The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons

"Harrigan, you may pour us out each a glass of wine."

Harrigan smilingly agreed, and after we had all imbibed, the Earl and Uncle Tooter played chess on the great mahogany table in the center of the room; Holmes and Thorneycroft started a game of checkers, as did Lord Launcelot and myself, sitting on the leather-covered divans in the broad bay-window, while Billie Hicks sprawled himself out in a comfortable arm-chair at one side. The Countess did not appear, being still upstairs in her own room with her maid Teresa, and the various servants were scattered through the numerous rooms of the castle engaged in their various duties.

So the afternoon passed, – from a little after two o'clock, when we returned from the stables, until ten minutes after five, when suddenly two loud shots split the silence, coming from the direction of the rear of the castle.

"Ha! There he is now!" yelled Holmes, as he jumped up instantly, knocking the checkerboard and all the pieces into the lap of the astonished Thorneycroft, and ran out into the corridor, shouting to us to accompany him. Holmes had pretty long legs, and he distanced the rest of us while we did another Marathon out to the stables, with the servants staring at us out of the back windows. I hate to have to tell it, but the sight that met our eyes in the hay-loft was honestly enough to make an archangel swear!

There, stretched out flat on his back on the hay-littered floor near the top of the stairs, bound and gagged, and snoring in the deepest slumber, lay our luckless friend, Inspector Barnabas Letstrayed!

Holmes turned pale with rage, and then he roared:

"Asleep at the switch! And Billie Budd far away by this time! Grab me, fellows, quick, before I forget myself and murder him where he lies! Oh, horrors!"

And he began to swear in French, which, as I have remarked in one of our previous adventures, was his mother's native tongue, to which he resorted when so excited that he couldn't express himself further in English.

The Earl and I untied the ropes that bound the sleeping Letstrayed, removed the gag from his mouth, which consisted of another piece of rope, and shook him to his feet, where he stood blinking in surprise, while Holmes leaned against the nearest wall and shook his fists in the air, while he made the air blue with variegated French cuss-words.

"Let's leave them alone, boys, and return to the castle, while the master-mind and his faithless guard have it out between themselves," suggested the Earl.

Whereupon we all followed him quietly back to the library, filled with mixed emotions. When we were back again in the seats from which we had recently been so sharply disturbed, the Earl said to me:

"Well, Doctor Watson, what do you make of it? You've had a good deal of experience with the great detective. Tell us what you think."

"What I think of Inspector Letstrayed wouldn't look very well in print," I began; "but it's easy enough to see what happened. The old dope fell asleep, so, of course, as soon as Budd heard those elephantine snores, he sneaked out from his hiding-place under the hay and tied him up with the ropes while he slept, took his revolver away from him, shot it off twice out of pure bravado, and then beat it for parts unknown. If he's as good a runner yet as he was this noon, he must be over in the next county by this time! Of course, it couldn't have been Letstrayed who shot the revolver off, because we found him still asleep and snoring; and he couldn't have shot first at Budd and then have been overpowered by the latter, because he didn't have time enough in the short minute between our hearing the shots and racing out there to have fallen asleep again, especially when he was tied up so tightly. I think you will find that I am right, – when Holmes returns with the information he has pried out of the Inspector."

Holmes returned soon afterward, still fuming and growling over his second setback of the day, with Letstrayed trailing along behind him, looking like a flour-sack that had been stepped on! The latter sat down quietly, without a word, and Holmes corroborated my deductions. He said Letstrayed told him he didn't know a thing about what had taken place until we untied the ropes from him; for he had fallen asleep in his too comfortable position on the pile of hay, and had not been awakened even by the shots.

"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 assumption 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 passed 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 passed 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 association 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 glass 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 glass 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 grass 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 passed, 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?"