“Certainly, Holmes, if there is anything I can do.”
“You can listen, old fellow. You are an invaluable listener. While we wait, I may perhaps outline for you her problem, as her successive written messages have presented it to me.”
“I am all ears.”
Holmes had finished his own breakfast, and while I attacked mine he pushed back his chair and lighted his first pipe of the day. “Miss Tarlton,” he began, “comes from a good family in New York. Her father is an eminent member of the medical profession there, and I suppose it is quite natural that she should have bestowed her heart upon another physician, Dr. John Scott. A very brilliant young man, by his fiancée’s account at least, and evidently determined to prove himself.”
“Young Scott’s talents lie—or lay; it is uncertain whether he is still alive—chiefly in research aimed at discovering the chemical and biological agents of disease. His studies in the laboratory were praised, but could not be conclusive in finding the cure he sought. Having some means of his own, and acquiring financial aid from other sources, he outfitted an expedition to the East Indies, where pestilential death is likely to be found at home to any caller.
“His departure took place just two years ago, in June of 1895. It was the agreement that upon his return to New York, having, as he expected, achieved success in his dangerous researches, he and Miss Tarlton should marry.
“For more than a year he wrote her faithfully, and she of course responded. The irregularity of the post sometimes brought her several letters from him at once, and twice months passed without a word. Therefore her alarm was not instantaneous when the young man disappeared.”
“You mean—?”
“I mean he ceased to write, or at any rate his letters ceased to arrive in America. After five months had passed with no word, Miss Tarlton began to find more and more ominous certain hints of danger appearing in his last letters. Her attempts to communicate with the American embassies and consulates nearest to his last known whereabouts in Sumatra produced no helpful information. More months passed and the young lady grew increasingly worried. She and her father were on the point of organizing a search expedition, when something happened that turned her attention halfway across the world. Her young man, or so there is some reason to believe, has recently been seen alive and well in London.”
“London! But why on earth should he have come here?”
“There is no apparent reason. And from all that I have yet learned of his character, Watson, it rings false that he should act in a deliberately callous way to his betrothed.”
“What was the nature of his research?” I moved my plate away, and began filling my own pipe.
“Well, word had reached him in America that the disease for which he sought a cure was endemic in certain remote parts of the interior of Sumatra. His letters from that island to Miss Tarlton describe its strange pattern of infection in those regions. Village after village was ravaged, in a slow geographical progression suggesting the movement through the jungle of a single causative agent, perhaps a Living creature of some kind.
“Such reports as he had from the natives insisted that this agent was in fact a large animal—some claimed it to be an orangutan, the great ape of the region; others spoke of a large rodent, a kind of monstrous rat.”
“Good heavens, Holmes!”
“Young Scott’s letters—I have them here, and you can read them later—detail his pursuit of this animal under conditions of extreme difficulty and hardship. The sole companion who had set out with him from America, another young scientist, fell ill with fever early in the game and had to return home. But Scott persevered, using native assistants. He of course faced danger from tropic diseases, from the natural obstacles of the uncharted wilderness, from beasts, and from some of the island’s more savage inhabitants. And in his last letter there is a hint of still another kind of trouble—he mentions the presence, within a few miles of his own camp, of some European expedition.”
“I should have thought he’d find the presence of other civilized men very welcome.”
“So he did, evidently. And yet…well, it would be a waste of time to theorize on those far-off events with no more data than are yet on hand. And here, unless I am mistaken, is Miss Tarlton herself, and you will be able to hear the details from her own lips.”
A moment later the lady was shown in. Few visitors more lovely can ever have crossed our threshold. She was richly but very modestly dressed. Her blue eyes at first glance searched me with hope, almost with pleading, as if I might represent some answer to her prayers. But when we were introduced, the hope in her gaze quickly faded, to be reborn an instant later as she turned to my companion. “Mr. Holmes. I am told that if any living person can solve my problem, you are that man.”
“Pray sit down, Miss Tarlton. I am eager to hear in some greater detail the facts as you have outlined them in your letters. In particular, exactly when, and under what circumstances, was your fiancé identified in London? What makes you so sure that it was he?”
Greatly agitated, the lady leaned forward in the chair she had just taken. “Mr. Holmes, I can’t be sure.” She drew a deep breath. “It happened this way. A mutual friend of John’s and mine, Mr. Peter Moore, happened to be on business in this city last month, when he received a call from the London firm of Morrison, Morrison, and Dodd, who I understand are specialists in assessing machinery. The ship Matilda Briggs, bound for Portsmouth from the South Seas, had run aground upon the Eddystone Rocks. The salvors
