The Stalwart Companions

by H. Paul Jeffers

  “I expect that when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it makes him look for a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.”

  “I intend to see that official notice is taken of your work in this case,” stated Hargreave.

  With a frown, Holmes replied, “No. I am not interested in accolades or rewards.”

  “Then I will give you something as a personal tribute,” insisted Hargreave.

  “A personal memento will be fine,” said Holmes. “I shall look forward to it. Ah, what is that across the way?”

  As we three turned to look toward the hotel, a carriage drew to the curb and two men stepped out, but the passengers were obscured for a long, painfully breathless moment until the carriage drew away, revealing the backs of two men who in no way approached the descriptions of Rickards and Charles.

  “We must wait a little while longer,” sighed Holmes, leaning against the wall once more.

  “Perhaps they caught wind of what has happened and won’t come,” I suggested glumly.

  “There is no way they could know of Veil’s fate,” replied Hargreave. “Not a word of it has reached the newspapers!”

  “I believe our men will be here,” added Holmes, “sooner or later.” Coming up straight again, his cold eyes peering toward the hotel, he added, “And sooner rather than later!”

  “It’s Rickards, all right,” whispered Hargreave excitedly. “Bigger than I’d expected but there’s no missing that mop of red hair.”

  “No mistaking the mousy Charles either,” I pointed out. As the immense Rickards swaggered toward the Gilsey Hotel, the smaller, pale, thin Charles walked rapidly at his side, trying to keep up with the bigger man’s pace. Rickards wore the clothing of a longshoreman. Charles was in a black suit and slouched hat that seemed to me to be in perfect accord with his villainous character. The two were gesturing wildly.

  “Our quarry appear to be having an argument,” said Holmes.

  “Shall we move in?” asked Hargreave.

  With the words, my hand went into my pocket to find the comforting presence of my revolver.

  “Let them come closer,” said Holmes, laying a restraining hand upon Will’s shoulder. “We don’t want to alert them just yet.”

  In a few moments, Rickards and Charles were near to the entrance of the Silver Dollar. Their voices carried clearly across the street. Angrily, Charles was saying, “It’s your fault that things have gotten out of hand. If you’d’ve taken care of Tebbel sooner, we’d have succeeded.”

  “Now we know who murdered Tebbel, eh?” whispered Holmes.

  Rickards’s reply to Charles was lost in the clopping of a horse’s hooves and the rattle of a passing carriage, but Holmes and I could not help but hear Hargreave’s choked gasp as he had his first close look at the two men across Broadway. “I know that little fellow! That is, I have seen him from time to time. He’s a very disreputable hanger-on who has been haunting the Fifth Avenue Hotel and bothering the political men who do business there.”

  “Where he undoubtedly met Veil,” I suggested.

  “Yes,” said Holmes.

  “He might recognise me,” warned Hargreave.

  “He’s seen you?” Holmes asked.

  Will shrugged. “I don’t know, but if I saw him it seems reasonable to assume–”

  “Um,” muttered Holmes. “We’ll have to move quickly, then. I suggest we cross the street and arrest these men right now.”

  We left the vestibule and hurried down a flight of steps. Neither Rickards nor Charles noticed us. Indeed, they took no notice until they were about to push open the door of the Silver Dollar. Then the sound of our running alarmed them. They stopped, turned, saw us, and bolted in the direction from which they had come.

  “Signal your man at the corner, Hargreave!” shouted Holmes, but no signal was needed. The policeman at the corner, deceptively attired in evening clothes, was already moving toward Rickards and Charles.

  “Halt! Police!” cried Hargreave.

  To no avail.

  I whipped my revolver from my pocket, ready to fire.

  “No, Teddy!” cried Holmes, knocking my arm down. It was a wise intervention. Had I fired, I could have struck the policeman who bounded in front of Rickards and Charles in an effort to block their path. Unfortunately, the daring and brave young member of the Broadway Squad proved no match for the massive Rickards and the wiry Charles and was thrown hard to the street. The culprits resumed their desperate bid to escape.

  I fired one shot after them but missed.

  Although Holmes, Hargreave, and I were running hard and closing the distance between us and the culprits, they had reached the corner, dashed into the street, and forced a passing hack to a halt. The burly Rickards leaped into the hack and shoved the hackie off his perch into the street. Charles scampered into the back of the hack like a ferret scrambling into its lair. The horse, at the crack of the whip in Rickards’ hand, sprang forward, and the hack clattered south on Broadway.

  “Damn!” cried Holmes.

  ___

  Author's notes on this chapter

  Fifteen

  With upraised arms and brandishing his badge, Hargreave dashed into Broadway to commandeer a passing carriage. “Stop! Police! We must have this coach!” Too startled and frightened to do anything but comply, the coach’s occupants meekly climbed down and we scrambled into it, Hargreave leaping to the driver’s box and seizing the reins.

  “Ha!” cried Holmes, nostrils flaring, eyes ablaze with excitement. “We shall have these criminals, I promise you!”

  Away, we flew down Broadway, Hargreave whipping the horse to greater exertion and our carriage to faster speeds while I held on for dear life, bounced and tossed upon the seat. Holmes stood, face in the wind, jaw firmly set with cold determination.

  Ahead of us by several blocks clattered the pirated coach carrying Rickards and Charles, the hack bouncing and careering dangerously through screaming, scattering pedestrians who had found themselves haplessly in the path of the coach and its desperately mad passengers.

  “Faster, Hargreave! Faster!” cried Holmes, bony hands clenching the back of the driver’s seat.

  “Sit down, Holmes!” I implored, tugging at his coattail. “You’ll fall out!”

  “We’ll get them, Teddy! We’ll get them!” he cried. “Or we’ll die in the effort.”

  Hargreave proved an expert driver, keeping our pursuing carriage on a straight line with the object of our chase. Helped by the fact that their dangerous race down Broadway had cleared a way for us, we gained steadily.

  “They’re turning!” shouted Hargreave.

  “Don’t lose them!” shouted Holmes.

  Holding tight, I managed to rise from my seat to watch Rickards wheel his stolen hack sharply to the east. In a moment, we had made the same turn, coming near to turning over, but soon we found a steady keel, plunging dangerously, recklessly along usually quiet, tree-lined Twenty-third Street. Here, too, frightened people ran for their lives as the speeding carriages suddenly bore down upon them. We raced past the City College of New York’s building at the corner of Lexington and Twenty-third, only two blocks from the spot where the murder of Nigel Tebbel had launched us on our amazing course only a few hours earlier.

  Rickards and Charles turned south on Third Avenue.

  Hargreave maneuvered the turn and closed the distance a bit more.

  “The horse cannot keep up this pace!” I warned.

  Holmes appeared not to hear my words.

  Mercifully, the avenue emptied before us as terrified citizens scurried to the safety of sidewalks only to gape in amazement and anger as the racing carriages rattled head-long past them. We crossed over to The Bowery and then into the streets of The Five Points while ahead of us loomed the stolidly impressive towers of the unfinished bridge to Brooklyn.

  “Your revolver, Roosevelt!” cried Holmes. “Use it now!”

  Leaping to my feet and trying to steady my st
ance, I levelled my arm and sighted down the barrel of the weapon. Holmes braced his body against mine to help steady me. I fired twice, missing twice.

  “Damn!” groaned Holmes, bringing out his pistol and firing with equally futile results.

  “It’s useless, Holmes, at this speed!”

  “Close it up, Hargreave!” Holmes demanded.

  My glance at the frothing, straining horse pulling our carriage was enough to tell me that we could not maintain this breakneck pace much longer. We had raced wildly for blocks. It was a wonder the animal had not dropped dead long ago!

  “Ho!” Holmes laughed triumphantly. “Look! They’ve overturned!”

  Sure enough! A chuckhole became their undoing, splitting a wheel and flipping the hackney into a spin and onto its side, their pitiful horse brought to its knees while the villains in the coach were plummeted to the street.

  “Stop, Hargreave!” roared Holmes.

  Even before we had come to a halt, Holmes leaped out of the coach to dash toward the fallen quarry. I leaped after him and Hargreave behind me. Rickards and Charles lay dazed in a gutter, but not for long.

  “Watch out!” warned Holmes, throwing himself to the street.

  Luckily, I saw what Holmes had seen – Rickards lifting himself onto an elbow to level a pistol at us. Dropping to the street and rolling against a curbstone, I heard the report of the weapon. It seemed to be the loudest noise I had ever heard! Yet it was lost immediately in the far more terrifying cry of pain from Hargreave. “I’m hit!” Looking back, I saw Will clutch his left shoulder. I scampered on all fours toward him as two other shots rang out.

  “Will! Will! Are you badly hit?”

  “The shoulder! Damn! It hurts like hell!”

  “I’ll get help!”

  “No! Give Holmes a hand! Look!”

  Sherlock Holmes was up to his feet again and chasing Rickards and Charles, who sprinted madly ahead of him. “I can’t leave you hurt, Will,” I protested.

  “God damn it, Teddy! We can’t let the scoundrels escape!”

  By this time, Holmes was two blocks distant and the criminals a block ahead of him. When I closed most of that distance between them and me we had reached the approaches to the Manhattan side of the bridge that would soon be a highway across the East River to Brooklyn and Long Island. As I could not chance using my revolver because I might hit Holmes, there was nothing to do but run as fast as I could and, with Holmes, grapple with the two men who, now, had become the objects of the most intense hatred I had ever known. They had shot my friend Will Hargreave and that, I felt at that moment, was a far greater crime than their plot to murder our President or their dastardly murder of Nigel Tebbel! Dashing up the long slope of the bridge, I realised that my interest in this affair was now the basest motive in the entire human experience – revenge. Revenge for wounding my friend Will!

  Then, with a flying tackle, Holmes – amazingly so for such a spare young man–brought down Rickards.

  And I pounced upon the smaller man.

  A vicious, cunning, skillful fighter and wrestler, Charles gave no quarter as we tangled, seizing each other around the middle and falling onto the planking of the floor of the bridge. Even though we were gasping, grunting, and breathing hard as we struggled, I heard the rush of East River waters far below us. Tenacious and shrewd, the wiry Charles clung to me, perhaps sensing that he would be in serious peril if I were free to use my fists.

  Then, frantically, I suddenly heard Holmes crying to me. “Roosevelt! Teddy! Teddy!”

  The horror of what I saw as I looked in the direction of that anguished cry can not be adequately put into words. The gargantuan Rickards had gotten the best of the young Englishman and was handling him as if he were a mere sapling which he was determined to break in two. Huge, thick hands throttled Holmes’ throat. Worse, Holmes was backed against a guardrail, his head, shoulders, and the upper portion of his torso thrust precariously backward over the brink. With sickening horror, I saw that he was a hairbreadth away from being flung into the black, swirling waters far, far below.

  I sprang to help.

  With all the strength I could muster, I lunged against the hulking Rickards and the impact was enough to shake his grip on Holmes’s throat. Turning away, the huge, red-haired abomination who had shot my friend Will and very nearly killed Holmes taunted me with a hateful grin. “I get you, now!” he boasted.

  “If you are going to hit a man put him to sleep!”

  The words were my father’s – so clear in my head that I would have sworn he was standing beside me.

  My right came up from my side in a long, wide, graceful but vicious arc.

  When my fist struck flesh, I felt nose cartilage give way, as Will’s had done years earlier in my boyhood boxing gym.

  Rickards’s hairy red face spattered with blood.

  Roaring in pain, he stumbled blindly backward, faltered, crashed against and through the wooden railing where Holmes had dangled so precariously, and went over the side of the bridge. Oddly, he uttered no cry as he disappeared into the deep, rapidly flowing black waters below. He sank immediately and never came up.

  Dazed, I stared down at the river until I felt someone shaking my shoulders. Regaining my senses, I turned and looked into the face of Sherlock Holmes. “Are you all right, Teddy?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saved my life, old friend. I could have been down there.”

  Suddenly, I remembered Charles and turned to look for him.

  “He’s gone,” sighed Holmes, nodding toward a distant figure in black scurrying over the dangerous length of the incomplete bridge. “He’ll be in Brooklyn in a few minutes.”

  “We can’t let him get away,” I cried.

  “I’m afraid he already has, Teddy.”

  ___

  Author's notes on this chapter

  Sixteen

  When I again found my friend Holmes in his rooms on East Twenty-second Street, the cluttered sitting room was blue with smoke from his calabash pipe, as if he were deliberately creating a simulation of the famous London fog. He peered at me through this haze with cocked head and arched brows, “Ah, Roosevelt, come in. Is it morning already?”

  “You’ve been up all night? Not fretting about the escape of Charles, I hope? I’m sure Hargreave will locate and arrest him.”

  “Perhaps,” said Holmes.

  “Be content, Holmes,” I said cheerily.

  “I am content only when I have a problem to work on, and at the moment I have none. I live only when the game’s afoot.”

  “Well, you are to be congratulated on the successful termination of this business. The President is safely back at the Executive Mansion.”

  Holmes gave me a rare, quick smile. “You were an invaluable help to me.”

  “I did little.”

  “But you were there at my side, a trusty companion. I am grateful, and Hargreave also appreciates your assistance.”

  “That young man has taken a liking to you and your methods.”

  “He’s told me as much. In fact, he offered me a job with the New York police.”

  “A bully idea!”

  “Hargreave was around bright and early this morning. Not even a bullet wound can keep that fellow out of service.”

  “I saw him last evening,” I said, “He’ll mend perfectly.”

  “A brave man, and now he’ll have a scar to boast about. And you, my friend, were not lacking in bravery either.”

  “I confess it was anger that motivated me to do what I did. Bravery had little to do with it.”

  “Well, bravery is usually the offspring of anger, isn’t it?”

  “I feel as if I have just put down a thrilling work of fiction. It is almost impossible to believe that what we have experienced really happened.”

  Holmes smiled. “Teddy, if we could make a magic flying tour of this magnificent city and magically see through the walls and rooftops of its houses, fiction would seem stale and unprofitable in the f
ace of the queer things which are going on, the coincidences, the plans that are being made, the cross purposes, the chain of events leading to the most incredible results. There is nothing quite like life to be found in fiction, Roosevelt.”

  “Are you inured to life and yet so young?”

  “Not at all. I am far from being inured. True, one could despair of life when confronting the likes of Veil or Rickards or the elusive Charles, but on the other hand, there are good men like Griggs. And Schulman, the hack driver with the alert senses! And the brave Hargreave! Not to mention a man named Theodore Roosevelt, who – what did Hargreave say of you? – walks quietly but carries a big fist!”

  “Let’s not forget a man named Holmes?”

  Holmes crossed the room and scooped up a sheaf of newspapers lying at the foot of his chair. “Have you seen today’s Times?”

  “I have not,” I said. “An account of the Gramercy Park affair?”

  “The briefest account of Tebbel’s murder. Nothing more, happily, of a case that is best left untold, but the Times in this number also has an article that has, I confess, stirred an emotion in me that I have long been battling to keep under control.”

  “Indeed? An article on what subject?”

  Holmes handed me the newspaper and managed a wan smile before slumping again into his chair and lifting his calabash to his mouth. “See for yourself.”

  I could only chuckle with amusement at the title of the article: “Phases of London Life.”

  “It amuses you that a man of my years and sophistication is touched with homesickness by a mere newspaper article?”

  “Of course it amuses me, but not at your expense. I was reminded of my own feelings of longing for more familiar streets and scenes when I first went to Cambridge. I found myself torn between a desire to read every New York newspaper I could find and a certain knowledge that the mere possession of a New York paper would tug at my heart strings.”

  “Home is where the heart is,” said Holmes, puffing hard and adding to the density of the fog that swirled around us.