disappoint? I am not over-tender of heart, but I call it cruel.”
“I think that I see my way to clearing James McCarthy,” said Holmes. “Have you an order to see him in prison?”
“Yes, but only for you and me.”
“Then I shall reconsider my resolution about going out. We have still time to take a train to Hereford and see him tonight?”
“Ample.”
“Then let us do so. Watson, I fear that you will find it very slow, but I shall only be away a couple of hours.”
I walked down to the station with them, and then wandered through the streets of the little town, finally returning to the hotel, where I lay upon the sofa and tried to interest myself in a yellow-backed novel.
The puny plot of the story was so thin, however, when compared to the deep mystery through which we were groping, and I found my attention wander so continually from the fiction to the fact, that I at last flung it across the room and gave myself up entirely to a consideration of the events of the day.
Supposing that this unhappy young man’s story were absolutely true, then what hellish thing, what absolutely unforeseen and extraordinary calamity could have occurred between the time when he parted from his father, and the moment when, drawn back by his screams, he rushed into the glade? It was something terrible and deadly. What could it be?
Might not the nature of the injuries reveal something to my medical instincts? I rang the bell and called for the weekly county paper, which contained a verbatim account of the inquest.
In the surgeon’s deposition it was stated that the