halt. Or we fire!’ yelled Holmes.
I thought there would be a riot on the longboat, but the threat worked and it stopped yards from the Jiguli shore.
In that moment, we saw a figure leap into the waist-high water and move towards the reeds.
‘Shoot him!’ commanded Holmes.
The man dived, came up and dived again. Shots rang out but missed their target.
‘Dammit!’ yelled Holmes, beside himself. ‘Follow me!’
With one leap he was in the water and flung himself towards the fleeing man. ‘Arrest the crew of the longboat. Five men follow me!’ he shouted.
Knee deep in water, we chased after the unknown man. Holmes, revolver in hand, was in front. Now the fleeing man, in water a little deeper than his ankles, suddenly stumbled and an inflated ox bladder flew out of his hand.
‘Get the bladder!’ shouted Holmes without turning round. I grabbed at it.
The escapee made a gesture of total despair, as if the loss had been of everything at stake. He reached into his pocket and out came a revolver. All of a sudden it went off twice at Holmes and the man vanished into the reeds. Holmes shot thrice and then he, too, vanished amongst the reeds.
A few minutes later, their figures appeared atop the steep bluff above us and from which we heard more shots.
Then, as we stumbled upwards, we saw the two opponents fall on each other and heard Holmes cry out, ‘Kartzeff!’
And the end came. No matter how long we searched for Holmes, no matter how loudly we hailed him, the deserted river bank remained deaf and dumb to us. Holmes and his enemy had vanished and we even couldn’t establish where they had gone.
VII
Tired and despondent, we returned to the ship after a four-hour-long search. ‘What’s this?’ asked Mahomet- Sultan through the interpreter, pointing at the bladder in my hand. I handed him my wretched trophy and something rolled around inside. Intuitively, I took back the bladder, tore it apart with my bare fingers and suddenly a huge black pearl rolled round our feet.
What happened to Holmes, I know not. All I know is that I went no further. I stayed at the scene of this sad occurrence with four sentries but a three-day search yielded no results.
From the papers, I was later to learn that the sailor Skalkin was the escaped prisoner, Foma Belkin. He confessed to being an accomplice of the notorious swindler and burglar, Kartzeff, in the theft of the pearl aboard the ship. An inspection of the ship revealed that under its right side there was some sort of cofferdam, through which the thief had crept out through an exit below the water line. The barge overseer was another member of the gang, but the barge labourers were completely innocent. Apart from all this, on the right-hand side of the ship, a cunningly attached rudder was found. It was this that Kartzeff had been able to operate, to bypass the ship’s rudder, making it plough into the sandbank.
6. THE COMMERCIAL CENTRE MYSTERY
P. Nikitin
I
This happened in 190*.
Sherlock Holmes had come to Nijni-Novgorod partly on holiday, partly to acquaint himself better with faraway Russia, of which the English have only a vague notion. Although there were no professional reasons for his visit, nevertheless, it was still noted locally. No matter how hard he tried not to be noticed, to remain aloof as he strolled around the town, he was followed by a bevy of curious citizens and heard his name whispered behind his back. Of course, he thought that all this attention was idle curiosity, but things turned out otherwise.
He was staying at the Post Hotel (by the Black Pond). On his third day, returning to his room, he was told by a porter that a gentleman had asked for him, and when told that he was out, had requested that he leave a
