I was walking along the narrow mountain path that leads from Balkh to Samarcand. In my right hand I held my trusty kirghiz, which I had sharpened only that very morning. My head was shaded from the blazing sun by a broad native mollah, presented to me by the Khan of Bokhara, with whom I had spent the previous day in his Highness's magnificent marble and alabaster palace. As I walked I could not but be sensible of a curiously strained and tense feeling in the air—the sort of atmosphere that seems to be, to me at least, the invariable concomitant of country-house guessing-games. I was at a loss to account for this most curious phenomenon, when, looking up suddenly, I saw on the top of an elevated crag in front of me the solitary and impassive figure of Picklock Holes, who was at that moment engaged on one of his most brilliant feats of induction. He evinced no surprise whatever at seeing me. A cold smile lingered for a moment on his firm and secretive lips, and he laid the tips of his fingers together in his favourite attitude of deep consideration.
"How are you, my dear Potson?" he began. "What? not well? Dear me, dear me, what can it mean? And yet I don't think it can have been the fifth glass of sherbet which you took with the fourteenth wife of the Khan. No, I don't think it can have been that."
"Holes, you extraordinary creature," I broke in; "what on earth made you think that I drank five glasses of sherbert with the Khan's fourteenth wife?"
"Nothing simpler, my dear fellow. Just before I saw you a native Bokharan goose ran past this rock, making, as it passed, a strange hissing noise, exactly like the noise made by sherbert when immersed in water. Five minutes elapsed, and then you appeared. I watched you carefully. Your lips moved, as lips move only when they pronounce the word fourteen. You then smiled and scratched your face, from which I immediately concluded you were thinking of a wife or wives. Do you follow me?"
"Yes, I do, perfectly," I answered, overjoyed to be able to say so without deviating from the truth; for in following his reasoning I did not admit its accuracy. As to that I said nothing, for I had drunk sherbert with no one, and consequently had not taken five glasses with the fourteenth wife of the Khan. Still, it was a glorious piece of guess-work on the part of my matchless friend, and I expressed my admiration for his powers in no measured terms.
"Perhaps," said Holes, after a pause, "you are wondering why I am here. I will tell you. You know Lady Hilda Cardamums?"
"What, the third and loveliest daughter of the Marquis of Sassafras?"
"The same. Two days ago she left her boudoir at Sassafras Court, saying that she would return in a quarter of an hour. A quarter of an hour elapsed, the Lady Hilda was still absent. The whole household was plunged in grief, and every kind of surmise was indulged in to account for the lovely girl's disappearance. Under these circumstances the Marquis sent for me, and that," said Holes, "is why I am here."
"But," I ventured to remark, "do you really expect to find Lady Hilda here in Bokhara, on these inhospitable precipices, where even the wandering Bactrian finds his footing insecure? Surely it cannot be that you have tracked the Lady Hilda hither?"
"Tush," said Holes, smiling in spite of himself at my vehemence. "Why should she not be here? Listen. She was not at Sassafras Court. Therefore, she must have been outside Sassafras Court. Now in Bokhara is outside Sassafras Court, or, to put it algebraically,