“Have you that note, too? Excellent! Thank you.” Holmes held the two papers for a moment to the light. Then he asked: “The victim was, I suppose, dressed in a peculiar kind of hospital shirt or gown, the sleeves held on by small cloth ties?”
If our visitors had been stunned by Holmes’ earlier remark, this question cast them into a state approaching paralysis. At last they stammered out some confirmation; and from a small bag which he had been carrying, Sir Jasper now produced a garment which, when unrolled, looked like the twin of the shirt discovered on the pier.
“Gentlemen,” he advised us, “I have treated this with carbolic, as was necessary to eliminate the danger of contagion. Otherwise it is just as I myself removed it from the latest plague victim’s body.”
Holmes accepted the garment and held it up, spread out. “I see no bullet-holes,” I remarked, no doubt rather thoughtlessly, in my excitement. Sir Jasper gave me a peculiar glance. “We have said, Dr. Watson, that the man died of plague.”
With a quick half-smile in my direction, Holmes bent to open a lower drawer of his desk. From the drawer he took out another roll of cloth, and spread it out upon his desk beside the first. The bewilderment in our visitors’ faces could scarcely be said to increase, but their expressions seemed to acquire a frozen permanence as they beheld the two shirts side by side.
“Two things I must assure you of, gentlemen,” Holmes’ voice crackled now, and he smiled no more. “The first is that the threat you have received is in the most deadly earnest; and the second is that there is a good chance of its being carried out.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I can only describe the pressure that kept me from entering Sal’s apartment by comparing it with the force that would prevent either breathing man or vampire from leaping in a single bound to the top of a hundred-story building; just so impossible was it for me to move a centimeter past the threshold without invitation.
“The coat!” Matthews rasped at me again, from across the squalid room. “Just tyke it off now, real easy-like.” The knife in his hand prodded with precise calculation at the girl’s soft throat, where one small bright drop of blood appeared.
My own right hand, extended at shoulder height, was hidden from his view behind the frame of the doorway in which I stood. It had gone to work with all its strength on the old masonry that mouldered there. Tired mortar crunched and cracked beneath my rage-driven talons, and a fist-sized stone was loosening.
To cover the sounds made by my busy fingers, and to try to gain time for them to complete their work, I endeavored to draw my enemy into an argument. As he obviously took me for some detective or other, I played the role. “Think what you are doing, Matthews. This is not a killing matter—not yet. Put down the knife, release the girl, and you shall never stand in the dock for any crime you may have committed so far. You have my solemn word on that.”
Matthews had no intention of believing me, or even of listening. “Your coat, I said! Or, by God, I’ll carve her!”
My straining fingers at last pulled the stone out of the wall. Time was when my right hand knew cunning with spear and lance and javelin. I twisted my body and threw with all the force that I could muster. The hurled stone cracked Matthews’ wrist, jarring the blade out of his hand—but from there the stone glanced on in a way that I had not foreseen, to smash into his forehead. He fell without a groan, to hit the floor almost before his clashing weapon.
Sal cried out, and she too went down, although the blade had left only the merest scratch upon her throat. For a long moment there was stark silence in the cellar, save for her solitary, gasping breath, and the uneven thumping of her heart. Then she raised her head, grasping the fact that the deadly peril of the knife had somehow been averted. She jumped up, hysterical though still almost silent, and would have run past me to the street.
I caught her gently in the doorway. “Sally, you must invite me in. Bid me come into your dwelling, dear. Sally—?”
It took a minute to extract from her the coherent words I needed. With their pronouncing, the overwhelming resistance to my entry was gone at once. (It could have been only psychological, you say? But so is life.) Now I could walk her to a chair, where I settled her and soothed her, and kissed the thrice-marred whiteness of her throat. Leaving her still quietly a—tremble, I walked over to the far wall, to see if a source of information might be salvaged.
Alas, it was at once apparent that no sort of appeal—even from me—was going to make much impression upon my quondam opponent. His eyes were half open and his vital signs had all but disappeared. Where the stone had struck his forehead there was a visible depression. Cursing my ill-fortune, I let him fall back to the floor.
At this, Sal let out a faint shriek, and I turned to regard her thoughtfully. Tremoring and twitching, staring now into space, she was seemingly indifferent even to the full display of her great birthmark in the reflected harshness of the electric lantern which still glowed where Matthews had left it on the table. I sighed. It was becoming plain to me, however belatedly, that Sal’s good-hearted nature was very ill-suited to stresses of the kind that Fortune had lately visited upon
