The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons Part 15

Egbert, however, didn't wait to reply when he saw who was inhabiting the billiard-room; but turned and ran for dear life back along the corridor.

Holmes brought his Marathon legs into play then, and soon captured the obese footman, who puffed like a porpoise in the firm and muscular grasp of the detective, who nabbed him just at the head of the stairs.

"Now, Eggie, the game is up for you as well as for the other four culprits, so you might as well begin to spill out your little narration of how it happened that you absent-mindedly left a valuable gem in a pool-table pocket," Holmes admonished, giving the gem to the Earl and jerking the perspiring footman into a more erect posture.

The Earl was contemplating his hireling, his face expressive of mixed emotions, the rest of us filling up the background as usual.

"Well, that man Billie Budd, 'e swiped the s.h.i.+ners, so 'e did,"

stammered Egbert, his eyes avoiding his master's, "and 'e prevailed hon me to 'ide one of them for 'im. Said 'e would reward me when 'e came back to dispose of them. But Hi didn't mean any 'arm by it, Your Lords.h.i.+p,--er, Mr. 'Olmes. The reason Hi lost the cuff-b.u.t.ton in 'ere was because Hi was shooting a little game of pool by myself just now, with the thing in my 'and, so Hi could hadmire it, and when Hi made the last shot, it rolled away. Hi didn't know which pocket it went into, and just then Hi 'eard some one coming, so Hi beat it."

"Well, you can beat it again, Bunbury. Back to the woods for you! I'll sentence you to help Yensen clean out the horses' stalls for your theft," said the Earl.

The fat footman, glad to be rid of the inquisition, went downstairs in a hurry.

Our little party now returned to the billiard room and finished our game, also a few more, playing until Donald MacTavish, the second footman, came in and announced luncheon, it now being twelve o'clock.

After luncheon, during which Holmes made several more cracks about the possible guilt of others in the diamond robbery, we adjourned to the library, and Holmes settled himself in the best chair, still wearing Luigi Vermicelli's light green livery, consulted his old chronometer again, and yawned.

"Well, it's still only a quarter of one. Hi! Ho! Hum! Nearly four hours yet before I am to go down to the village and grab the second gardener with his stolen pair of diamonds!" he remarked. Then turning to me, he added: "Doc, I believe the reaction is on me now. I haven't had a shot in the arm since yesterday morning. Have you got the dope-needle with you? No, that's right,--I have it here in my pocket."

And before I could prevent him, the hardened old "c.o.ke"-fiend had pulled out his famous needle and inoculated himself again in the arm with the poisonous cocaine, and right in front of all the five people in the library, too,--the Earl, Thorneycroft, Launcelot, Tooter, and Hicks,--who stared at him as if he were a dime-museum freak; which indeed he was, to a certain extent.

The seven of us managed to kill time some way or another that Wednesday afternoon, while the sun shone through the ancient windows, and the birds sang their springtime songs in the trees outside, the Countess having retired to the music room to hammer Beethoven,--or maybe it was Mendelssohn,--out of the piano.

I had grown considerably interested in a very romantic novel by Xavier de Montepin, and took no note of the pa.s.sage of time until suddenly my unconventional partner jumped up and yelled:

"Arise and depart with me, John H. Watson, M. D.! The time now approaches when we shall accomplish the recovery of the sixth and seventh stolen piece of gla.s.s for His Nibs the Earl!"

And Holmes grabbed me by the shoulder so sharply that the book fell out of my hands.

"You don't need to throw a fit about it, anyhow," I grumbled, as I hastened to accompany him out of the castle and down the somewhat dusty road to the village of Hedge-gutheridge.

The darned village was three-quarters of a mile from Normanstow Towers, and I didn't feel like taking a tramp just then, but Holmes seemed to be in high spirits as we pa.s.sed along the ancient and dilapidated main street of the village, sizing up the signs above the stores until we came to one that read:

WILFRED WUXLEY FLOUR and FEED

It didn't look very inviting, being only a hundred feet away from the grimy railroad station by which we had first come here, with cinders blown all over it, and if the building had been back in the U. S. A.

and I was a deputy state fire marshal, I would have ordered it torn down at once. Of course none of the constables were in sight anywhere, probably being asleep in some back room!

Holmes led the way into the feed store, and we met the proprietor, who strongly reminded me of Inspector Letstrayed and Egbert Bunbury by his general air of sleepy incompetence. It was now five minutes to five, and after Holmes had warned old man Wuxley of his ident.i.ty beneath the valet's livery, we decided to hide behind one of the barrels of bran that stood on one side of the store, and there await the coming of Demetrius with his booty.

We didn't have long to wait, for he soon showed up in the doorway,--with his swarthy face and s.h.i.+fty eyes,--and asked Wuxley if Luigi had arrived yet to meet him. Suppressing a smile, Wuxley motioned him in, saying that Luigi was in a back room.

As he pa.s.sed the bran barrels Holmes and I jumped out and nailed him, and Holmes exclaimed:

"Well, here I am, Mr. Xanthopoulos. We'll catch the next train in to London and sell the diamonds,--maybe!"

But the wily Greek was quicker than I thought he would be; he jerked loose as soon as he heard the tones of Holmes's well-remembered voice that had bawled him out at the inquisition the day before, and in a second had escaped by the back door, leaving Holmes with a shred of cloth out of his coat-tail held between his fingers.

We two gave chase at once; out of the rickety old back door of the feed store we sped, nearly breaking our necks in our stumble down the uneven steps that led to a weedy yard. There was a gate in the picket fence surrounding the yard, and through this we dashed madly after the swiftly retreating Demetrius, who led us down a narrow lane back of the stores fronting on the main street for several hundred feet, until we arrived at a small creek that paralleled the railroad tracks,--a stream that I had not noticed on the way out from London the previous Monday.

As our ill luck would have it, Demetrius found a couple of dingy rowboats at the edge of the creek, and into one of them he jumped, grabbed the oars, and paddled himself down-stream at a pretty good clip. Holmes swore, both in English and French, but quickly grabbed the other boat, shoved me into it, and started to row after the gardener down the turbid and muddy waters of the creek, which was about sixty feet wide. As we rounded a sharp left bend in the creek, Holmes ran our boat in near the opposite sh.o.r.e and succeeded in hitting the side of Demetrius's boat with the prow of our own.

Demetrius yelled something unintelligible,--in his native Greek, I guess,--and the collision threw him overboard, on the outer side of his boat, whereupon he began to swim across the creek to the farther side.

"Come back here, or I'll throw this oar at you!" yelled Holmes, pulling it out of the row-lock, too excited to think of the revolver in his pocket, while I strove to row the boat as well as I could with the one remaining oar.

Owing to Holmes's gyrations with the other oar, our boat capsized too, and the three of us were now struggling in the cold, muddy water, which, fortunately, was only shoulder-deep. We found it quicker to wade out than to swim out, and as Demetrius scrambled up the opposite bank of the creek, Holmes was upon him, and grabbed him this time with an unbreakable grip.

"Here are the two cuff-b.u.t.tons, Mr. Holmes," faltered the gardener, as he nervously fumbled at his vest-pocket and handed over the two gems, none the worse for the wetting they had received. "Please don't kill me now. Billie Budd made me and Vermicelli keep the cuff-b.u.t.tons for him, after he said he stole them; and as he didn't come back yet, we thought we'd sell 'em ourselves. And I'm liable to catch pneumonia from all this, anyhow!"

"We'll see about that when we get back to the castle,--I've got seven of them now out of the eleven. Seven, come eleven!" said Holmes with a grim smile, as he put the two causes of Demetrius's downfall in his own pocket.

The strangely a.s.sorted trio now walked back to the castle, the few villagers we met at the edge of Hedge-gutheridge staring at us in surprise on seeing our drenched and streaming condition.

The golden April sun was low in the western sky as we turned in at the castle grounds, and I felt good and hungry, I can tell you, after all the excitement. After explaining what had happened to the gaping habitues of the castle, I hustled upstairs with Holmes, and we changed our wet clothes immediately, putting on dry ones, after advising Demetrius to do the same. I prescribed a hot drink of whiskey-punch apiece for us in order to ward off pneumonia; and by half-past six we were ready for dinner.

Everything pa.s.sed off as well as before, and Holmes was effusively congratulated by the Earl for his recovery of the sixth and seventh diamond cuff-b.u.t.tons, His Lords.h.i.+p deciding at length that the second gardener had been punished enough for his theft by being dumped into the creek. They all echoed Holmes's slogan of: "Seven, come eleven!"

for the recovery of the four remaining gems; and after an evening spent in listening to Lord Launcelot play the mandolin, and to Uncle Tooter telling some more extravagant tales of his adventures in India, we retired at ten o'clock, and I soon fell asleep.

Then I dreamed that I was back in the United States, on a Mississippi River levee, throwing dice with several colored boys, who kept shouting: "Seven, come eleven!" when Hemlock Holmes came along and pinched us all for c.r.a.p-shooting!

CHAPTER XV

Thursday morning, April the eleventh, found us none the worse for our wetting in the creek the afternoon before; and as Holmes and I were dressing in our room, he loudly boasted that before another day had pa.s.sed he would succeed in finding the four remaining diamond cuff-b.u.t.tons.

"Well, I hope so, Holmes; only I can't help thinking what a supreme chump that Earl is for keeping those five servants of his from whom you extracted the first seven cuff-b.u.t.tons,--Yensen, Thorneycroft, Galetchkoff, Bunbury, and Xanthopoulos!" I said; "because at any time they are liable to steal the darned cuff-b.u.t.tons again. Then there's Vermicelli, who was mixed up in the plot with the Greek, and the Countess herself!"

"What of it, Doc?" grinned Holmes, as he bent down to lace his shoes.

"His Nibs can't very well fire _her_, can he? And as to the five servants whom he has so mercifully retained, that's _his_ funeral, not ours. I was hired at an exorbitant fee to get back the cuff-b.u.t.tons, and when I have done so my duties end. Handing out free advice to people who have not asked for it generally doesn't get you anything, I have observed."

I subsided, knowing from long experience how bull-headed Holmes was, and we went downstairs to breakfast, at which meal the Earl and Countess both did the honors to the a.s.sembled party. It developed then that Inspector Barnabas Letstrayed, in spite of his nap on the billiard-table the day before, had also bestirred himself in an eleventh hour attempt to find some of the cuff-b.u.t.tons before Holmes dug them all up, and he told us how he had been all through the servants' rooms on the fifth floor, rummaging in their dressers and clothes-closets, and peeking under the beds, in a vain endeavor to unearth at least one of the stolen gems. He had also been down in the wine-cellar, on the theory that some of the servants might have gone down there to get drunk, and while in that condition might have dropped the gems, but there also he was doomed to disappointment.

"Cheer up, Barney, old boy; maybe I'll let you stand beside me when I nab the next thief, and you can thus share in the honor of apprehending him," said Holmes. Letstrayed, however, seemed to think that my partner was unjustly putting something over on him in getting back so many of the cuff-b.u.t.tons when he, Letstrayed, couldn't find one. After breakfast the Earl suggested that we take a walk about the grounds, which proved to be a pleasanter jaunt than the one we took at Holmes's insistence on Tuesday morning; for the gra.s.s had been dried by this time by the suns.h.i.+ne that had followed Monday's rain.

The nine of us, including the Countess, rambled around the wide-spreading lawn by twos and threes, and I contrived to draw Holmes past the stables and gardens back to the small patch of woods that adjoined the castle grounds at the rear, where we seated ourselves on a fallen tree-trunk.

"Now, look here, Holmes, I've just been thinking----" I began.

"What! Again?" interrupted Holmes, with a grin.

"Don't interrupt me, please," I said seriously. "I want you to dope out for me the process of reasoning you went through yesterday noon in the music room behind the locked doors. Some of the moves you have made are too many for me, and I seek enlightenment."

"Well, Doc," said Holmes, as he took out his pocket-knife, pulled a sliver of wood off the tree-trunk we were sitting on, and began to whittle it, "the red clay I found on Eustace Thorneycroft's shoes was pretty good evidence that he had been around the stable, where the only red clay in the neighborhood is located; so I disguised myself as the race-track loafer and pried his secret out of the none too bright Olaf Yensen, the coachman. Then I found cigar ashes of the peculiar Pampango brand, which I can always spot with a microscope, on the Countess's shoes, which proved that she had been in the Earl's rooms just after he had smoked a Pampango and before the room had been swept out, so I was able to nail _her_ as one of the kleptomaniacs----"