The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes

body shuddering for the spring, stood another monstrous spider.

I knew instinctively that any sudden movement would merely precipitate the creature's leap and so, carefully drawing my revolver from my pocket, I fired pointblank.

Through the powder-smoke, I saw the thing shrink into itself and then, toppling slowly backwards, it fell through the open lid of the stove. There was a rasping, slithering sound rapidly fading away into silence.

'It's fallen down the pipe,' I cried, conscious that my hands were now shaking under a strong reaction. 'Are you all right, Holmes?'

He looked at me and there was a singular light in his eye.

'Thanks to you, my dear fellow!' he said soberly. 'If I had moved then—but what is that?'

A door had slammed below and, an instant later, we caught the swift patter of feet upon the gravel path.

'After him!' cried Holmes, springing for the door. 'Your shot warned him that the game was up. He must not escape!'

But fate decreed otherwise. Though we rushed down the stairs and out into the fog, Theobold Wilson had too much start on us and the advantage of knowing the terrain. For a while, we followed the faint sound of his running footsteps down the empty lanes towards the river, but at length these died away in the distance.

'It is no good, Watson. We have lost our man,' panted Holmes. 'This is where the official police may be of use. But listen! Surely that was a cry?'

'I thought I heard something.'

'Well, it is hopeless to look further in the fog. Let us return and comfort this poor girl with the assurance that her troubles are now at an end.'

'They were nightmare creatures, Holmes,' I exclaimed, as we retraced our steps towards the house, 'and of some unknown species.'

'I think not, Watson,' said he. 'It was the Galeodes spider, the horror of the Cuban forests. It is perhaps fortunate for the rest of the world that it is found nowhere else. The creature is nocturnal in its habits, and unless my memory belies me, it possesses the power actually to break the spine of smaller creatures with a single blow of its mandibles. You will recall that Miss Janet men­tioned that the rats had vanished since her uncle's return. Doubtless Wilson brought the brutes back with him,' he went on, 'and then conceived the idea of training certain of his canaries to imitate the song of some Cuban night-bird upon which the Galeodes were accustomed to feed. The marks on the ceiling were caused, of course, by the soot adhering to the spiders' legs after they had scrambled up the flues. It is fortunate, perhaps, for the consulting detective that the duster of the average housemaid sel­dom strays beyond the height of a mantelpiece.

'Indeed, I can discover no excuse for my lamentable slowness in solving this case, for the facts were before me from the first, and the whole affair was elementary in its construction.

'And yet to give Theobold Wilson his dues, one must recognize his almost diabolical cleverness. Once these horrors were installed in the stove in the cellar, what more simple than to arrange two ordinary flues communicating with the bedrooms above? By hanging the cages over the stoves, the flues would themselves act as a magnifier to the birds' song and, guided by their predatory instinct, the creatures would invariably ascend whichever pipe led to it. Once Wilson had devised some means of luring them back again to their nest, they represented a com­paratively safe way of getting rid of those who stood between himself and the property.'

'Then its bite is deadly?' I interposed.

'To a person in weak health, probably so. But there lies the devilish cunning of the scheme, Watson. It was the sight of the thing rather than its bite, poisonous though it may be, on which he relied to kill his victim. Can you imagine the effect upon an elderly woman, and later upon her son, both suffering from insomnia and heart disease, when in the midst of a bird's seemingly innocent song this appalling spectacle arose from the top of the stove? We have sampled it ourselves, though we are healthy men. It killed them as surely as a bullet through their hearts.'

'There is one thing I cannot understand, Holmes. Why did he appeal to Scotland Yard?'

'Because he is a man of iron nerve. His niece was instinctively frightened and, finding that she was adamant in her intention of leaving, he planned to kill her at once and by the same method.

'Once done, who should dare to point the finger of suspicion at Master Theobold? Had he not appealed to Scotland Yard and even invoked the aid of Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself to satisfy one and all? The girl had died of a heart attack like the others and her uncle would have been the recipient of general condolences.

'Remember the padlocked cover of the stove in the cellar and admire the cold nerve that offered to fetch the key. It was bluff, of course, for he would have discovered that he had 'lost' it. Had we persisted and forced that lock, I prefer not to think of what we would have found clinging round our collars.'

Theobold Wilson was never heard of again. But it is perhaps suggestive that, some two days later, a man's body was fished out of the Thames. The corpse was mutilated beyond recognition, probably by a ship's propeller, and the police searched his pockets in vain for means of identification. They contained nothing, how­ever, save for a small note-book filled with jottings on the brooding period of the Fringilla Canaria.

'It is the wise man who keeps bees,' remarked Sherlock Holmes when he read the report. 'You know where you are with them and at least they do not attempt to represent themselves as something that they are not.'

----:----

In this memorable year '93, a curious and incongruous succession of cases had engaged his attention ranging from . . . the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca down to the arrest of Wilson the notorious canary-trainer* which removed a plague-spot from the East End of London.

FROM 'BLACK PETER.'

* In the Wilson case, Holmes did not actually arrest Wilson as Wilson was drowned. This was a typical Watson error in his hurried reference to the case in 'Black Peter.'

12

The Adventure of the Red Widow

'Your conclusions are perfectly correct, my dear Wat­son,' remarked my friend Sherlock Holmes. 'Squalor and poverty are the natural matrix to crimes of violence.'

'Precisely so,' I agreed. 'Indeed, I was just think­ing—' I broke off to stare at him in amazement. 'Good heavens, Holmes,' I cried, 'this is too much. How could you possibly know my innermost thoughts!'

My friend leaned back in his chair and, placing his finger-tips together, surveyed me from under his heavy, drooping eyelids.

'I would do better justice, perhaps, to my limited powers by refusing to answer your question,' he said, with a dry chuckle. 'You have a certain flair, Watson, for concealing your failure to perceive the obvious by the cavalier manner in which you invariably accept the ex­planation of a sequence of simple but logical reasoning.'

'I do not see how logical reasoning can enable you to follow the course of my mental processes,' I retorted, a trifle nettled by his superior manner.

'There was no great difficulty. I have been watching you for the last few minutes. The expression on your face was quite vacant until, as your eyes roved about the room, they fell on the bookcase and came to rest on Hugo's Les Miserables which made so deep an impres­sion upon you when you read it last year. You became thoughtful, your eyes narrowed, it was obvious that your mind was drifting again into that tremendous dreadful saga of human suffering; at length your gaze lifted to the window with its aspect of snow-flakes and grey sky and bleak, frozen roofs, and then, moving slowly on to the mantelpiece, settled on the jack-knife With which I skewer my unanswered correspondence. The frown darkened on your face and unconsciously you shook your head despondently. It was an association of ideas. Hugo's terrible sub-third stage, the winter cold of poverty in the slums and, above the warm glow of our own modest fire, the bare knife-blade. Your expression deepened into one of sadness, the melancholy that comes with an understanding of cause and effect in the unchanging human tragedy. It was then that I ventured to agree with you.'

'Well, I must confess that you followed my thoughts with extraordinary accuracy,' I admitted. 'A remarkable piece of reasoning, Holmes.'

'Elementary, my dear Watson.'

The year of 1887 was moving to its end. The iron grip of the great blizzards that commenced in the last week of December had closed on the land and beyond the windows of Holmes's lodgings in Baker Street lay a gloomy