The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons Part 9

"I'm so mad I could chew nails," said Holmes. "The only thing I can do now is to send a telegram down to the village to be dispatched to the authorities in all the surrounding towns, asking them to apprehend Budd when he shows up. Can your secretary here be trusted to send the messages right, Earl?"

He sized up the bald-headed Thorneycroft with a critical eye, as he spoke, and suddenly changed his mind.

"No. I'll go down to Hedge-gutheridge myself and send the telegrams.

Then I know it'll be done right, without a third balling-up. Ta, ta!

I'll be back in half an hour."

And my erratic partner was out of the building before we hardly knew what had happened.

At a quarter of six he returned, somewhat out of breath, and announced that we might as well sit down to dinner, since he would not resume operations until morning. The Earl quietly accepted his tacit a.s.sumption of mastery of the castle, since he recognized by this time that Hemlock Holmes simply had to have his own way while on a case, or else he wouldn't play,--that's all!

The dinner as prepared by Louis La Violette,--and served by Joe Harrigan the butler,--was fully as scrumptious and all to the mustard as the one we had partaken of the evening before, and so was the wine served afterwards. We pa.s.sed the evening in the library smoking and swapping lies, while Her Ladyship the Countess pleaded a severe headache and remained in her room, her dinner being served up there by her maid. At about half-past ten we retired; that is, the others retired, but Holmes grabbed me by the arm as soon as we had entered our room upstairs, and whispered:

"I'm going to pull off something now, Watson. We'll have to wait here until they're all asleep, as Letstrayed was out in the hayloft this afternoon, and then I'm going to get some evidence."

CHAPTER IX

Well, the two of us sat up in our room for an hour, and when his watch pointed to half-past eleven, my partner said:

"Hist! Here we go now. Take off your shoes."

Grumblingly I complied, and he did the same. Then Holmes led me down the corridor to Thorneycroft's room, and noiselessly opened the door.

"I'm going to steal his shoes," he whispered.

"Steal his shoes! What the----" I began under my breath; but I subsided as Holmes tightened his warning grip on my arm and tiptoed quietly into the bedchamber of the sleeping secretary. He took the pair of shoes under the chair beside the bed, and then just as quietly pa.s.sed out, closing the door behind us.

Only a dimly flickering gas-light on the wall of the corridor illuminated the strange scene as we left Thorneycroft's room, and Holmes tiptoed along in his stocking feet to the next room, inhabited by Lord Launcelot, the Earl's brother.

"Say, are you going to swipe all their shoes, Holmes?" I whispered in his ear, as we softly opened Launcelot's door. "If you don't look out, there'll be another detective from London sent down here to investigate their disappearance!"

"Oh, shut up, you old duffer!" he answered irritably. "Can't you ever learn anything after all your long a.s.sociation with me? If you can't do anything else right, at least keep still, and don't arouse these sleeping dummies."

I obeyed, and so the two of us gradually worked our way around to the four other rooms, taking the shoes we found beside the bed in each room, until we had six pairs of them--Thorneycroft's, Lord Launcelot's, Uncle Tooter's, Billie Hicks's, Billie Budd's (who, fortunately for Holmes's purposes, had left a pair of shoes in his room, and had escaped that afternoon in another pair) and even the Countess's. I demurred considerably at burglarizing her room and stealing her dainty high-heeled shoes; but the cold-blooded Holmes would stop at nothing, and took her shoes along with the rest. And the worst part of it was that he made me carry them all! Toting around a large and awkward collection of six pairs of shoes in my arms, through the dark corridors of an ancient castle in the middle of the night, was certainly something new in my sleuthing experience, and I so expressed myself when we finally got back to our own room, and Holmes had closed the door behind us. I laid down the pile of shoes on the floor in one corner of the room, and grumbled:

"I've done a good many funny things since I took up this job of being your side-partner, Holmes, but I never thought I'd sink so low as to go sneaking around into people's rooms while they're asleep and steal their shoes!"

"Oh, forget it, Doc. I'll tell you more about it in the morning," was all that my tyrannical partner would reply.

And in a short time we were both in bed, with the light out,--at last.

I was rather tired by this time, and was just dozing off when Holmes suddenly jumped up to a sitting posture, and said:

"By the great horn spoon, I almost forgot that Letstrayed still has my perfectly good revolver and I have his, since we exchanged this afternoon out in the hay-loft. I must go and get it back, or there's no telling what may happen to it in his incompetent keeping!"

Then, before I could say a word, Holmes bounced over me with his long legs, went over to his coat-pocket, took out the Inspector's revolver, opened the door, and started down the corridor, in his flapping nightgown.

In a minute or so I heard a loud noise as of some one falling over a chair in the dark, and I knew it must be Holmes in Letstrayed's room, exchanging the guns. I had to stuff a corner of the pillow into my mouth to keep from laughing. Holmes soon returned, with his own revolver in his hand, and fire in his eye, so I knew it wouldn't be safe to kid him about it. All I said was:

"What did you find?"

"Nothing," he answered. "Go to sleep."

I did so with alacrity.

_Zing-g-g-g-g!_ went the alarm-clock, which Holmes had placed on the chair beside our bed. Jumping up to turn it off, I saw with vexation that it was only six o'clock.

"What in thunder did you set it so early for, Holmes?" I demanded.

"They don't blow any early factory-whistle around here."

"Well, I have some work to do,--scientific work that admits of no delay. You can lay in bed till they call you for breakfast, if you want to," was Holmes's reply, piling out of bed and jerking his clothes on as if he were a fireman answering a fire. Then he took out the magnifying gla.s.s that he always carried in his pocket, and a microscope out of our suit-case, pulled a chair over to one of the windows, and began to go over the twelve shoes one by one, first with the magnifying gla.s.s and then with the microscope, which was arranged so that objects as large as the shoes could be inspected through it, all the time taking down notes in his little notebook.

I couldn't for the life of me see what he was up to nor what he expected to find from the shoes; and still less could I figure out why he had insisted on our all walking out in the wet gra.s.s the morning before.

Every once in a while his eyes would light up with a subdued gleam of triumph, and I knew he was on the trail of something or other.

Suddenly he jumped up and jerked the window-shade so that it flew up to the top of the window, then dragged his chair closer to the window, and continued examining the shoes through his two instruments. At length, after more than an hour had pa.s.sed, he put them down with a deep-drawn sigh of relief, after hastily scribbling a few more notes, and turned to me.

"Well, Doc, what would you say as to the shoes from a cursory examination, without the instruments?" he inquired with a smile.

By this time I, having arisen and dressed, was kind of anxious to see what was going to happen next. I picked up one of the shoes that we had pilfered from Thorneycroft's room, and turned it over in my hands.

"All I can say about it is that this particular shoe ought to be sent to the cobbler's. There's a small hole in the middle of the sole," I said, "and it should also have this smear of red clay wiped off," I added, as I pointed to the stain along the outer side of the shoe.

"Oh, use your bean, Doc, use your bean!" cried Holmes. "Is that all you can detect?"

"Well, that's all there is to detect without your magnifying gla.s.s and microscope there," I replied.

"Honestly, Watson, I think you're getting dumber and dumber every day!

Think, man, think! Where in this immediate vicinity did you see red clay like that before?" said Holmes. I scratched my head with perplexity, and after a moment it came to me:

"Oh, yes; out behind the stables, near where the horses' stalls are. I remember now having seen the clay there when we were out after Billie Budd yesterday afternoon."

"Well, that shows that Eustace Thorneycroft, the owner of the shoe, was out behind the stable some time recently," said Holmes; "a rather incongruous place for a private secretary, and one of such sedentary and scholarly appearance too. Putting two and two together, it is not a very violent a.s.sumption to say that Eustace went out to the stables for a very special purpose, and what more special purpose could he have than to hide the diamond cuff-b.u.t.tons, or at least some of them, which he probably stole! _Comprends-tu cela, tu imbecile?_" Then my partner added: "Of course, I couldn't exactly swear to it yet that Eustace is the guilty gink we are after, but I'm going to disguise myself as a race-track follower and go out and talk 'horses' to the two coachmen, Yensen and Linescu, and we'll probably learn some more.

I've found a good many other clues on the other shoes, which I will not divulge into your capacious ears until later. Suffice it to say, however, that the reason I made you people walk out on the wet gra.s.s yesterday was not because I own stock in a cough-and-cold medicine company, as you might think, but because I wanted whatever telltale stains there might be on the six pairs of shoes (indicating to my trained eye where their owner had been recently) to become moistened and to stick more firmly to the shoes, so they wouldn't dry up and get knocked off before I could grab the shoes and inspect them. You see, Watson, there are more ways of killing a cat than by choking it to death with b.u.t.ter!"

As the sarcastic old cuss continued his lecture, he shoved all the twelve shoes he had examined into the lower drawer of the dresser in the room, locking it and putting the key in his pocket.

"I guess breakfast must be about ready now," said Holmes, as he glanced at his watch; "it's twenty minutes after seven. If there's any of that whiskey left that we found on the shelf in the lavatory yesterday morning, I'm going to help myself to some more of it. I feel kind of chilly after sitting up for an hour inspecting the shoes."

We washed, after Holmes had taken the chill-remedy, and were pa.s.sing down the front stairway to the lower hall on our way to the dining-room when I suddenly thought of the consequences of our nocturnal escapade.

"Say, Holmes," I whispered anxiously, "what'll we do when all these people report the loss of their footgear to the Earl?"

"What'll we do, you chump? Why, sit tight and say nothing, of course.

Just leave it to your revered Uncle Dudley to deal with the situation.