“Rather cool, eh, Watson? I’m much mistaken if they don’t have cause to regret their action when it’s too late. After this I shall certainly refuse to act for them any further in the case, even if they ask me to do so. In a way I’m sorry because the matter presented some distinctly interesting features and is by no means the simple affair our friend Lestrade thinks.” “Why, don’t you think he is on the right scent?” I exclaimed. “Wait and see, Watson,” said Holmes mysteriously. “Mr Booth hasn’t been caught yet, remember.” And that was all that I could get out of him. One result of the summary way in which the banker had dispensed with my friend’s services was that Holmes and I spent a most restful and enjoyable week in the small village of Hathersage, on the edge of the Derbyshire moors, and returned to London feeling better for our long moorland rambles.
Holmes having very little work in hand at the time, and my wife not yet having returned from her Swiss holiday, I prevailed upon him, though not without considerable difficulty, to pass the next few weeks with me instead of returning to his rooms at Baker Street. Of course, we watched the development of the Sheffield forgery case with the keenest interest. Somehow the particulars of Lestrade’s discoveries got into the papers, and the day after we left Sheffield they were full of the exciting chase of Mr Booth, the man wanted for the Sheffield bank frauds.
They spoke of “the guilty man restlessly pacing the deck of the Empress Queen, as she ploughed her way majestically across the solitary wastes of the Atlantic, all unconscious that the inexorable hand of justice could stretch over the ocean and was already waiting to seize him on his arrival in the New World.” And Holmes after reading these sensational paragraphs would always lay down the paper with one of his enigmatical smiles.
At last the day on which the Empress Queen was due at New York arrived, and I could not help but notice that even Holmes’s usually inscrutable face wore a look of suppressed excitement as he unfolded the evening paper. But our surprise was doomed to be prolonged still further. There was a brief paragraph to say that the Empress Queen had arrived off Long Island at six a.m. after a good passage. There was, however, a case of cholera on board, and the New York authorities had consequently been compelled to put the boat in quarantine, and none of the passengers or crew would be allowed to leave her for a period of twelve days.
Two days later there was a full column in the papers stating that it had been definitely ascertained that Mr Booth was really on board the Empress Queen. He had been identified and spoken to by one of the sanitary inspectors who had had to visit the boat. He was being kept under close observation, and there was no possible chance of his escaping Mr. Lestrade of Scotland Yard, by whom Booth had been so cleverly tracked down and his escape forestalled, had taken passage on the Oceania, due in New York on the tenth, and would personally arrest Mr Booth when he was allowed to land.
Never before or since have I seen my friend Holmes so astonished as when he had finished reading this announcement. I could see that he was thoroughly mystified, though why he should be so was quite a puzzle to me. All day he sat coiled up in an easy chair, with his brows drawn down into two hard lines and his eyes half closed as he puffed away at his oldest brier in silence.
“Watson,” he said once, glancing across at me, “it’s perhaps a good thing that I was asked to drop that Sheffield case. As things are turning out I fancy I should only have made a fool of myself.” “Why?” I asked. “Because I began by assuming that somebody else wasn’t one—and now it looks as though I had been mistaken.”
For the next few days Holmes seemed quite depressed, for nothing annoyed him more than to feel that he had made any mistake in his deductions or got onto a false line of reasoning. At last the fatal tenth of September, the day on which Booth was to be arrested, arrived. Eagerly but in vain we scanned the evening papers. The morning of the eleventh came and still brought no news of the arrest, but in the evening papers of that day there was a short paragraph hinting that the criminal had escaped again.
For several days the papers were full of the most conflicting rumours and conjectures as to what had actually taken place, but all were agreed in