James Francis Thierry

When we got down to the library, which seemed to be the Earl's usual hang-out, we found His Lordship sitting in a chair, with a book in his lap, but with his somewhat gloomy eyes gazing on the floor, and old Uncle Tooter, with his back turned to him, looking out of the window, as if they had just had a quarrel,—which was the case.

"Two o'clock on Thursday afternoon in Easter week and all is well, Your Lordship!" said Holmes triumphantly, with a smile over his mobile face that spread from ear to ear as he advanced and politely tendered the final diamond cuff-button to the Earl. "I have now the very great pleasure of presenting you with the last remaining stolen heirloom of the ancient House of Puddingham, thus recovering all the articles stolen from you on Easter Sunday night and throughout Easter Monday, which recovery is due to my herculean efforts, ably assisted from time to time by my old side-kicker, Doctor Watson. The only thing now remaining to be done is to seize Billie Budd when he comes up here in disguise to-morrow morning, and ship him into London with a ball and chain around his ankles."

The Earl arose and feelingly congratulated Holmes on the recovery of the gems, shaking hands with him warmly, and added:

"You will pardon me for not seeming more enthused over the event than I am, but Uncle Tooter and I have just had some words, the result of which is that he will leave this castle Friday afternoon with his bride-to-be, Teresa Olivano; and my six good pairs of diamond cuff-buttons will be sent in by express to the Bank of England, there to be placed in an iron-bound, steel-doored safety deposit vault, where no Billie Budds can break in and hypothecate them!"

"Yes, that's right," said Tooter, facing around in Holmes's direction; "and I can add that I am darned glad that I am not to be shadowed and dogged around by such a long-legged piece of impudence as you any longer. If a gentleman decides to play a trick on his nephew-in-law by hiding a worthless bauble for a few days, it's none of your business, and he should not be treated as if he was a hardened criminal for it. I am worth eight million pounds, and I don't have to take your sass, or the Earl's either, if I don't feel like it."

And the speaker cleared his throat and looked defiantly at me, as if I were responsible for all of Holmes's actions.

"Eight million pounds of what? Turnips?" said my unimpressed partner. "That doesn't cut any ice with me whatever! I only did my duty in going after the stolen gems in the most strenuous manner possible, and if you feel like putting on the gloves with me to have it out, I will meet you at any time at my rooms, 221-B Baker Street, in London, and then we'll see who's the better man."

And Hemlock lit another cigarette.

"Here, here! You don't have to fight about it, you know. I guess it's bad enough for Uncle Tooter to leave me to-morrow, without a threat of fisticuffs. Not that I care a hang about the social mÉsalliance he's committing in marrying the Countess's maid, but the fact of his implication in the robbery has me all cut up."

"Well, if that's the way you feel about it, Earl, you'd better grab hold of something for support when I inform you that the person who had the eleventh and last cuff-button in his wrongful possession was none other than your beloved brother and heir, Lord Launcelot. Here he comes now. I guess he must have been so out of breath from that hard race up to the roof that he couldn't walk down again as fast as we could."

Here Holmes pointed to Launcelot, who came into the library just then with a frown on his face and with most of his recent defiant manner gone. The Earl sat down hard in his chair, put his hands over his face for a moment, and then hollered for help to his best friend,—the butler.

"O Harrigan, Harrigan!" he called, "pour me out a glass of the stiffest brandy you've got in the place, with a dash of absinthe in it! Help! Life-saving service quick!"

"Yes, yes; I'm coming!" shouted Harrigan, who came running in, and ministered unto the Earl's needs from the supply of potables that was always kept handy on the sideboard in the dining-room, so he wouldn't have to lose so much time going all the way down to the wine-cellar.

"And say,—pour out a glass or two, or a decanter or two, of the castle's best wine for the Honorable Mr. Holmes, who has just now recovered all my stolen diamond cuff-buttons, Joe. Give him a barrelful of it if he can stand it,—give him anything he wants!—only for the love of Mike let me try to forget that the ancient honor of our noble House of Dunderhaugh and Puddingham has gone to pot in the unwelcome fact that my only brother and sole heir to the title, that shrimp of a Launcelot, has been mixed up in the robbery!"

The Earl yammered away at the butler for some time, while yours truly did not forget to help himself to the drinks while they were passing around, although I knew as a physician that they were not exactly the best thing for the lining of my stomach.

"Now then, Your Lordship, if you are sufficiently revived to talk business again, I would suggest that you give all those eleven recovered cuff-buttons, together with the twelfth and last one that the thieves didn't get, to me," said Holmes, "and I will keep them safely in my coat-pocket for you until you are ready to send them in to the bank in the city, protected the while by the revolver in my hip-pocket. I suppose you might as well forgive Launcelot as you forgave the others for their thefts, or rather for their receipt of stolen goods from Budd, as the main thing now will be to nab him, the author of the crime, when he comes to-morrow."

"Yes, I suppose so, Holmes," replied the Earl. "Come over to my room and I'll give you all the gems for safe keeping. Launcelot, you rummie, I'll forgive you, although I shouldn't; and I warn you and Uncle Tooter both not to interfere when Holmes arrests Budd to-morrow."

"All right, George. Thanks!" murmured Launcelot with downcast eyes, and Tooter also nodded assent.

When Holmes had got all the twelve gems stowed away in his right-hand coat-pocket, the Earl spoke of writing out a check for the twenty thousand pounds' reward he had promised him, but Holmes unexpectedly demurred,—saying he would wait until Billie Budd was captured first,—instead of grabbing feverishly for the coin, as I naturally thought he would.

"Well, there's nothing to do now but kill time until to-morrow when that scoundrel shows up in a spurious disguise," said Holmes, as he moved toward the door. "I move that we shoot several games of pool upstairs for the rest of this eventful afternoon.

"It ought to be about time now for old Chief Sleepy-eye to waddle in and ask about the stolen gems, after I've dug them all up, I guess."

"Old who, did you say?" inquired Thorneycroft with a smile.

"Why, old Chief Sleepy-eye,—that lethargic and comatose old piece of cheese that you call Letstrayed, of course. I suppose his ancestor must have got the name Letstrayed because he was let stray away from some asylum for the feeble-minded. Look, here he is now! Speak of the devil and he appears, darned if he don't!"

It was indeed the slow-moving and ponderous Inspector Barnabas Letstrayed that loomed up in the doorway and inquired about the cuff-buttons, while Holmes answered him very sharply:

"Wake up and come to life, old General Incompetence! All the eleven shiners have now been run down and captured before they could bite anybody, by me, you understand, me,—your ancient rival!"

"Well, er—ah, I suppose I shall have to send in a formal report to Scotland Yard about it, then, so the authorities will have official cognizance of the matter," said Letstrayed, as he scratched his somewhat thick head.

At this moment, the bell rang, and Egbert the first footman, answering it, brought in a telegram from Scotland Yard, which Letstrayed had just mentioned, and handed it to him. Holmes snatched it out of his hand, tore it open, and hastily read it to the crowd:

Inspector Barnabas Letstrayed,
Normanstow Towers, Surrey,

Have you found Puddingham's cuff-buttons yet? Answer.

O. U. Doolittle,
Chief of Scotland Yard.

"Wouldn't that knock the specs off your grandmother's nose?" sneered Holmes.

He hurriedly scrawled a reply, which he gave to the waiting messenger outside the front door, while Letstrayed fumed and stammered in protest.

This was the sarcastic message my partner sent back to London:

We all gave it up, and willingly joined the masterful dictator of the castle in the billiard-room on the fourth floor, where we played pool and billiards until the evening shadows fell and Donald the second footman came in and announced dinner.

The dinner passed off without excitement, except for the Earl's rising and proposing the health of Hemlock Holmes, which was responded to enthusiastically by all present except Letstrayed, who insisted on saying "we" instead of "you" when speaking to Holmes about the credit for the recovery of the gems. After dinner we adjourned to the music room, where the Countess Annabelle entertained us as on the evening before, playing a number of selections on the piano, including one little song entitled, "Once I Loved A Spanish Maid," which she repeated a couple of times with the evident purpose of kidding her uncle about his forthcoming marriage with her maid Teresa.

The next morning dawned bright and clear, with the sun shining warmly, and after breakfast we took a walk around the lawn in the rear of the castle, where Holmes claimed that intuition told him that Billie Budd would appear. It got around to a quarter after nine, and while we were chinning with Blumenroth the gardener and Yensen the coachman, I noticed a farmer dressed in a suit of blue overalls and a wide-brimmed straw hat come strolling along the graveled driveway that led back to the stables. He was a harmless-looking fellow, with bushy gray whiskers and old-fashioned spectacles, and he came up and addressed us in a somewhat squeaky voice, which aroused Holmes's suspicions at once.

"I say, gentlemen, could you tell me who has charge of His Lordship's hay in the stables? My name is Samuel Simmons, a farmer down the road a piece, and I would like to buy a ton or two of his hay, if he doesn't want too much for it."

And the alleged farmer took off his old straw hat and fanned himself with it after his long walk.

"Well, Sam, the guy who has charge of it is the coachman over there, that fat little fellow with the red face standing under the peach tree," replied Holmes in a well modulated tone, but with his eyes glittering with suppressed excitement. "And I suppose the Earl would sell you part of it, as I have good reason to know, to my cost, that he has more of it up there in the loft than he needs, and I think that you do, too. Weren't you up in the hayloft last Tuesday afternoon, Sam? Sure you were, and what's more, your name then was William X. Budd or I'm a Chinaman!"

And Holmes yelled out as he lunged at the so-called Samuel Simmons and pulled away his false whiskers, thereby disclosing to my astounded eyes the well-remembered face of Budd the crook.

Budd waited not a second, but put his speedy limbs into action down the driveway toward the open road a blamed sight faster than he came in, his spectacles and straw hat falling to the ground, while Holmes and I took after him as rapidly as we could.

"Hey! head him off! head him off there, somebody, for the love of Heaven!" shouted Holmes.

Our hopes were rewarded by Harrigan the butler, who came running out of a side entrance of the castle and made a flying leap at Budd from the side, just as the latter passed him.

Harrigan seized the runner around the knees, and they both came with a crash to the ground (making as fine a football tackle as I ever saw), where they rolled and wrestled, the butler on top.

Holmes and I ran up to them, and we soon got a pair of handcuffs,—which Holmes always carried with him,—around Budd's wrists and jerked him to his feet, while Harrigan arose and brushed off his clothes, just in time to meet the Earl, who hastened out of the castle and came over and clapped the butler on the back, shaking hands with him effusively.

"By Jove, Harrigan, you're a prince! Accept my heartiest thanks for the good work you did in capturing that scoundrel. I saw the whole thing from one of the windows, and knew right away that it must be Budd, in spite of the farmer's disguise," chortled the Earl. "Go inside and pour yourself out a glass of the best wine in the place on me!"

Harrigan left us with a grin, while Budd, handcuffed in Holmes's grasp, stood and scowled at us and ground his teeth with rage as the great detective said:

"We've got him at last, Your Lordship, and he'll certainly get all that's coming to him now. Just go inside and telephone down to the village to send up two of their constables, in order that he may be escorted into London in a manner befitting the enormity of the crime he has committed."

But as the Earl turned away to reËnter the castle, the desperate Budd made another attempt to escape, and succeeded in breaking away from Holmes. Down the driveway he tore at a mile a minute or so, holding his manacled hands up before him, while Holmes for a moment seemed to be dying of heart failure, judging by the appearance of his face.

"Great guns!" he yelled, and a couple of other expletives as well, as he ran after the fugitive again; "he mustn't get away now, after all the trouble we've had to get him!"

But Budd developed remarkable speed, and there was no one now to head him off by a flank movement. But suddenly Holmes spied a farmer driving a small wagon with a single horse along the road out in front.

"Here! your horse and wagon are commandeered in the name of the law!" he shouted, jumping into the wagon and jerking the reins away from their astonished owner. Then he whipped up the horse after the fleeing Budd, who was making a large cloud of dust behind himself down the road toward the village. In a minute or two, the Earl and I, standing on the front lawn, saw Holmes and the farmer overtake Budd, with their horse galloping, and the wagon tearing along most of the time on three wheels. Leaping out of the wagon at just the right moment, my resourceful partner landed squarely on the back of Budd, and bore him to the ground in a cloud of dust and execrations, while the farmer, stopping his panting horse, got out and assisted Holmes to tie up Budd's ankles with a piece of rope that he fortunately had with him in the wagon. Then they lifted the now powerless crook into the wagon, and drove more slowly back to the castle, while Holmes explained the situation to the farmer.

"Well, I guess we might as well use this conveyance to take Budd down to the railroad station ourselves," said Holmes, as the wagon stopped in front of us, and he patted his coat-pocket where he had the dozen cuff-buttons. "Those constables would probably take a year getting out here anyhow, and I can also take your twelve cuff-buttons that caused all the trouble into London with me, instead of your waiting to send them by express. I'll take 'em to the Bank of England all right, get a receipt from the safety deposit department there, and mail it to you; and you can mail me your check for the twenty thousand pounds reward. You know my address, 221-B Baker Street. I can't stand on ceremony now, as I want to get this fellow Budd into the hands of the jailer P. D. Q., before he pulls off another attempted escape, so I'll just ask you to say good-by to Her Ladyship the Countess for me, and give my regards to Joe Harrigan, Louis La Violette, and Heinie Blumenroth,—the only three among the servants who showed any brains,—and my prayers for brains for all the others. Ta, ta! George! You're a pretty good fellow yourself!"

"Good-by, Holmes, and my best congratulations for capturing that man Budd the second time. I'll mail you the check right away, so you'll get it this afternoon in town."

And the Earl waved his hand at us, as I climbed into the wagon and joined Holmes on our farewell trip. Halfway down to the village, I took my handkerchief, at Holmes's command, and made a gag out of it to tie in Budd's mouth, to prevent the flow of a very profane line of talk that he inflicted on the atmosphere.

The farmer's name was Henry Hankins, and Holmes gave him a ten-pound note for his trouble in helping to recapture Budd. At the village, the three of us lifted the bound, gagged and shackled Budd out of the wagon and into a passenger coach on the 9:50 train for London, where Holmes silenced all excited inquirers by calmly showing them his card, at which every one drew back abashed, some even taking off their hats at sight of the celebrated name.

In a half-hour's time we arrived at the station in London, and when Budd was lifted out onto the platform, he showed his still impenitent desperation by actually trying to escape a third time, handcuffed and with his ankles tied as he was, by hopping along, both feet together.

We collared him soon, though, and bundled him into a cab for Scotland Yard, where, upon his arrival, the scoundrel again caused a rumpus by jumping and twisting around when they went to put him into a prison-cell, so that it required the combined efforts of four fat policemen to hold him down.

"Gosh! I feel as if I could sleep for a year, after all that excitement out at Normanstow Towers!" sighed Holmes, as he mopped his forehead on arriving finally at our old rooms on Baker Street, about a quarter after eleven that Friday morning.

"Same here, Holmes. You have nothing on me in that respect," I said, as I threw off my coat and put on my well-worn lavender smoking jacket, preparatory to sitting down in my old chair and enjoying a good, quiet, peaceful smoke before luncheon, far from the madding diamond-thieves' ignoble strife.

After luncheon, served by our old reliable landlady, Mrs. Hudson, who still did business at the old stand unmoved by the shame that had recently come to the noble House of Puddingham, we played chess until two o'clock, when the mail-carrier brought us an envelope addressed to Holmes, with an earl's coronet engraved on it. Tearing it open, Holmes found it to be a short note from our late host and friend the Earl, with a thin, pale blue check for twenty thousand perfectly good pounds sterling enclosed with it, drawn on the Bank of England, filled out in Thorneycroft's handwriting, and signed, as per the nobiliary custom, with simply the one word: "Puddingham."

"And the date of the check is April 12, 1912, Watson. And now I'm going to keep my promise I made to you out in the woods yesterday morning back of the castle," smiled Holmes, "I split with you fifty-fifty. When I go down to the bank now to deposit this check, I'll write you one of mine for ten thousand pounds, and you can come along to endorse it, deposit it to your credit, and we'll leave the Earl's diamond cuff-buttons at the safety deposit vault, mailing him the receipt for them from there."

"Holmes, you're certainly a gentleman and a scholar," I said. "Thanks."

On our return from the bank, after a few more games of chess, we had an early dinner and retired to a much needed rest, in our bedroom adjoining the celebrated sitting-room, but I couldn't get the case out of my head, and inquired:

"Say, Holmes, old boy, how was it you didn't grab Launcelot first instead of last, when you got all the evidence at once?"

Holmes had a grouch on just then,—for some reason or other,—and he answered me by throwing one of his shoes in my direction, which I hastily dodged by shoving my head under the bedclothes as he growled:

"Didn't you just make the equivalent of fifty thousand Yankee dollars for three or four days' work, the most of which I did, Watson? For the love of Pete, stow it away in your historical records somewhere and forget it! Dry up and lemme go to sleep now, or I'll climb out there and settle your hash for good!"