The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons Part 8

"Yes. Sure, Watson. I'm hungry, too, after all that heavy thought.

We'll go in and have luncheon now, and then we'll get some swift action."

Thereupon Holmes led the way to the dining-room, where the others awaited us.

And so we did get some swift action, but not exactly what Holmes had expected, sad to relate. To all adroit inquiries on the part of the Earl as to what he had deduced, Holmes returned a smiling and evasive answer during the elaborate luncheon, which proceeded to the end,--when the finger-bowls were brought on,--without untoward incident.

As my partner deftly ma.s.saged his long tapering digits in the perfumed water, he leaned over and whispered to Inspector Letstrayed, who sat next to him. Letstrayed's eyes bulged out, and Holmes then arose, pushed his chair back, inserted his left thumb in the left armhole of his vest, expanded his chest, cleared his throat, and pointed his right fore-finger dramatically at Billie Budd at the other end of the table, as he said:

"Inspector Letstrayed, do your duty! There stands the guilty wretch!"

CHAPTER VIII

As Holmes finished, the man from Scotland Yard quietly got up, also cleared his throat, waddled around the table in a very pompous manner, placed his fat left hand on Budd's shoulder, and said solemnly, in that sepulchral tone of voice that he generally adopted for such occasions:

"William X. Budd, it now becomes my painful duty to arrest you in the Queen's name--er, no, I mean the King's (that's right, old Vic is dead now),--to arrest you in the King's name for the following high crimes and misdemeanors, contrary to the statutes made and in such cases provided, to wit: Burglary, Robbery, Conspiracy, a.s.sault and Battery, and Attempted Murder! It is also my duty to inform you that anything you may say will be used against you, as usual, you know! Now come with me quietly!"

"Aw, what the Sam Hill are you giving us, you old dub? I never did anything to you to have you call me names like that!" shouted Budd, and he instantly wrenched himself loose from Letstrayed's none too muscular grasp, and ran at top speed out of the room and down the long corridor outside, upsetting the contents of his finger-bowl all over the leather seat of his fancy chair.

The Countess promptly had hysterics, and then fainted in the arms of her gaping brother-in-law, Lord Launcelot, while everybody else, except Holmes, myself, and the Earl, grew red and white by turns; and Uncle Tooter, in attempting to arise suddenly, fell out of his chair and tumbled on the floor in a very undignified manner.

"Holy smoke! Don't let him get away like that, you pack of rummies!

Get up and chase him!" shouted Holmes in great excitement, as he pulled a revolver out of his hip-pocket and dashed madly out of the room after the fleeing and recreant Budd, while the rest of us, galvanized back to life by the sudden developments, took after the great detective down the corridor, in the way that they generally do in the movies, all hollering: "Stop--thief!" at the top of our voices.

_Bang! Bang!_ Holmes shot twice at Budd, but the bullets went wild, and we all continued the chase through the kitchen, down the rear stairway, and out through the wide gardens between the castle and the stables, while Louis La Violette, the French cook, cursed us volubly in his best Parisian for disturbing him.

Budd was a pretty good runner, so he was about a hundred feet ahead of us when Holmes dashed up to the open front door of the Earl's great stone stable-building. He took another shot at Budd as the latter fled up the stairs to the hay-loft, and then disappeared suddenly, thus frightening the eight horses in their stalls at the rear, who neighed loudly, while Holmes and the rest of us piled up the stairs after him, like a pack of dogs after a rabbit!

When we got up to the loft we found that it covered the entire upper floor of the building; was at least two hundred feet long by a hundred and fifty feet wide, and except for a small s.p.a.ce just around the head of the stairs, was filled up eight feet deep with odorous hay and piles of straw.

Of course, not a trace of that scoundrel Budd was to be seen. He was evidently somewhere under the hay, because the shuttered windows were too high up for him to have made his escape through them in the short time that had elapsed; and the pigeons that roosted around on the rafters cooed their darned heads off just as if they didn't know that a desperate crook was concealed somewhere beneath the wide-spreading piles of hay.

Holmes ground his teeth with rage as he recognized his temporary defeat by the resourceful guy from Australia, and it was a good thing the Countess was still back in the castle being a.s.sisted out of her fainting-spell by her Spanish maid Teresa, because the language that Hemlock Holmes used as he called down imprecations on the head of the hay-hidden Budd was frightful to hear!

"Gol darn it!" he said, when he had somewhat recovered his usual equanimity; "this is certainly the first and only time in my life that I've been held up and stalled by such a common thing as a load of hay!

What in thunder did you ever get in such an enormous lot of the darned stuff for, anyhow?" he demanded, turning to the Earl. "I should think there was enough hay in here to feed a regiment of horses for three years!"

"Well, you don't need to take it out on me, Holmes," returned the Earl with some asperity. "How could I foresee that some one would steal my cuff-b.u.t.tons and then run up here and hide in the hay? I bought the hay two months ago, when prices were lower than they are now, so I got a lot of it, antic.i.p.ating the rise in prices that has followed since then; and I also bought a large lot of corn, oats, bran, and so on, which I keep downstairs. You're getting to be rather unreasonable, don't you think?"

Holmes didn't reply, but stood there contemplating the great piles of hay and straw in silent wrath, while the hidden Budd was probably smiling to himself somewhere underneath. Lord Launcelot, who was watching the chagrined expression on Holmes's face, leaned back against the wall and said:

"Oh, Gee! I have to laugh! This is the funniest thing I've seen for a long time!"

"It is, eh?" shouted Holmes, dashing at Launcelot. "Now, you beat it!

You've been warned before not to interrupt while I'm thinking."

And he grabbed Launcelot by the arm and hustled him down the stairs, then returned and faced the Earl.

"Well, it would certainly be an endless job to try to dig Budd out of all this hay, Your Lordship," he said, "so we'll adopt some strategy, and starve him out. We'll have Inspector Letstrayed watch the loft here at the head of the stairs, as I see this is the only way out, have his dinner brought to him this evening, while he stands guard, and then I'll stand guard through the night, for I can keep awake better than Fatty can. Then we'll keep up the sentinel business all day to-morrow, if necessary, Letstrayed and I relieving each other, till we finally force that robber to come out and beg for food,--when we'll nab him! How does that sound for a scheme?"

"It listens well, Holmes,--that is, if Letstrayed doesn't make a mess of it," said the Earl musingly.

"Woe to him if he does, I can tell you." And Holmes glared at the obese inspector, who sat on the top step trying to get his breath back after the hard race out from the castle. "But then, I don't see how he can. Right here is the only place where Budd could get out, and I'll give Letstrayed my revolver to use instead of his own, since mine is a little bit quicker on the trigger. Here, Barney," he added as he turned to the Inspector, "take my six-shooter, and I'll take yours.

Now see that you don't spill the beans, like you've done before, and stand guard faithfully this afternoon till six o'clock, when we'll bring your dinner out to you, and if William X. Budd tries to break away from under the horse-feed, why, you know what to do with your little cannon there!"

"Well, all right, fellows, I'll be the goat if you'll send down to the village and telegraph in to headquarters in London now, telling them where I am. Say, Earl, haven't you got a pack of cigarettes about your person that isn't working?" asked Letstrayed, as he took up his station on a particularly soft pile of hay nearby, and stretched his fat legs over it comfortably.

"What! Smoke cigarettes up here in the hay, and burn down my ancestral stables for me!" shouted the Earl in surprise. "Good night! You've got about as much brains as Holmes says you have, Letstrayed. But here, I realize that it'll be pretty lonesome up here watching for a hidden crook with n.o.body but a lot of pigeons for company, so you can take this package of fine-cut, and chew to your heart's content. Good-by, now."

Barnabas took the proffered pack of chewing tobacco, and sighed deeply.

"Well, good-by. If you hear any shooting, you'll know it's me," he said, as he took a big mouthful of the fine-cut.

And so we left him to his afternoon vigil, after Holmes had taken a look at the bulldog chained up near the horses downstairs,--and returning to the castle we all entered the library, where the Earl called the butler, and said:

"Harrigan, you may pour us out each a gla.s.s of wine."

Harrigan smilingly agreed, and after we had all imbibed, the Earl and Uncle Tooter played chess on the great mahogany table in the center of the room; Holmes and Thorneycroft started a game of checkers, as did Lord Launcelot and myself, sitting on the leather-covered divans in the broad bay-window, while Billie Hicks sprawled himself out in a comfortable arm-chair at one side. The Countess did not appear, being still upstairs in her own room with her maid Teresa, and the various servants were scattered through the numerous rooms of the castle engaged in their various duties.

So the afternoon pa.s.sed,--from a little after two o'clock, when we returned from the stables, until ten minutes after five, when suddenly two loud shots split the silence, coming from the direction of the rear of the castle.

"Ha! There he is now!" yelled Holmes, as he jumped up instantly, knocking the checkerboard and all the pieces into the lap of the astonished Thorneycroft, and ran out into the corridor, shouting to us to accompany him. Holmes had pretty long legs, and he distanced the rest of us while we did another Marathon out to the stables, with the servants staring at us out of the back windows. I hate to have to tell it, but the sight that met our eyes in the hay-loft was honestly enough to make an archangel swear!

There, stretched out flat on his back on the hay-littered floor near the top of the stairs, bound and gagged, and snoring in the deepest slumber, lay our luckless friend, Inspector Barnabas Letstrayed!

Holmes turned pale with rage, and then he roared:

"Asleep at the switch! And Billie Budd far away by this time! Grab me, fellows, quick, before I forget myself and murder him where he lies!

Oh, horrors!"

And he began to swear in French, which, as I have remarked in one of our previous adventures, was his mother's native tongue, to which he resorted when so excited that he couldn't express himself further in English.

The Earl and I untied the ropes that bound the sleeping Letstrayed, removed the gag from his mouth, which consisted of another piece of rope, and shook him to his feet, where he stood blinking in surprise, while Holmes leaned against the nearest wall and shook his fists in the air, while he made the air blue with variegated French cuss-words.

"Let's leave them alone, boys, and return to the castle, while the master-mind and his faithless guard have it out between themselves,"

suggested the Earl.

Whereupon we all followed him quietly back to the library, filled with mixed emotions. When we were back again in the seats from which we had recently been so sharply disturbed, the Earl said to me:

"Well, Doctor Watson, what do you make of it? You've had a good deal of experience with the great detective. Tell us what you think."

"What I think of Inspector Letstrayed wouldn't look very well in print," I began; "but it's easy enough to see what happened. The old dope fell asleep, so, of course, as soon as Budd heard those elephantine snores, he sneaked out from his hiding-place under the hay and tied him up with the ropes while he slept, took his revolver away from him, shot it off twice out of pure bravado, and then beat it for parts unknown. If he's as good a runner yet as he was this noon, he must be over in the next county by this time! Of course, it couldn't have been Letstrayed who shot the revolver off, because we found him still asleep and snoring; and he couldn't have shot first at Budd and then have been overpowered by the latter, because he didn't have time enough in the short minute between our hearing the shots and racing out there to have fallen asleep again, especially when he was tied up so tightly. I think you will find that I am right,--when Holmes returns with the information he has pried out of the Inspector."

Holmes returned soon afterward, still fuming and growling over his second setback of the day, with Letstrayed trailing along behind him, looking like a flour-sack that had been stepped on! The latter sat down quietly, without a word, and Holmes corroborated my deductions.

He said Letstrayed told him he didn't know a thing about what had taken place until we untied the ropes from him; for he had fallen asleep in his too comfortable position on the pile of hay, and had not been awakened even by the shots.