was still standing at the door of the house, and even as our foaming
horse came to a halt the coffin, supported by three men, appeared on
the threshold. Holmes darted forward and barred their way.
"Take it back!" he cried, laying his hand on the breast of the
foremost. "Take it back this instant!"
"What the devil do you mean? Once again I ask you, where is your
warrant?" shouted the furious Peters, his big red face glaring over
the farther end of the coffin.
"The warrant is on its way. The coffin shall remain in the house
until it comes."
The authority in Holmes's voice had its effect upon the bearers.
Peters had suddenly vanished into the house, and they obeyed these
new orders. "Quick, Watson, quick! Here is a screw-driver!" he
shouted as the coffin was replaced upon the table. "Here's one for
you, my man! A sovreign if the lid comes off in a minute! Ask no
questions--work away! That's good! Another! And another! Now pull all
together! It's giving! It's giving! Ah, that does it at last."
With a united effort we tore off the coffin-lid. As we did so there
came from the inside a stupefying and overpowering smell of
chloroform. A body lay within, its head all wreathed in cotton-wool,
which had been soaked in the narcotic. Holmes plucked it off and
disclosed the statuesque face of a handsome and spiritual woman of
middle age. In an instant he had passed his arm round the figure and
raised her to a sitting position.
"Is she gone, Watson? Is there a spark left? Surely we are not too
late!"
For half an hour it seemed that we were. What with actual
suffocation, and what with the poisonous fumes of the chloroform, the
Lady Frances seemed to have passed the last point of recall. And
then, at last, with artificial respiration, with injected ether, and
with every device that science could suggest, some flutter of life,
some quiver of the eyelids, some dimming of a mirror, spoke of the
slowly returning life. A cab had driven up, and Holmes, parting the
blind, looked out at it. "Here is Lestrade with his warrant," said
he. "He will find that his birds have flown. And here," he added as a
heavy step hurried along the passage, "is someone who has a better
right to nurse this lady than we have. Good morning, Mr. Green; I
think that the sooner we can move the Lady Frances the better.
Meanwhile, the funeral may proceed, and the poor old woman who still
lies in that coffin may go to her last resting-place alone."
"Should you care to add the case to your annals, my dear Watson,"
said Holmes that evening, "it can only be as an example of that
temporary eclipse to which even the best-balanced mind may be
exposed. Such slips are common to all mortals, and the greatest is he
who can recognize and repair them. To this modified credit I may,
perhaps, make some claim. My night was haunted by the thought that
somewhere a clue, a strange sentence, a curious observation, had come
under my notice and had been too easily dismissed. Then, suddenly, in
the gray of the morning, the words came back to me. It was the remark
of the undertaker's wife, as reported by Philip Green. She had said,
'It should be there before now. It took longer, being out of the
ordinary.' It was the coffin of which she spoke. It had been out of
the ordinary. That could only mean that it had been made to some
special measurement. But why? Why? Then in an instant I remembered
the deep sides, and the little wasted figure at the bottom. Why so
large a coffin for so small a body? To leave room for another body.
Both would be buried under the one certificate. It had all been so
clear, if only my own sight had not been dimmed. At eight the Lady
Frances would be buried. Our one chance was to stop the coffin before
it left the house.
"It was a desperate chance that we might find her alive, but it was a
chance, as the result showed. These people had never, to my
knowledge, done a murder. They might shrink from actual violence at
the last. The could bury her with no sign of how she met her end, and
even if she were exhumed there was a chance for them. I hoped that
such considerations might prevail with them. You can reconstruct the
scene well enough. You saw the horrible den upstairs, where the poor
lady had been kept so long. They rushed in and overpowered her with
their chloroform, carried her down, poured more into the coffin to
insure against her waking, and then screwed down the lid. A clever
device, Watson. It is new to me in the annals of crime. If our
ex-missionary friends escape the clutches of Lestrade, I shall expect
to hear of some brilliant incidents in their future career."
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DEVIL'S FOOT
In recording from time to time some of the curious experiences and
interesting recollections which I associate with my long and intimate
friendship with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have continually been faced by
difficulties caused by his own aversion to publicity. To his sombre
and cynical spirit all popular applause was always abhorrent, and
nothing amused him more at the end of a successful case than to hand
over the actual exposure to some orthodox official, and to listen
with a mocking smile to the general chorus of misplaced
congratulation. It was indeed this attitude upon the part of my
friend and certainly not any lack of interesting material which has
caused me of late years to lay very few of my records before the
public. My participation in some if his adventures was always a
privilege which entailed discretion and reticence upon me.
It was, then, with considerable surprise that I received a telegram
from Homes last Tuesday--he has never been known to write where a
telegram would serve--in the following terms:
Why not tell them of the Cornish horror--strangest case I have
handled.
I have no idea what backward sweep of memory had brought the matter
fresh to his mind, or what freak had caused him to desire that I
should recount it; but I hasten, before another cancelling telegram
may arrive, to hunt out the notes which give me the exact details of
the case and to lay the narrative before my readers.
It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes's iron
constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of
constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by
occasional indiscretions of his own. In March of that year Dr. Moore
Agar, of Harley Street, whose dramatic introduction to Holmes I may
some day recount, gave positive injunctions that the famous private
agent lay aside all his cases and surrender himself to complete rest
if he wished to avert an absolute breakdown. The state of his health
was not a matter in which he himself took the faintest interest, for
his mental detachment was absolute, but he was induced at last, on
the threat of being permanently disqualified from work, to give
himself a complete change of scene and air. Thus it was that in the
early spring of that year we found ourselves together in a small
cottage near Poldhu Bay, at the further extremity of the Cornish
peninsula.
It was a singular spot, and one peculiarly well suited to the grim
humour of my patient. From the windows of our little whitewashed
house, which stood high upon a grassy headland, we looked down upon
the whole sinister semicircle of Mounts Bay, that old death trap of
sailing vessels, with its fringe of black cliffs and surge-swept
reefs on which innumerable seamen have met their end. With a
northerly breeze it lies placid and sheltered, inviting the
storm-tossed craft to tack into it for rest and protection.
Then come the sudden swirl round of the wind, the blistering gale
from the south-west, the dragging anchor, the lee shore, and the last
battle in the creaming breakers. The wise mariner stands far out from
that evil place.
On the land side our surroundings were as sombre as on the sea. It
was a country of rolling moors, lonely and dun-colored, with an
occasional church tower to mark the site of some old-world village.
In every direction upon these moors there were traces of some
vanished race which had passed utterly away, and left as it sole
record strange monuments of stone, irregular mounds which contained
the burned ashes of the dead, and curious earthworks which hinted at
prehistoric strife. The glamour and mystery of the place, with its
sinister atmosphere of forgotten nations, appealed to the imagination
of my friend, and he spent much of his time in long walks and
solitary meditations upon the moor. The ancient Cornish language had
also arrested his attention, and he had, I remember, conceived the
idea that it was akin to the Chaldean, and had been largely derived
from the Phoenician traders in tin. He had received a consignment of
books upon philology and was settling down to develop this thesis
when suddenly, to my sorrow and to his unfeigned delight, we found
ourselves, even in that land of dreams, plunged into a problem at our
very doors which was more intense, more engrossing, and infinitely
more mysterious than any of those which had driven us from London.
Our simple life and peaceful, healthy routine were violently
interrupted, and we were precipitated into the midst of a series of
events which caused the utmost excitement not only in Cornwall but
throughout the whole west of England. Many of my readers may retain
some recollection of what was called at the time "The Cornish
Horror," though a most imperfect account of the matter reached the
London press. Now, after thirteen years, I will give the true details
of this inconceivable affair to the public.
I have said that scattered towers marked the villages which dotted
this part of Cornwall. The nearest of these was the hamlet of
Tredannick Wollas, where the cottages of a couple of hundred
inhabitants clustered round an ancient, moss-grown church. The vicar
of the parish, Mr. Roundhay, was something of an archaeologist, and
as such Holmes had made his acquaintance. He was a middle-aged man,
portly and affable, with a considerable fund of local lore. At his
invitation we had taken tea at the vicarage and had come to know,
also, Mr. Mortimer Tregennis, an independent gentleman, who increased
the clergyman's scanty resources by taking rooms in his large,
straggling house. The vicar, being a bachelor, was glad to come to
such an arrangement, though he had little in common with his lodger,
who was a thin, dark, spectacled man, with a stoop which gave the
impression of actual, physical deformity. I remember that during our
short visit we found the vicar garrulous, but his lodger strangely
reticent, a sad-faced, introspective man, sitting with averted eyes,
brooding apparently upon his own affairs.
These were the two men who entered abruptly into our little
sitting-room on Tuesday, March the 16th, shortly after our breakfast
hour, as we were smoking together, preparatory to our daily excursion
upon the moors.
"Mr. Holmes," said the vicar in an agitated voice, "the most
extraordinary and tragic affair has occurred during the night. It is
the most unheard-of business. We can only regard it as a special
Providence that you should chance to be here at the time, for in all
England you are the one man we need."
I glared at the intrusive vicar with no very friendly eyes; but
Holmes took his pipe from his lips and sat up in his chair like an
old hound who hears the view-halloa. He waved his hand to the sofa,
and our palpitating visitor with his agitated companion sat side by
side upon it. Mr. Mortimer Tregennis was more self-contained than the
clergyman, but the twitching of his thin hands and the brightness of
his dark eyes showed that they shared a common emotion.
"Shall I speak or you?" he asked of the vicar.
"Well, as you seem to have made the discovery, whatever it may be,
and the vicar to have had it second-hand, perhaps you had better do
the speaking," said Holmes.
I glanced at the hastily clad clergyman, with the formally dressed
lodger seated beside him, and was amused at the surprise which
Holmes's simple deduction had brought to their faces.
"Perhaps I had best say a few words first," said the vicar, "and then
you can judge if you will listen to the details from Mr. Tregennis,
or whether we should not hasten at once to the scene of this
mysterious affair. I may explain, then, that our friend here spent
last evening in the company of his two brothers, Owen and George, and
of his sister Brenda, at their house of Tredannick Wartha, which is
near the old stone cross upon the moor. He left them shortly after
ten o'clock, playing cards round the dining-room table, in excellent
health and spirits. This morning, being an early riser, he walked in
that direction before breakfast and was overtaken by the carriage of
Dr. Richards, who explained that he had just been sent for on a most
urgent call to Tredannick Wartha. Mr. Mortimer Tregennis naturally
went with him. When he arrived at Tredannick Wartha he found an
