“He has never been,” he murmured, “quite the man he was since that fall.”
If this admission, or insinuation served to “give us pause,” our spirits were to be reassured in a few hours by the return of Mr Holmes in a great state of suppressed excitement.
“Give me a foot-rule,” he said. “I believe my theory was correct and that I am on his tracks.”
His enthusiasm communicated itself to us all.
“Great heavens, sir!” said Mr Shapter. “Do you mean to say you believe him to be really in hiding at the farm?”
“I lend myself to no positive assertion, my dear sir,” answered the other, with a smile. “I state, only, that I have come upon a number of footmarks about the house that were not there this afternoon. They may be his; they may not be. A great deal depends upon the postulate. But nothing can be lost, at least, by following them up; and that is my sole present intention. I shall be absent, probably, during the greater part of the night, and even, it may be, well into to-morrow morning. See that the door is left on the latch.”
You may be sure that none of us—save only Dr Watson, whose snores shook the partitions—slept much that night. We were all awake with daylight, and eager for news. It came, presently, with the astounding information that Mr Holmes, returning to the house in the early hours of the morning, had ordered incontinently a fly for the station, and had left in it before any of us were down. We stared at one another in mute consternation.
But Dr Watson, when he appeared, took the thunderbolt unruffled. This sudden disappearance was only, in his opinion, part of the plot. Likely enough the tracks had led his friend to Footover.
In the meantime he laid himself out to enjoy his respite in the consumption of much excellent fare and tobacco, to which latter indulgence he never resorted without first fitting on his head an embroidered black velvet smoking-cap with a large gold tassel pendent from its crown. His engagements, he said, left him free till Easter, when he was to take his usual little holiday at Clacton-on-Sea. No doubt there would be developments in a day or two.
But there were no developments, not that day nor the next, and we were beginning to foresee a difficulty in ridding ourselves of this self-complacent incubus, when there arrived a letter to him from Mr Holmes, which settled the business. He read it, and, in a fit, I cannot but think, of temporary aberration, threw it across to Mr Shapter. It ran as follows:—