Free The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories by Otto Penzler Page B

Street, has been asked to assist in hunting down this daring forger
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    “Then there follows a lengthy description of the fellow, which I needn’t read but will keep for future use,” said Holmes, folding the paper and looking across at me. “It seems to have been a pretty smart affair. This Booth may not be easily caught, for though he hasn’t had a long time in which to make his escape we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that he’s had twelve months in which to plan how he would do the vanishing trick when the time came. Well! What do you say, Watson? Some of the little problems we have gone into in the past should at least have taught us that the most interesting cases do not always present the most bizarre features at the outset.”
    “ ‘So far from it, on the contrary, quite the reverse,’ to quote Sam Weller,” I replied. “Personally nothing would be more to my taste than to join you.”
    “Then we’ll consider it settled,” said my friend. “And now I must go and attend to that other little matter of business I spoke to you about. Remember,” he said, as we parted, “one-thirty at St. Pancras.”
    —
    I was on the platform in good time, but it was not until the hands of the great station clock indicated the very moment due for our departure, and the porters were beginning to slam the carriage doors noisily, that I caught the familiar sight of Holmes’s tall figure.
    “Ah! here you are Watson,” he cried cheerily. “I fear you must have thought I was going to be too late. I’ve had a very busy evening and no time to waste; however, I’ve succeeded in putting into practice Phileas Fogg’s theory that ‘a well-used minimum suffices for everything,’ and here I am.”
    “About the last thing I should expect of you,” I said as we settled down into two opposite corners of an otherwise empty first-class carriage, “would be that you should do such an unmethodical thing as to miss a train. The only thing which would surprise me more, in fact, would be to see you at the station ten minutes before time.”
    “I should consider that the greatest evil of the two,” said Holmes sententiously. “But now we must sleep; we have every prospect of a heavy day.”
    It was one of Holmes’s characteristics that he could command sleep at will; unfortunately he could resist it at will also, and often have I had to remonstrate with him on the harm he must be doing himself, when, deeply engrossed in one of his strange or baffling problems, he would go for several consecutive days and nights without one wink of sleep.
    He put the shades over the lamps, leaned back in his corner, and in less than two minutes his regular breathing told me he was fast asleep. Not being blessed with the same gift myself, I lay back in my corner for some time, nodding to the rhythmical throb of the express as it hurled itself forward through the darkness. Now and again as we shot through some brilliantly illuminated station or past a line of flaming furnaces, I caught for an instant a glimpse of Holmes’s figure coiled up snugly in the far corner with his head sunk upon his breast.
    It was not until after we had passed Nottingham that I really fell asleep and, when a more than usually violent lurch of the train over some points woke me again, it was broad daylight, and Holmes was sitting up, busy with a Bradshaw and boat timetable. As I moved, he glanced across at me.
    “If I’m not mistaken, Watson, that was the Dore and Totley tunnel through which we have just come, and if so we shall be in Sheffield in a few minutes. As you see I’ve not been wasting my time altogether, but studying my Bradshaw, which, by the way, Watson, is the most useful book published, without exception, to anyone of my calling.”
    “How can it possibly help you now?” I asked in some surprise.
    “Well it may or it may not,” said Holmes thoughtfully. “But in any case it’s well to have at one’s fingertips all knowledge which may be of use.