“Especially when slung bottom-foremost in the saddle by your orderly!” laughed Holmes. “At least your acquaintance with our four-legged friends is not limited to the wrong end of a bookmaker’s tally-sheet!”
“Really, Holmes!” I replied. “I wouldn’t have thought that a pint of beer would make you so merry! It must be the thin air at this elevation. I’m surprised the Mormons allow this much alcohol to be served here, too.”
“Actually, they don’t,” admitted Ames, glancing about somewhat furtively as he drained another glass of his own. “It may well be that this is the sort of contraband that no-good Dennis is runnin’. Natcherly, I’m prepared to do my duty and put a stop to it, even if the rascal is performin’ a public service.”
So that, reader, is how I found myself encamped under the stars with Ames and Holmes.
“Don’t move,” hissed the motionless Holmes to the Marshal. “Watson! Have you got your service revolver?”
But I was too late. Even as I was shifting for my weapon, the snake—a spotted Massasauga rattler, we later confirmed—struck Ames’s heel, and my shot an instant later tore off its evil head, but was out of time.
The three of us knew well enough how to deal with poisonous snake bites, and I had not outgrown the habit of carrying my medical bag everywhere, so we were easily able to save his life. But there was no question now of the Marshal riding the mountain trail in pursuit of Dennis.
“It’ll be about all I can do to get back to town to the hospital, I reckon,” he lamented. “Your boy will be over the border in Wyoming by the time I can get an officer detailed to you. Damn sorry! But no doubt Dennis’ll make another contraband run sometime soon, he ’ppears to have gotten latched onto a going operation.”
Holmes did not relish a delay, and I doubted our financial benefactress would approve it, either. “Could you not describe the route to us, Marshal,” asked Holmes, “so Dr. Watson and I could secure Dennis on our own?”
Ames chewed his moustache and grimaced, either from the tourniquet we’d applied or the quandary we’d presented. “Well, the way is easy enough to see—bein’ an old Pony Express trail,” he mused. “And I s’pose I could deputize you; you ain’t Americans, but that’s never made much never-mind in this territory. But I still don’t care for it much.”
“Why not?” cried Holmes.
“You have to understand, we were cuttin’ things mighty fine to begin with. We had to wait for the dawn because this trail is so durn precipitous some places that it would be risky even for an experienced rider in the dark. And shoot! Now that the sun’s up, we’ve wasted so much time with this snake folderol that you’d have to do a Pony Express race just to catch up with Dennis before he crosses the border! And frankly, I’m fearful you gents might come to harm tryin’ to go full-out ’round these mountains, unescorted-like.”
“Oh, that’s all right.” Holmes waved his hand dismissively, and to my dismay said, “Dr. Watson is an old Afghan hand who can ride country like this in his sleep. But why does the territorial border matter if we have federal commissions?”
Ames squinted his eyes dubiously at me, as if his suspicions of my prowess as a horseman were much the same as my own. “Well, the federal writ runs both sides of the border, all right,” he acknowledged. “But Jack Taylor has a rough set of Mormon guards up there, and you’re far better off to snag your man before you have to two-step with the Temple brethren.”
Holmes was thoughtful for a moment, and then turned to me. “That settles it,” he said with an air of resolve. “Watson, since I am hardly in your league as a mountain rider, I must follow in your wake as best I can. You must start at once, at full speed, to overtake Dennis before he reaches the border.”
“My dear Holmes,” I assured him fervently, “I’m sure I cannot.”
“Do so all the same,” he replied.
Reader, I did.
Looking at the fire in those keen eyes, I had a prevision of the partnership that would outlast the shadows eternally shifting through those foothills. And though I confess that I heaved a sigh, my pulse racing a little, it did not take me long to saddle my horse, a fine mustang paint called Nestor, which Ames had broken himself, and climb into the stirrups. A few last minute instructions from both my superiors, and I set out at a brisk gallop.
Before long, though, the steepness of the climb and the sharpness of the turns forced me to slow Nestor to a walk. It seemed the pathway skirted one dizzying precipice after another the entire way! But we continued to make the best time we could, and when I looked down at the chasms below us, I blessed my beast’s sure feet.
Sooner than expected, I heard the sound of voices drifting down from above and wondered at first if this might be some trick of the acoustics of the mountains. But not wanting to give our approach away, I stopped and tethered Nestor to some rugged bushes sprouting out of the side of the mountain wall.
Holding my pistol ready, I crept as softly as I could along the path until, rounding a corner, I suddenly found myself staring at a considerable flat expanse in which there was an encampment of several tents. A few young women were busying themselves at some activity, which I had no time to scrutinize because I hastily moved back out of sight. But I was too late. One of the women had seen me, shrieked, and pointed in my direction, and a moment later, a gunshot ricocheted off the rocks, spraying fragments inches from my face just as I leapt back.
This was a fine predicament! I could only reflect back on my Afghan experience for guidance, so I decided that since I knew nothing of the other party’s strength, but knew all too well my own, I should gain little by delay, but might gain something by boldness.
Having a notion of the shooter’s position, to make an impression, I darted out from behind my rocks and hazarded a quick couple of shots, one of which found its mark—for as I ducked for cover again, I was glad to hear a cry of surprise mingled with pain, followed by the sound of a body evidently fallen from some height. This was followed by an unmelodious chorus of feminine wails, and sounds of scurrying feet.
Hard-pressed to know what to do next, I was startled to hear a bold female voice close at hand, beckoning me: “You might as well come out, now, whoever you be—there’s nobody left to shoot back, and I reckon you won’t shoot women, will you?”
It sounds foolish, and I daresay it was, but this challenge to me as a gentleman provoked me to step out into what might have been harm’s way. Instead, I almost stepped into the arms of a masterful-looking woman of perhaps forty years walking toward me, dressed in male western fashion, but rather attractive withal.
“Whoa!” she said, holding up a leather-gloved hand. “Put up that shootin’-iron if you don’t mind. Ain’t I already told you there’s nobody but us women, now you’ve plugged poor Tom?”
“Tom Dennis?” I bellowed. “How badly is he hurt? I’m a doctor!”
She lifted one fine grey eyebrow. “You ain’t much of one fer your Hippocratic Oath, are you? Or do you plug ’em first and then charge to mend ’em?”
“Don’t bandy pleasantries when someone’s bleeding!” I snapped. “My name is Watson. I am a doctor. I’ve chased that man all the way from London, and I want him alive!”
The woman sagged against the mountain wall. “Not Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s friend?” she asked in a weak voice, and also, I noticed, a suddenly more cultured accent. “I thought—we thought—you were from the Church.... Tom’s over here.” She gestured toward a space behind the nearest tent, where I saw several young women huddled. “You only winged him, Doctor. He’s more hurt from the fall.”
As she led me where our long-sought quarry was now stretched upon a camp cot, she turned her fine profile to me over her shoulder and added, almost as an afterthought, “I’m Lucy Ferrier Hope.” The words stunned me, and for a moment I simply stared in amazement. Her face, however, was filled with concern for the wounded man, and I realized that explanations would have to wait. Gathering myself, I knelt by the cot to attend to my patient.
Dennis was in considerable pain until I administered some morphia and he drifted off. My shot had been lucky for both of us, for I had stopped his shooting without doing him much harm beyond breaking his thumb, but he had broken his ankle in his fall from the eminence where he’d been doing guard duty for the camp. Just what the camp’s purpose was, I had yet to find: were these young women the “contraband” Dennis was running?
After I had made my patient as comfortable as possible, my hostess led me to a set of canvas camp chairs at her campfire, offered me a mug of barbarous American coffee, and we talked a bit as we awaited the arrival of Sherlock Holmes, which I assured her was imminent.
“You notice I don’t use that fiend Drebber’s name, Doctor,” she said quietly. “I don’t count that as a marriage but as an abduction, of course.”
“I quite understand,” I told her. “But how did you escape? Hope told us he saw you stretched out dead on your bier.”
She smiled in a way that made me shiver. “Why, so he did. Didn’t he tell you also that he used to be the sweeper-out of the laboratory at York College, and learned a thing or two about drugs and medicines?”
“Poisons, you mean,” I corrected her.
“Oh, poisons, too,” she admitted. “But what he gave me was more like what Romeo’s friar gave Juliet—a potion to give me ‘A thing like death to chide away this shame, that cop’st with death himself to scape from it.’ Something to make me sleep till he burst in and carried me off amongst all those ‘mourning’ Drebber wives. Oh, and wasn’t I glad when I woke up!”
I was stunned, not for the first or last time in this case. “But he told us he only came in to take the ring off your finger!”
“I know,” she replied calmly. “He told me when I visited him in prison. But that was one of his tallest ones! Why on earth should he have wanted the ring Drebber gave me? Jeff and I both hated Drebber.”
My mind was swimming—each new revelation prompted at least two questions.
“How could you visit him in prison? He only lived one night! He wanted the ring for revenge, didn’t he?”
“Oh, Doctor!” She shook her head, and her still-beautiful tresses, chestnut mingled with grey, fell about her solemn face as the hint of a reminiscent smile lit it. “Don’t you think I’d been improving my time all those months we’d been in London? I was very active helping the Visitation Society, and it was no problem for me to get permission to visit Jeff. I’ll tell you this, about those ‘poisons’ you mentioned: Jefferson Hope never poisoned anybody. But I wasn’t about to let the man I loved languish in prison to die a lonely death from a burst heart, or at the end of an English noose for murders he never did. He taught me about drugs and poisons too! So there’s my confession, and if you and Mr. Holmes want to take me back to London for it, I’ll go quietly, after I’ve finished the work I’m about today.”
My mother tried to raise her sons properly, but I have a dreadful feeling that my mouth was hanging agape at this point. I certainly wondered if it was I who was mad, or the lady speaking to me. “But Hope confessed,” I said at last.
“I know that,” she reiterated, as if she were explaining to a child. “He did that because he knew he didn’t have long to live anyway.” She wiped away a tear sliding down her sunburnt cheek. “And because he wanted to shield Tom.”
The sun was now high in the Utah sky, and at last the light began to dawn in my foggy English brain as well. “Dennis killed them both,” I said.
“Of course,” Lucy nodded. “He hated Drebber and Stangerson far worse than Jeff or I did. You see, he hadn’t been able to save the girl he loved. She really was dead.”
“Sally Sawyer,” I whispered.
Lucy looked at me, surprised. “How did you know?”
“Never multiply names unnecessarily,” I recited, recalling Holmes’s dictum as if from a dream. “Dennis told us the name himself, in the story he prattled when he came to try to get the ring from us. But come—how did Hope know of that visit?”
“Oh, goodness, Doctor!” Lucy laughed, for the first time, and I saw she was still a handsome woman. “What chatterboxes you and Inspector Gregson were in that cab on the way to Scotland Yard! Jeff told me all about it!”
I must have looked hurt, because she added, in a kindly tone, “Jeff said Mr. Holmes let slip a hint or two, also . . . and you have to admit that my Jeff was a resourceful man.”
“More even than we credited,” I agreed sincerely. Seeing sudden misery in her face, I reached across the distance between our two chairs and clasped her wrist. “You must miss him sorely.”
“Every day!” she cried, raising her overflowing eyes to the empty sky, then turning them back to me. “But we had near two happy decades ranching in Wyoming before Jeff learned Tom was on Drebber’s trail in Cleveland. Jeff determined to stop him from doing murder. He couldn’t bear for Tom to have that sin on his conscience or his soul, no matter what the provocation.” Now she was caught up in the full onrush of her story, and had to tell all.
“And I couldn’t bear him to go without me, so we went together. We couldn’t find Tom in Cleveland, but that foul Drebber spotted Jeff and had him jailed for a trumpery nonsense—and I couldn’t bail him out at first for fear that Drebber would see me! By the time Drebber was gone and I’d got Jeff out, it was too late to stop Tom. That was how it went, across half the world, it seemed, using up our resources and Jeff getting more and more desperate, until finally we came to London.
“Jeff tried to do double duty hunting for Tom and guarding Drebber and Stangerson, while I did what I could, too—though it wasn’t much because I daren’t let them see me.
“At last, at Lauriston Gardens, Jeff was too late by moments to stop Tom. It nigh broke his heart.” She looked at me fiercely as if daring me to deny it.
“He wasn’t too late to be observed by the constable,” I pointed out. “And his presence there created all kinds of compromising physical evidence, although I always said that Holmes was too quick to theorize about a crime scene which he himself compared to the aftermath of a buffalo stampede.”
“Jeff made up that stuff about going back for the ring,” she said. “After you told him about ‘Mrs. Sawyer’ coming to your rooms for it, it was easy enough for him to figure out that Tom had lost Sally’s ring there. Tom really wanted it back, you know; it was the one he’d given Sally himself, not like the one in my case.”
“You mean Dennis and Sally had really been married before Drebber had taken her away?” I exclaimed. “But that’s infamous!”
“Oh yes,” she sighed. “It’s not unknown among the polygamists, you know. Sometimes plural wives are passed around—it’s awful. Anyway, Jeff was too late again when Tom got to Stangerson, and I guess you know the rest.”
“But why did the two of you go through all this to save Tom Dennis?” I asked, running my hand through my hair distractedly. “It’s noble, of course, and I commend you both for it, but why should Hope risk the happiness of the woman he loved to save Dennis?”
“Because he didn’t want his son to be a murderer.”
I was suddenly as dizzy as if I had really plunged into one of those mountain chasms.
“Tom is Jeff’s son from an attachment long before me,” she continued. “And now poor Tom is truly bereft over this; he understands, as Jeff always knew he’d do, about revenge not lightening his heart from sorrow. That’s why he decided to join me in my good work.”
“Good work?” I muttered blankly. “What work is that?”
“Why, helping plural brides to escape over the border into Wyoming and freedom!” she exulted. “Jeff and I had done it for years, and now Tom’s taking it up with me, in Jeff’s memory, and Sally’s—or at least he was, until you laid him low with that lucky shot.” She gave me a dark look under which I began to shift uneasily in my seat. I began to wish, not for the first time, that Holmes would arrive.
I’m not sure that her animadversion about my marksmanship did not rankle as much as t
he implication that I was somehow setting back the march of women’s rights. “Oh, I’d love to do it all by myself!” she went on. “Maybe even be a Masked Rider like my old friend Bess Erne, but we can’t get a passel of young Mormon women past the Temple guards without a man. The safest way’s to pretend that we’re a Mormon family traveling, a husband with his wives. Now I don’t know what I’m to do! If I take these girls back, their families will never let them slip away again. They’ll be watched too closely. And we can’t camp here much longer; the relief squad for the guards will be coming.”
She looked me full in the face with her piercing eyes. “Do you want them to end up like me—or Sally?” she asked.
I was silent. “No,” she mused, after a few moments watching my face, “so I guess the only answer is for the fake husband to be you, or Mr. Holmes.”
“Hah!” I laughed. “Holmes will never do it! You don’t know his views about women. He couldn’t carry the part off even if he did agree.”
She smiled at me.
And that is how I added the women of a third continent to my store of dearly-bought knowledge. “How many of them are there in all?” I sighed.
“Seven.”
“Oh dear,” I muttered. “‘As I was going to St. Ives . . . ’ Introduce these young ladies to me,” I said. “I must know their names if I’m to be plausible.”
“Oh, that won’t be any problem,” laughed Lucy. “All seven are named for flowers, and four of them are named Violet.”
When I returned exhausted to the foot of the mountain, the stars were out and I was wrestling with conflicting emotions. I felt pleased with my good deed, but also unsure of how to tell Holmes that I had left Dennis with Lucy Hope—or, for that matter, how to share any of my news with him. I confess I was also put out with him for leaving me to handle the entire matter myself, and I tried to keep that perturbation uppermost in my mind, so as not to contemplate the awful possibility that he might have attempted to follow me, but met with some mishap on the treacherous mountain pathway.
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