by Otto Penzler
Suddenly, on that lonely road, we came upon a grisly procession—a shuffling file of convicts in knickerbockers and tunics stamped with broad arrows. Under a strong escort of blue-uniformed Civil Guards armed with carbines and fixed bayonets, Britain’s born losers trudged along with picks and shovels over their shoulders, their sullen, shaved heads sunk on their chests.
“There, Bunny,” Raffles muttered, “but for the grace of God—”
I knocked on wood as our dogcart clattered on past. And, about lunchtime, there loomed up ahead of us the house of a thousand hatreds, the most notorious of penitentiaries, its great, gaunt complex of buildings towering starkly over the squat little cluster of dwellings, Princetown, isolated under the gunmetal sky.
“Caution’s our watchword, Bunny,” Raffles said, as he reined in our horse before the long, low, stone-built inn that faced the prison across a deep dip in the moor. “We’ll feel out the ground.”
We found the landlord behind his counter in the Bar Parlour. A stout man in his shirtsleeves, with an oiled cowlick of hair, he was polishing the shove-ha’p’ny board. He gave us good-day and Raffles ordered a Scotch-and-soda for each of us.
“See any lags on the road?” a voice asked.
We turned from the bar. There was one other customer present, sitting on a settle by the window. Lean, tall, powerfully built, gaunt of face, with a mean, tight mouth under a small, wax-pointed, sergeant-major type moustache, he wore a buttoned-up frockcoat and a bowler.
“Yes,” Raffles said, “we saw a group.”
“Being marched in from the stone quarries, huh? At this hour? That means there’s fog coming up.”
The man drained his tankard, mopped his moustache with a red bandanna handkerchief, stood up and, with a curt nod to the landlord, went out.
“Have a drink yourself, landlord,” said Raffles.
“Thank ’ee, sir—just a small nip o’ gin, then, to give me an appetite. You gents on holiday?”
“Snatching a few days from the treadmill,” said Raffles. “Like that gentleman, perhaps, who just went out?”
“Well, no, sir, that’s—but I better not mention his name, he likes to keep it quiet.” The landlord glanced around, lowered his voice. “Between ourselves, gents, he’s the Man with the Cat.”
I stared. We had come to Dartmoor to see a man about a dog.
“The Man with the Cat?” said Raffles.
The landlord nodded. “It’s not like the bad old days, sir, when it was done ’ap’azard. We’re in a new century now. When a lag’s ordered strokes nowadays, it has to be done civilized. So the Man with the Cat comes down from the Prison Commissioners in London to do it. He brings the Cat-o’-Nine-Tails in proper hygienic wrappings. He has to do the job within a prescribed time of the lag bein’ sentenced, to avoid mental anguish, and lay the Cat on for the best effect—scientific.
“He lodges with me for a night or two when he comes down on ’is business. If ’e lodges in the prison, the lags seem to smell ’e’s arrived. They catcalls all night, yowling miaouw miaouw like a thousand randy toms on the roof, to keep him from sleepin’. They kick up a hell of a shindy, to sap ’is strength. The man’s a bit too much in love with ’is work, for my taste. I gets a lodgin’ allowance for him from the Commission, but I can’t say I like the man.”
“I’m sure,” said Raffles. “Landlord, I think we’ll have another drink. Is that gentleman your only guest just now?”
“No, sir, we’ve one other in the house. Book-dealer gent. Rides round to country ’ouses, tryin’ to buy up old books, not that he seems to have much luck. Asked me, he did, when he arrived a week or so ago, if I’d ’appened to read the tale about our Phantom ’Ound in a magazine. Well, I don’t get the time for reading, but we had the writer of it lodgin’ here about a year ago, a Dr. Doyle, ’oo ’ad a Mr. Robinson an’ Mr. Baskerville with him.”
“Mr. Baskerville?” Raffles exlaimed.
The landlord chuckled. “I showed the book-dealer gent our Guest Book to prove it.” He produced a leather-covered volume from under his counter, consulted the pages, then turned the book to Raffles and me. “See for yourselves, sir.”
Under the date 2nd April 1901 were two signatures, one firm and clear, the other boldly scrawled:
A. Conan Doyle, M.D., Norwood, London.
Fletcher Robinson, Ipplepen, Devon (and coachman, Harry M. Baskerville)
“Mr. Robinson brought ’is own dogcart and coachman, see,” said the landlord. “Mr. Baskerville’d drive the two gents ‘ere an’ there on the moor, then wait with the dogcart when the gents trudged off to points they could only get to afoot. Mr. Baskerville took ‘is meals in the kitchen with me an’ my family an’ staff. ’E was tickled pink because Dr. Doyle’d asked him if he’d mind bein’ knighted and put in a tale as Sir ’Enry Baskerville. Talk about laugh.”
“Well, well!” said Raffles. “There’s more behind some of these magazine stories than meets the eye. Is your book-dealer guest still staying here?”
“Yes, sir. He’s out just now. He’s out all day, most days, on a horse I hires him. If he ain’t back well before dark, by the look of it, he’ll get fogged in an’ have to put up in some shepherd’s bothy. Dartmoor’s dangerous in fog.”
“Then perhaps we’d be wise to spend the night here ourselves,” said Raffles. “Got a couple of vacant rooms?”
“Certainly, sir.”
As soon as we had been shown to our rooms, I joined Raffles in his.
“The so-called book-dealer’s our man, Bunny. He’s ‘Sirius,’ all right. I want to find his room and take a look at his things while he’s out.” Raffles opened a door, listened at the crack, then turned. “Mealtime sounds from downstairs, Bunny. The inn folk are in the kitchen, eating. Now’s my chance. Watch from that window. If a grey-faced man on a horse arrives, open this door and start whistling Drink, Puppy, Drink.”
He was gone. I watched from the window. I thought of the “Sirius” letter that implied the existence of “Baskerville whelps,” and Whyte-Melville’s old hunting ditty ran eerily through my mind:
Drink, puppy, drink, and let every puppy drink
That’s old enough to lap and swallow,
For he’ll grow into a hound,
so let’s pass the bottle round,
And merrily we’ll whoop and hollo!
Outside, a stealing mist was beginning faintly to obscure the gaunt buildings of the prison across the plunging dip in the moorland. In front of the inn our dogcart still stood, the horse munching in its nosebag. No man came riding enigmatic out of the mist. And suddenly, silently, Raffles was back in the room.
“Got him, Bunny—knew his room because it’s the only one with a few books in it. There was a locked portmanteau. I opened it with the little gadget I carry. There’s a small Blick typewriter with a faded ribbon in the portmanteau.”
“That settles it,” I said.
“Not quite, Bunny. There’s also an envelope containing five sheaves of currency notes, each sheaf £100. I dared not take it, of course. There’s an Ordinance Survey map of Dartmoor in the portmanteau. I took a look at the map. I could faintly make out the pressure marks left by a pencil when a tracing had been made over the map, and a small x marked on it.”
“The alleged ‘lair of the whelps,’ Raffles!”
“Not only that, Bunny. There’s also in the portmanteau a copy of the daily Devon & Cornwall Gazette, with a small announcement in the Personal column ringed round in pencil: ‘Sirius—instructions awaited.’ ”
My heart stopped.
“The one thing we didn’t want, Bunny,” Raffles said, his grey eyes hard, “must have happened. Mr. Greenhough Smith has shown the ‘Sirius’ letter to Dr. Doyle, and that real-life Sherlock Holmes has smelled the trap in it—damn it, he’d be bound to, knowing what we know of him! If he inserted that announcement, it’s because he’s decided to catch ‘Sirius’ himself, knowing the ‘tainted sources’ he’s probably working for. But, Bunny, that cop
y of the Devon & Cornwall Gazette is four days old! I checked the date on it.”
Raffles was searching, as he spoke, through the things in his own valise.
“You see what it means, Bunny? If the map tracing showing the alleged lair of the whelps was posted to The Strand Magazine the day the announcement appeared in the Gazette, the tracing could have reached Dr. Doyle the day before yesterday, assuming normal mail. He may be on the moor now—the real-life Holmes! He may already have caught ‘Sirius’ in a counter-trap.”
“Or”—I hardly dared say it—“ ‘Sirius’ caught him?”
“My money—remembering Portsmouth—is on the real-life Holmes,” Raffles said grimly. He was studying his own Ordinance Map, dug out from his valise. He made a small x on the map with a pencil. “There we are, Bunny. There it is—out on the moor—the alleged ‘lair of the whelps,’ at the neolithic Stone Rows near Higher White Tor. There’s where ‘Sirius’ has set his trap and where he’s been keeping vigil over it every day for Doyle to walk blindly into it, ‘Sirius’ hopes!”
“For all we know,” I said, “he may be out there at this moment!”
“Bunny,” Raffles said grimly, “they may both be out there at this moment, stalking each other in this fog that’s closing in. There may be just a chance that we can take a hand and square a long-outstanding account. The dogcart’s outside. The map shows Higher White Tor and the Stone Rows to lie almost due north from Princetown here. Come on!”
—
Raffles at the reins, the horse jingled along, now at a trot, now at a canter, along a rough track through the heather, the wheels of the dogcart jolting and grinding. Mist, slowly deepening over the moor, was beginning to take on the grey tinge that presaged the menace of a Dartmoor peasouper.
Presently, the track became impossible for the dogcart. We left it and trudged on afoot. Heather, sparse and tough, grew among scattered, loose flints, which became more plentiful as we went on.
“Prehistoric flint-chippings, Bunny,” Raffles said, “workings of our skin-clad ancestors, the beetle-browed Dawn Men. We must be getting near their settlement, the Stone Rows.”
Suddenly a cry came, thin and inhuman, from somewhere ahead. We checked, listening. Again came the cry, soaring to a neighing, despairing screech, and abruptly ceased.
“There’s a Dartmoor pony gone,” said Raffles, “mired in some morass, and not far off.”
I felt the insidious vapour, dankly chill like grave sweat on my face, as we trudged on—blindly, for my part—up a slope that now was virtually a glacis of flint-chippings, debris of the Dawn Men.
“Down!” breathed Raffles. “Listen!”
Flat on my belly beside him, I discerned a thickening in the mist ahead. A little above our level, the thickening was probably one of the Stone Age hut circles, up there on a small plateau. I heard a slight crunching sound. Somebody was walking around among the ruins.
Raffles inched higher, keeping flat. I followed. The rock-edge of the plateau loomed now just above us. I made out the shadowy form of a man up there. From our low-angle viewpoint, he looked like a very thin, tall funeral mute in a high hat and cemetery black.
“The ‘book-dealer,’ ” Raffles breathed in my ear. “ ‘Sirius.’ ”
The man’s elongated legs moved like scissors as he paced slowly to and fro between the plateau-edge and a ruined hut-wall dimly perceptible in the mist. A strange figure, this gaunt assassin who had been riding about Dartmoor on a hired horse, sniffing at the year-old trail of the author of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
The man passed from view around the angle of the hut wall. We seized our chance to clamber higher, then froze as he reappeared. He resumed his pacing. We kept low. I could feel the thumping of my heart against the ground. Hours seemed to pass. A man of deadly patience, this “Sirius,” who must thus for two, perhaps three days now have been keeping vigil here over his trap, baited with whelps that never were.
Even as the thought crossed my mind, as I crouched there beside Raffles on the steep slope in this mist-muffled, silent solitude, the man checked his pacing and stood as though intently listening. Then he did a thing that raised the hair on my head.
He howled like a mournful hound.
The wailing cry died away in the mist. All was still, the man a long shadow, listening. I heard faintly, as from the further slope of this tumulus or plateau, the clink of a shod horse’s hooves, then walking. The sounds stopped.
A yelp sounded, a sudden ky-yi-ing as of pain, a sharp bark, snarls and growling. Had the human source of these canine sounds not been dimly visible there above on the ledge, I would have sworn they emanated from a litter of whelps contending in a lair among the ruins.
“Bait,” Raffles breathed. “He’s got a revolver in his hand now. He’s holding it clubbed. He’s drawing his man on to look for the lair. As he comes around the hut wall, he’ll be clubbed senseless and dragged down for disposal in the mire where we heard that pony scream as it was sucked under.”
“Who comes?” I whispered. “Dr. Doyle?”
I had no answer from Raffles, for just then, out of the mist-dim ruins of the Dawn Age dwellings, a voice rang, calling: “Is there anybody here?”
Silence. Then sudden, sharp barks, on a note of challenge and interrogation, as from the hidden lair of the “Baskerville Whelps.” And, before I sensed his intention, Raffles lunged upwards to the ledge, seized the barking man by the ankles, and jerked his feet out from under him.
He toppled backwards against the hut wall, tore his ankles free, aimed a kick at Raffles’s head, then with flying coat-tails made a huge bound clean over the both of us. He landed on the glacis, went slithering down it in a cascade of loose flints, and vanished into the mist.
“Who’s there?”—again the voice, peremptory above us.
We looked up. From our angle, the man who stood now on the ledge above us loomed tall in the mist—not a burly figure like Dr. Conan Doyle, but a lean man, a man in a deerstalker cap and an Inverness cape, a figure known the world over, a figure out of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
I seemed to hear the cracking of the thin ice of human reason.
Neither Raffles nor I moved, staring up.
“Who are you?” the man on the ledge demanded, firmly authoritative, conspicuous on his eminence. “I require an answer. You recognise with whom you have to deal!”
I heard Raffles, beside me, draw in his breath, slowly, deeply, as though released from a thrall. Clambering up to the ledge, he stood erect there.
“Yes, we have met,” he told the newcomer courteously. “You’re the Assistant Editor of The Strand Magazine. How d’you do?”
—
My own bespelled trance dissolved. My reason restored to me, with reservations regarding the newcomer’s garments, I clambered up on to the ledge.
Glibly, Raffles explained that, as amateur Sherlockians, he and I had been prompted by our reading of The Hound of the Baskervilles to spend a few days on Dartmoor while he worked on his cricket article. Visiting this prehistoric site, the Stone Rows, we had noticed a man here who was behaving oddly. As we watched the man, he suddenly had begun to foam at the mouth and emit canine sounds. Believing him to be seized of a fit of some kind, we had tried to succour him, but he had eluded our helpful attentions and bolted.
“I thought I heard a horse galloping away,” said Raffles. “He must have had one tethered down there in the mist somewhere.”
“But good God!” exclaimed the Assistant Editor. “Don’t you realize, Mr. Raffles? That must’ve been the man himself—‘Sirius’—the Baskerville hoaxer!”
“Indeed?” said Raffles, astonished. “Bunny, what a pity we lost him!”
The Assistant Editor, seeming rather nettled by our ineptitude, explained that he had been convinced from the first that the “Sirius” letter was a hoax. To prove it to Mr. Greenhough Smith, who still had been half inclined to let Dr. Doyle see the letter, the Assistant Editor had persuaded Mr. Smith to let hi
m insert the reply—“Instructions awaited”—in The Devon & Cornwall Gazette.
On receipt by mail of a map tracing marked with the lair of the alleged whelps, he had come down from London by train, spent the night at Coryton, then hired a horse and set out across the moor to find the marked spot, the Stone Rows.
“Lucky to find the spot, with this mist coming on,” he said, not knowing how lucky he was not to have had his skull fractured, in mistake for Dr. Doyle’s, and to have ended up in the mire that had swallowed the pony. “I borrowed this deerstalker and cape,” he said, “from the studio of our artist, Sidney Paget, who illustrates the Holmes stories. My idea was, if the hoaxer should show himself, to give the fellow the shock of his life by suddenly appearing before him as—Sherlock Holmes!”
“You gave us a shock,” said Raffles ruefully. “Eh, Bunny?”
“Absolutely, Raffles,” I said.
“Listen!” exclaimed the Assistant Editor. “What’s that sound?”
From somewhere distant in the mist came, faintly, a prolonged, eerie howling. The Assistant Editor blenched, listening, a wild surmise in his eyes.
“It’s all right,” said Raffles. “That, I think, comes from Dartmoor Prison. The convicts must have learned they have a certain visitor in the vicinity.”
—
From time to time, that night, we heard yowling and catcalling from the nearby prison.
Raffles mentioned it when we set off, very early next morning, in the dogcart, to return it to Missus and catch our train at Lydford. The Assistant Editor, who had also put up at Rowe’s Duchy Hotel and who was to go up to London in the same train with us, was astride his hired horse, trotting a hundred yards ahead of us in the grey, foggy morning.
“The yowling from the prison didn’t keep the Man with the Cat awake, Bunny,” Raffles said. “He was snoring when I paid his room a visit in the night. Have a look in my valise.”
Mystified, I unstrapped his valise and took out, in its hygienic wrappings bearing the seal of the Prison Commissioners, the Cat-o’-Nine-Tails.