Sherlock Holmes: The American Years (38 page)

I was just as glad to be alone as I rode down the toll road, because I hardly cut a dashing figure on my steed. Jasper’s fastest gait appeared to be a matter-of-fact walk. If I tried to spur him with a kick of my heels in his flanks, he shook his head slightly, in a fatherly way, declining my pleas to enlist him in such recklessness. During our short journey, the stage to Calistoga hurtled past us in a chaos of dust, pounding hoofs, clattering wheels, and shouts. Jasper edged carefully to the side of the road and gazed reproachfully at the receding coach before resuming his dutiful progress.

The scene of the robbery was a ford, where a small creek crossed the road. It had washed out part of the downhill side, and the coach would have slowed to cross it. Tall pines and oaks overhung the road, and vines, bushes, and saplings grew together in a tangled mass beneath them. Its lushness and shade were ominous, as if created for an ambush—the sort of place a solitary walker might pass through with a quickening of heart and pace and a glance or two over his shoulder.

Corwin, McConnell, and one of the men from the hotel were standing with the horses on the near side of the ford. Near them lay the express box from the stage, its lid open. Among the trees
to the right of the road, I saw something moving. Looking toward it, I saw Holmes.

Alone in a small clearing, where the stream formed a pool before continuing in its course across the road, he crossed slowly back and forth, like a tracker searching for signs marking the passage of his quarry. From time to time he knelt and studied the ground as though committing it to memory, and then jotted something in a small notebook he carried. Several times, he made measurements with a measuring tape and wrote the numbers down in his notebook. Along the way, he picked up a couple of small objects and placed them in a leather wallet he drew from a pocket of his jacket, or carefully untangled something from a branch and wrapped it in a bit of paper before adding it to the wallet. Sometimes a questioning frown shadowed his thin face, but most of the time his posture and expression held the concentrated energy of a man intent on dissecting a particularly interesting and challenging problem. A little later, he crossed to the downhill side, where he climbed for some distance down the stream bank until he was no longer in sight. He reappeared a few minutes afterward, walking back toward us on the toll road. As he approached, I heard hoof-beats and the clatter of wagon wheels in the distance, followed by the baying of a dog. Corwin looked up. “Sheriff and Sorensen, with the bloodhounds,” he said.

In a minute we saw, rounding a curve, a half dozen men on horseback, followed by a farm wagon driven by a stocky old man in a straw hat. Two red-brown bloodhounds stood at the wagon rail, wriggling with excitement and baying their peculiar note, between a bark and a howl, from somewhere within their drooping dewlaps.

Holmes walked to the wagon and said to the driver, as it stopped, “You can try the bloodhounds, but they may not be able to get a scent.”

Sorensen looked dubious. “And why would that be?”

“The robber doused the area with cayenne pepper.”

Sorensen leaned forward in the seat of his wagon and looked at Holmes from under the brim of his hat. “You’re kidding me,” he said.

“No, I’m not. You can try the hounds, but I don’t hold out much hope.”

“May’s well, since we’ve come this far,” Sorensen said. He jumped from the seat, walked around to the back of the wagon, and pulled down the gate. The dogs jumped to the ground and shook themselves in a liquid flow of loose skin. Sorensen tied a length of rope to each dog’s leather collar. “Hero, Rex. Come on, boys.”

Holmes led them to the clearing. “The robber seems to have hidden in here beforehand, and then ridden on the road itself toward Calistoga,” he told Sorensen.

“That was pretty brazen,” said one of the sheriff’s men.

“The whole damn thing was brazen,” McConnell huffed. “We weren’t even five miles from town.”

Sorensen led the dogs to the clearing and gave them a command. They began eagerly sniffing the ground, but after a minute or two they stopped and stood shaking their heads and bringing forth a series of snorts and sneezes that rippled the loose skin up and down their bodies. Sorensen pulled them back toward him. “Aw, jeez,” he said. “Come here, you two.” He led the dogs, or, more rightly, was hauled by them, to the edge of the creek, where he pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket and proceeded to sponge their
muzzles with the water flowing between the rocks. The dogs drank, shook their dewlaps some more, and licked his hands and face. “Cayenne.” He shook his head. “Who’d have thought of such a thing?”

“I’ve heard of it,” Holmes said. “It’s a clever trick, nonetheless.”

One of the men in the posse said, “So there’s no way to track him down?”

“Not with horses and hounds, at least,” said Holmes. “And probably not with trackers. His tracks on the toll road have been covered over by now—by the Calistoga stage and, regrettably,” he said, with a glance at the posse, “others.” He turned to Corwin. “Perhaps we should go back to the hotel, so the sheriff can speak with the passengers.”

Jasper, even energized by the prospect of home and food, was soon outpaced by the men on horses, and I was left to ponder the eccentric Holmes. Despite his irritating candor, I felt sympathy for him as a fellow countryman far from home. Then, too, I’d never seen anything like his scrutiny of the robbery scene, and I was curious to know what he’d found.

At the hotel, I mentioned meeting Holmes to Fanny (leaving out his references to my clothes and poverty). “I’m thinking of inviting him to visit our camp,” I said. “Would you mind?”

She gave me a worried look. “Are you sure? We’ll have to give him fry bread and bacon for dinner. I’ve been down here all afternoon instead of cooking.”

“I don’t think you need to worry,” I said. “He doesn’t look like a man who concerns himself much with food.”

I found Holmes at a table in the saloon, in conversation with
the sheriff and Corwin. Most of the men from the stagecoach had whiled away the afternoon drinking, and were sitting in the bar grumbling and cursing the sheriff, whom they seemed to blame even more than the robber for their predicament. I caught Holmes’s eye, and he excused himself and walked over to me. With a glance past his shoulder at the scene of discontent, I said, “Our camp is up the hill in the old Silverado mining town—or what’s left of it. If you don’t mind the walk up the trail, you’re welcome to come back with us and see the old mine. I have some good local wine keeping cool in the mine shaft.” Holmes asked if we could wait until he had finished his business with the sheriff. A quarter of an hour later, he joined us on the veranda.

He seemed in good spirits on our walk up the trail. Catching his breath after the final climb up a hill of mine tailings, he appraised the platform, with its rusting machinery and looming ruin of a bunkhouse, that made up our kingdom. The mining equipment, the tumbledown scaffolding, and the physical design of the operation seemed to interest him, and I wondered if he was perhaps an engineer.

We climbed up to the mine shaft, where I filled a few bottles of wine from our improvised cellar in the mountain. Afterward, I nursed a fire to health in the ruined forge, and the four of us, Holmes, Fanny, Sam, and I, ate our simple supper
en plein air
as the sun sank behind the mountain. In the fading twilight, Holmes lit a pipe, and Fanny and I our cigarettes, and we shared a local Chasselas and then a Bordeaux. Holmes, who seemed fairly knowledgeable about wine, expressed his approval of both.

Fanny was unusually subdued. I had seen her thus before around strangers; in some company, she was painfully conscious of our
cheap way of life in our mountain camp and the all-too-recent scandal of her divorce in San Francisco. As for myself, in an outpouring of sentiment fueled by wine and the warmth of new acquaintance, I soon confided to Holmes the story of how we had come to our mountain home. “It’s a poor man’s spa,” I concluded, “where I’ve spent the summer basking in the mountain air and seeking to recover my health. My wife—a woman of the frontier, and not to be trifled with” (I looked at Fanny out of the corner of my eye and saw that she was looking intently at her hands clasped in her lap), “stared Death down across my sickbed—and after that, did me the honor of marrying the little that was left of me. If it weren’t for her—Fanny, my love, you know it’s all true—I’d have been buried out here, in exile.”

Fanny gave me a look as if she might take issue whether I were worth the trouble. Holmes, to my relief, turned to her with a sober nod of respect, in which I saw not a trace of irony. “Your husband is a fortunate man,” he said.

The evening passed, more easily than I had feared, in wine and talk. Even touched by the mellowing influence of the grape, Holmes was a young man of almost reptilian reserve. But what he lacked in lightness and humor, he made up for in the breadth of his knowledge and thinking. He seemed free of the social prejudices so pervasive among the English, and spoke with a rare candor of observation, an honest willingness to acknowledge what he saw in things instead of what convention expected him to see. Even Fanny soon warmed to him and joined in the talk.

Our discussions ranged widely, touching on European and American politics, history, literature, architecture, engineering, and the sciences. The last particularly interested Holmes: He
leaned toward us, and his eyes glittered in the firelight as he explained his ideas about how the methods and findings of modern science could be adapted to the solving of crimes and civil disputes. “I considered reading law at one point,” he said, “but there is so much more the application of scientific methods can do to improve the methods of the police and the law courts. To a trained mind with an understanding of chemistry, physics, and the science of human motivation, I believe the scene of a crime can be a book in which one can read all that happened there, and see the criminal himself.”

I had studied law and practiced, albeit for a short time, as an advocate, and I agreed with him about the need for better methods. The policeman’s truncheon, paid informers, surmise, and the vagaries of trial juries are a poor set of instruments to separate the innocent from the guilty. I asked him if he had had many opportunities to test his theories.

“A few,” he said. “I worked for awhile with the coroner in Chicago, from which I learned a great deal about the mechanisms of homicide. While there, I helped a colleague snare a blackmailer through the paper and ink in his letters, and thus obtained a reference to a banker trying to catch forgers. And that, in turn, has led to other work, most recently here in California. Also,” he continued, “I have been teaching myself to observe people scientifically, that is to say methodically and as objectively as possible, deducing facts about them from the physical marks left by their lives and occupations.”

I allowed that he had read me pretty well that afternoon. Fanny asked what I meant, and I told her what Holmes had drawn from a moment’s look at me, like a magician drawing scarves from a hat.

Holmes managed a smile. “I have to confess,” he said, “that I’d heard your name before. Your accent and the evidence of your shirtsleeve led me to consider the possibility that you might be the writer of essays—though I couldn’t account for your being so far from home. The rest was merely deduction from your physical appearance.”

I had almost forgotten my curiosity about Holmes’s peregrinations at the robbery scene, but Sam, who had been falling asleep at his mother’s knee, sat up and asked, “What did you see when you looked around this afternoon? Did you figure out who the robber was?”

“Not yet.”

“Are you going to keep looking for him?” Sam asked.

“I think I will,” Holmes said.

“What will you do next?” I asked.

“Probably visit the manager of the bank that sent the payroll money.”

“Ben Ingram,” I said. “I know him fairly well, if you need an introduction.”

Holmes looked interested. “Thank you. Would you mind riding there with me in the morning?”

I turned to Fanny. “Can you spare me?”

She looked at me earnestly. “We’ll manage—but promise me you won’t let yourself get too tired.”

“I’ll take good care of myself,” I said.

She looked dubious but didn’t protest. “Go, then. Sam and I can work on the packing.”

I explained to Holmes that we were breaking up our camp and would soon be going back to San Francisco and thence to
Edinburgh—such is the perversity of the homesick Scot, to gladly abandon an earthly paradise for the cold gray hills of home.

Early the next morning, I made my way again to the hotel. Abashed by Holmes’s comments on my dress, Fanny and I had polished my boots and combed the straw from my hair, and I was garbed like a gillie at his wedding in my one decent jacket and my least frayed shirt. Holmes was waiting, with two horses already saddled, and we followed the toll road down the mountainside to the plain where Calistoga lay steaming among its sulphur springs.

After the quiet of the mountain, the town seemed a clash and clatter of wagon wheels and shouted voices. Holmes stopped at both general stores and asked whether anyone had bought a large quantity of cayenne pepper recently, but no one recalled any such purchase. Among promenading carriages and wagons of dry goods we made our way to the bank and, once there, were directed to Ben Ingram’s office.

Ingram greeted us, adorned with a businessman’s smile. The man looked made for the part of a banker—sleek, pink-cheeked, and freshly shaved. His light brown hair flowed back from a smooth forehead, and his hearty mustache was neatly combed and trimmed. His starched and gleaming shirt front had not yet begun to wilt in the heat, and his pants still kept their press. The heavy gold chain that looped from his watch pocket to the buttonhole of his gray jacket murmured reassuringly of success and prosperity.

He shook hands with me. “Mr. Stevenson, good to see you again. How are the plans going for your trip to Scotland?” he asked cordially—the friendship of bankers being one of the advantages conferred on the struggling author by a sizable cheque from home.