The Moor

'You did.'

'Did I? Oh good.'

'So what has the Stapleton case to do with Dartmoor now?' Holmes prodded.

'I do not know except—' He dropped his voice, as if someone, or something, might be listening at the window. 'They tell me the Hound has been seen again, running free on the moor.'

***

I cannot deny that the old man's words brought a finger of primitive ice down my spine. A loose dog chasing sheep is a problem, but hardly reason for superstitious fears. However, the night, my fatigue, and the stark fact that this apparently sensible and undeniably intelligent old man was himself frightened, all came together to walk a goose over my grave. I shivered.

Fortunately, Holmes did not notice, because the words also had an effect on the man who had uttered them. He slumped into his chair, suddenly grey and exhausted, his eyes closed, his purplish lips slack. I stood in alarm, fearing he had suffered an attack of some kind, but Holmes went briskly out of the door, returning in a minute with the cheerful, rather stupid-looking woman who had brought our dinner. She laid a strong hand on Baring-Gould's arm, and he opened his eyes and smiled weakly.

'I'll be fine in a moment, Mrs Moore. Too much excitement.'

'On top of everything else, the cold and the worry an' all. Mrs Elliott will never forgive me if I let you take ill. Best you go to bed now, Rector. I've laid a nice fire in your room, and tomorrow Mrs Elliott will be back and the heat'll be on.' He began to protest, but she already had him on his feet and moving towards the door.

'Time enough tomorrow, Gould,' Holmes called. We followed the sounds as the woman half-carried her easily bullied charge upstairs to his bed. A far-off door closed, and Holmes dropped back into his chair and took up his pipe.

'Twenty years ago that man could walk me into the ground,' he said.

I took some split logs from the basket and tossed them onto the fire before returning to my own chair. 'So I came all the way here to help you look for a dog,' I said flatly.

'Don't be obtuse, Russell,' he snapped. 'I thought you of all people would see past the infirmities.'

'To what? A superstitious old parson? A busybody who thinks the world is his parish—or rather, his manor?'

Holmes suddenly took his pipe out of his mouth, and said in pure East-End Cockney, ' 'E didn't 'alf ruffle yer feathers, didn'e, missus?'

After a minute, reluctantly, I grinned back at him. 'Very well, I admit I was peeved to begin with, and he didn't exactly endear himself.'

'He never has been much of one for the politic untruth, and you did appear very bedraggled.'

'I promise I'll behave myself when I meet him again. But only if you tell me why you brought me down here.'

'Because I needed you.'

Of all the clever, manipulative answers I had been braced to meet, I had not expected one of such complete simplicity. His transparent honesty made me deeply suspicious, but the real possibility that he was telling the unadorned truth swept the feet out from under my resolve to stand firm against him. My suspicions and thoughts chased each other around for a while, until eventually I simply burst out laughing.

'All right, Holmes, you win. I'm here. What do you want me to do?'

He rose and went to the sideboard to replenish his glass (not, I noticed, from the small stoneware jug that held the metheglin) and returned with a glass in his other hand as well, which he placed on the table next to my chair before moving over to stand in front of the fire. He took a deep draught from his drink, put it down on the floor beside his foot (as there was no mantelpiece), and took up his pipe. I sank down into the arms of the chair, growing more apprehensive by the minute: All of this delay meant either that he was trying to decide how best to get around the defences that I thought I had already let down, or that he was uncertain in his own mind about how to proceed. Either way, it was not a good sign.

He succeeded in getting his pipe to draw cleanly, retrieved his glass, and settled down in his chair, stretching his long legs towards the fire. Another slow draught half emptied the glass, and with his chin on his chest and his pipe in his hand, he looked into the fresh flames and began to speak.

'As Gould intimated, Dartmoor is a most peculiar place,' he began. 'Physically it comprises a high, wide bowl of granite, some three hundred and fifty square miles covered with a thin, peaty soil and scattered with outcrops of stone. It functions as a huge sponge, the peat storing its rain all winter to feed the Teign, the Dart, the Tavy, and all the other streams and rivers that are born here. The floor of the moor is a thousand feet above the surrounding Devonshire countryside, from which it rises abruptly. It is a thing apart, a place unconnected with the rest of the world, and it is not inappropriate that a very harsh prison was set in its midst. Indeed, to many, Dartmoor is synonymous with the prison, although that facility is but a bump on the broad face of the moor.'

'I have seen the Yorkshire moors,' I said.

'Then you've a very rough idea of the ground here, but not of Dartmoor's special character. It is much more of a hortus conclusus, although this walled garden is no warm and fruitful paradise, but a rocky place of gorse and bracken. As Gould said, it does not generously part with its wealth. It is a land of great strength—men have broken their health and their fortunes trying to beat it down and shape it to their ends, but the moor wins out in the end. The men who chose to build a prison here set great value on breaking the spirits of the men they were guarding. The moor will not be farmed, nor made to grow any but the simplest crops. Tin miners have been the only men to draw much money from the place, and even they had to work hard for it. On a basic level, however, it has provided spare sustenance to its inhabitants for thousands of years: One finds mediaeval stone crosses mingling with neolithic ruins and early Victorian engine houses.

'Most of the moor is a chase or forest, which as I'm sure you know does not necessarily mean trees, and here most emphatically does not. In this sense, a forest denotes a wild reserve for the crown to hunt, although I imagine the Prince of Wales must find the game somewhat limited on the moor itself, unless he is fond of rabbits. Much of it is a common, grazed by the adjoining parishes with fees collected at a yearly gathering up of the animals,