The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes

into the house, whipping out a pocket lens as he did so.

After a decent interval, I hurried after him with Les­trade on my heels. Through a door on the left of a great dark hall, we caught a glimpse of a candle-lit room piled high with half-withered flowers and of Holmes's long, thin figure stooping over a white-shrouded form in the open coffin. The candlelight twinkled on his lens as he bent down until his face was only a few inches above that of the dead man. There was a period of absolute stillness while he scrutinized the placid features beneath him. Then gently he pulled up the sheet and turned away.

I would have spoken, but he hurried past us swiftly and silently with no more than a curt gesture towards the stairs. On the upper landing, Lestrade led the way into a bedroom with massive dark furniture that loomed up gloomily in the light of a shaded lamp burning on a table beside a great open Bible. The sickly stuffiness of funeral flowers, as well as the dampness of the house, followed me everywhere.

Holmes, his brows drawn into two hard black lines, was crawling on all fours under the windows, examining every inch of the floor with his lens. At my stern word of injunction he rose to his feet.

'No, Watson! These windows were not opened three nights ago. Had they been opened during so heavy a storm, I must have found traces.' He sniffed the air. 'But it was not necessary to open the windows.'

'Listen!' said I. 'What is that strange noise?'

I looked over towards the bed, with its curtains and high dark canopy. At the head of the bed my gaze fastened on a marble-topped table littered with dusty medicine-bottles.

'Holmes, it is the dead man's gold watch! It lies upon that little table there, and it is still ticking.'

'Does that astonish you?'

'Surely, after three days, they would have allowed it to run down?'

'So they did. But I wound it up. I came up here before I examined the dead man downstairs. In fact, I made this whole journey from the village to wind up Squire Tre­lawney's watch at precisely ten o'clock.'

'Upon my word, Holmes—!'

'And see,' he continued, hastening to the small table in question, 'what a treasure-trove we have here! Look at this, Lestrade! Look at it!'

'But, Holmes, it is only a small pot of vaseline such as you may buy at any chemist's!'

'On the contrary, it is a hangman's rope. And yet,' he finished thoughtfully, 'there remains that one point which continues to puzzle me. How was it that you were able to avail yourself of Sir Leopold Harper?' he asked sud­denly, turning to Lestrade. 'Does he live here?'

'No, he is staying with some friends in the neighbour­hood. When the post-mortem was decided on, the local police looked upon it as a bit of luck that the best-known expert in England on medical jurisprudence should be within reach, so they sent for him. And a fine time they had to get him to do it,' he added with a sly grin.

'Why?'

'Because he was in bed with a hot-water bottle, a glass of hot toddy, and a cold in his head.'

Holmes threw his arms in the air.

'My case is complete,' he cried.

Lestrade and I looked at each other in amazement. 'I have only one more instruction to give,' said Holmes. 'Lestrade, nobody must leave this house to­night. The diplomacy of detaining everyone here I leave to you. Watson and I will compose ourselves in this room until five o'clock tomorrow morning.'

It was in vain, considering his masterful nature, to ask why we must do this. While he settled into the only rocking-chair, it was in vain to protest that I could not even sit down on the dead man's bed, much less take a brief nap there. I objected for some time. I objected until— 'Watson!'

Cleaving through my dreams, that voice roused me from slumber. I sat bolt upright on the quilt, feeling much dishevelled, with the morning sun in my eyes and the dead man's watch still ticking near my ear.

Sherlock Holmes, with his customary catlike neatness of appearance, stood watching me.

'It is ten minutes past five,' said he, 'and I felt I had best awaken you. Ah, Lestrade,' he continued, as there came a knock at the door. 'I trust that the others are with you. Pray come in.'

I bounded off the bed as Miss Dale entered the room followed by Dr. Griffin, young Ainsworth and, to my astonishment, the vicar.

'Really, Mr. Holmes,' cried Dolores Dale, her eyes sparkling with anger. 'It is intolerable that a mere whim should keep us here all night—even poor Mr. Appley.'

'It was no whim, believe me. I wish to explain how the late Mr. Trelawney was cold-bloodedly murdered.'

'Murdered, eh!' blurted out Dr. Griffin. 'Then In­spector Lestrade wants to hear you. But the method —?'

'Was diabolical in its simplicity. Dr. Watson here was shrewd enough to call my attention to it. No, Watson, not a word! Mr. Appley gave us the clue when he said that if he had practiced medicine he might absent-mindedly have removed a patient's gall-stones. But that was not all he said. He stated that first he would have chloroformed the patient. The suggestive word was chloroform.'

'Chloroform!' echoed Dr. Griffin, rather wildly.

'Exactly. It might well suggest itself to a murderer, since only last year, in a famous murder-trial at the Old Bailey, Mrs. Adelaide Bartlett was acquitted from a charge of poisoning her husband by pouring liquid chloroform down his throat as he lay asleep.'

'But, deuce take it! Trelawney swallowed no chloro­form!'

'Of course not. But suppose, Dr. Griffin, I were to take a large pad of cotton-wool saturated in chloroform, and press it over the mouth and nostrils of an old man —a heavily sleeping man—for some twenty minutes. What would happen?'

'He would die. Yet you could not do that without leaving traces!'

'Ah, excellent! What traces?'

'Chloroform tends to burn or blister the skin. There would be burns, at least very small burns.'

Holmes shot out a long arm towards the marble-topped table.

'Now suppose, Dr. Griffin,' said he, holding up the tiny pot of vaseline, 'I were first softly to spread on the face of the victim a thin film of such ointment as this. Would there be burns afterwards?'

'No, there wouldn't!'

'I perceive that your medical knowledge leaps ahead and anticipates me. Chloroform is volatile; it evaporates and quickly vanishes from the blood. Delay a post­mortem examination for nearly two days, as this was delayed, and no trace will be left.'

'Not so fast, Mr. Sherlock Holmes! There is—'

'There is a slight, a very slight possibility, that an odour of chloroform may be detected either in the room of death or at the post-mortem. But here it would have been hidden by the thick pungency of medicine and liniment. At the post-mortem it would have been hidden by that bad cold in the head from which Sir Leopold Harper suffered.'

Dr. Griffin's face seemed to stand out white against his red beard.

'By God, that's true!'

'Now we ask ourselves, as the vicar might, cui bono? Who profits from this dastardly crime?'

I noticed that Lestrade moved a step closer to the doctor.

'Take care, curse you!' snarled Griffin.

Holmes put down the ointment and took up the dead man's heavy gold watch, which seemed to tick even more loudly.

'I would draw your attention to this watch, of the sort known as a gold hunter. Last night I wound it up fully at ten o'clock. It is now, as you see, twenty minutes past five.'

'And what of that?' cried Miss Dale.

'It is the exact time, if you recall, when the vicar wound up this same watch on the morning you found your uncle dead. Though the performance may distress you now, I beg of you to listen.'

Cr-r—r-ack went the harsh, rasping noise as Holmes began slowly to wind it up. On and on it seemed to go, while the stem still turned.

'Hold hard!' said Dr. Griffin. 'There's something wrong!'

'Again excellent! And what is wrong?'

'Deuce take it, the vicar made only two full turns of that stem, and it was fully wound up! You've made seven