Sherlock Holmes In America

THE ADVENTURE OF THE COUGHING DENTIST by Loren D. Estleman

Loren D. Estleman has published more than sixty novels in the mystery and historical western genres and mainstream fiction. He has received four Shamus awards from the Private Eye Writers of America, five Spurs from the Western Writers of America, and has been nominated for the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award and the American Book Award. His first Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, has been in print for most of the past thirty years. His latest novel is Frames, introducing Valentino, a film archivist-turned detective. Estleman lives in Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan.

Throughout the first year of our association, Mr. Sherlock Holmes and I were rather like strangers wed by prearrangement, mutually respectful but uncertain of the person with whom each was sharing accommodations. The situation was ungainly, to say the least, because upon the surface we were very different individuals indeed. When, therefore, it chanced that we should travel together abroad, we agreed without hesitation. As Mr. Clemens says (mortally assaulting the Queen’s English), “I have found that there ain’t no better way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”

As it happened, both Scotland Yard and the Times of London, which was publishing a series chronicling the tragic events I have set down elsewhere under the somewhat sensational title of A Study in Scarlet, had asked Holmes to visit the place where the troubles involving Enoch Drebber, Joseph Stangerson, and Jefferson Hope had begun, and apply his formidable detecting skills towards eliminating a number of small discrepancies in the murderer’s confession. This journey, with expenses to be paid by the Times in return for an exclusive report of the investigation, would take us to Salt Lake City, the capital of Mormon country in the Utah Territory, a strange and terrible place not unlike Afghanistan of darkest memory.

When I say that we did not hesitate to accept the offer, I do not mean to imply that we failed to discuss it at length in the privacy of our Baker Street digs.

“This is redolent of inspectors Gregson and Lestrade,” said Holmes, flicking his long tapering fingers at the telegram from the Times as he lounged in his basket chair. “They were swift to claim credit when the boat seemed seaworthy, but now that it’s sprung a leak or two they seek to abandon ship and let me go down with it.”

“Undoubtedly. But if you’re still certain of the soundness of the solution-”

“I’d stake my reputation upon it, were I to possess such a thing.”

“Then,” said I, “you have nothing to lose but a month or so from your studies here, and a holiday to gain.”

“Holidays are for the overworked. I am singularly idle thanks to my magnanimity towards the Yard. The press perceived it to be a police case from start to finish until this moment.” He made a motion of dismissal, exactly as if he were slashing his bow across the strings of his violin. Then his face assumed a quizzical expression. “You say ‘you’ as if I am to be alone in this excursion. What do I know of being a special correspondent? You’re the literary half of this partnership, Doctor.”

“That’s flattering, but premature. I’ve only just begun arranging my notes, and there is no guarantee of publication, rather the opposite. I’m just one more returning veteran with a story to tell. Fleet Street must be crowded to the rafters with unrequested and unwelcome manuscripts like mine.”

“Hardly like yours. There’s romance in the business, murder, and not a line about troop movements or grand strategy. I’d read it myself if I didn’t know the ending already. I never accept a pig without a poke. No, Doctor, I shan’t undertake the assignment without a companion upon whose loyalty and discretion I can rely without question. What is your answer?”

“I was afraid you’d never ask.”

His smile was shy, an emotion I had thought absent from his meager repertoire. We would be quite on the other side of our second adventure before such reticence vanished from our relationship forever.

Our crossing was not uneventful, despite calm seas; but the affair of the American industrialist and the Swedish stowaway presents facets of its own, and its appearance in these pages would only distract the reader from the circumstances I am about to relate. It is a story the world may be prepared to hear, but which I am unprepared to tell. As many times as Holmes has explained to me how a disparity between a ship’s bells and the time on a pocket watch, both equally accurate, can coexist, I remain ignorant as to how he brought the matter to a satisfactory conclusion before we arrived in the Port of New York.

Ironically, the very questions that had brought us from our hemisphere and across the vast reaches of the North American continent proved easier to answer than the conundrum aboard ship. Suffice it to say that a minor but crucial player in the Hope tragedy lied to dissemble a sordid personal peccadillo, and that most of the burden fell to me as I struggled to turn a half-penny hurricane into four columns in the Times. They were printed, and our fare and lodgings were paid for without complaint, but from that day to this I have not received another invitation to submit so much as a line to that august institution.

We were left with a wealth of time and opportunity to broaden our experience of the world’s curiosities. I circumnavigated the gargantuan lake in a hired launch, and Holmes made copious entries in his notebook about the practice of polygamy for a monograph upon the subject, but we were both eager to add to our education and were soon off to Denver.

On the way we were detained in a muddy little hamlet whose police force had been forewarned of a visit by the remnants of the Jesse James gang of notorious reputation, suspected because of our British accents and European clothes as bandits in disguise. While awaiting word from Washington, D.C., confirming the material in our travel documents, we were placed under house arrest in the town’s only hotel. One of our guards was a friendly fellow with swooping moustaches and a revolver the size of a meat-axe, who taught us the rudiments of the game of faro. By the time we were released, Holmes had become an expert, and I had learned just enough to swear off playing ever again for the sake of my army pension.

Having lost several days, we elected to forego Denver as just another large city like St. Louis and turned south towards the territory of Arizona. There among weird rock formations and cactus plants shaped like tall men with arms upraised, I remarked to my companion that I was disappointed not to have seen a red Indian yet, to add to my observations of the aborigines upon three continents.

“In order to make an observation, one must first observe,” said Holmes. “Those silhouettes are not the product of erosion.”

I followed the direction of his pointing finger, but we had nearly drawn beyond range before I identified what had looked like broken battlements atop a sandstone ridge as a group of motionless horsemen watching the train steam past.

“Apaches, if my preliminary reading is accurate. Zulus are peace lovers by comparison.” He laid aside his Rocky Mountain News and uncocked the Eley’s pistol he was holding in his lap.

“You might have said something. I’m no babe in the woods, you know.”

“Quite the opposite, Doctor. A seasoned warrior like yourself might have responded from instinct and training. That would in all likelihood precipitate an action we should all regret.”

“I am not a hothead.” I fear I sounded petulant.

“You’ve given me no reason to think otherwise. Now that you have so informed me, as one gentleman to another, I shall not repeat the mistake.”

Ours was a difficult getting-acquainted period, as I’ve said. Even my dear late wife and I had an easier time of it; but then I’d had the advantage of having saved her life early in the courtship. I can’t recommend a better approach when it comes to breaking the ice.

The gypsy life deposited us at length in the city of Youngblood, some forty miles north of Tucson. I’m told the place no longer exists, with nary a broken bottle nor a stone upon stone to indicate it ever did. I do not grieve over this pass.

Why we alighted in this vagabond jungle of canvas and clapboard, with an open sewer running merrily down its main street, is a question I cannot answer with certainty. We had not paused thirty seconds to take on water when Holmes shot to his feet and snatched his Gladstone bag from the brass rack overhead. Perhaps it was the scenery which inspired him. I vividly recall a one-eyed mongrel performing its ablutions on the platform and an ancient red Indian wrapped in a filthy blanket attempting to peddle an earthenware pot to everyone who stepped down from the train. A place so sinister in appearance seemed an ideal location for a consulting detective to practice his trade; then again, he may simply have been drawn to its perfect ugliness through some aesthetic of his own.

“Well, Doctor?” He stood in the aisle holding out my medical bag. His eyes glittered.

“Here?”

“Here forsooth. Can you picture a place further removed from Mayfair?”

For this I could offer no argument, and so I took the bag and hoisted my army footlocker from the rack.

Approaching the exit, Holmes nearly collided with a man boarding. When Holmes asked his pardon, the fellow started and seized him by the shoulders. “There’s no call, stranger, if that accent’s real and it belongs to Sherlock Holmes.”

The reader will indulge me if I remind him that at this juncture in his long and illustrious career, my companion was no more public a figure than the thousands of immigrants then pouring into the frontier in pursuit of free land, precious metal for the taking, and the promise of a new life. To hear one’s associate addressed by name so far from home was as much a surprise as to be struck by a bullet on some peaceful corner, and one nearly as unsettling. My hand went to the revolver in my pocket.

“I believe you have the advantage,” said Holmes stiffly.

He did indeed. The stranger was as tall as my fellow lodger, and a distinct specimen of the Western type, with long fair hair, splendid moustaches, and a strong-jowled face deeply tanned despite the broad brim of his black hat. He wore a Prince Albert coat of the same funereal hue over a gaily printed waistcoat, striped trousers stuffed into the tops of tall black boots, and a revolver every bit as large as our erstwhile jailer’s on his hip. I left my much smaller weapon in its pocket-albeit gripping it tightly-in the sudden certainty that any swift move by me would be met by one much swifter on his part, and far more deadly.

To my surprise, the man released his grip upon Holmes’s shoulders and stepped back, dipping his head in a show of deference. “No offense meant. I feared I’d missed you, and charging square into you like a bull buffalo set my good manners clear to rout. Wyatt Earp, sir, late of Tombstone, and headed I-don’t-know-where, or was anyway till I set foot in this hell.”

The name signified nothing to me and was so unusual that I took it at first as a statement interrupted by gastric distress: “Why, at-urp!” was how I received his introduction. Having sampled in Colorado the popular regional fare of beans and hot peppers stewed and served in a bowl, I had been suffering from the same complaint for several hundreds of miles.

Holmes did not share this delusion, and he, who in later years would treat kings and supercriminals with the same cordial disdain, became deferential on the instant. “I am just off reading of your exploits in the Rocky Mountain News. This business in a certain corral-”

“It wasn’t in the O.K., but in an alley down the street next to the photo studio of C.S. Fly; but I don’t reckon ‘The Shoot-out in Fly’s Alley’ would make it as far as Denver. It cost me a brother last March, and crippled another one three months before that. I’m not finished collecting on that bill, but it’s not why I met this train. I saw a piece about you being in jail up north-”

It was Holmes’s turn to interrupt. “Hardly a jail, although the condition of the hotel linens was a crime in itself. I’m curious as to the process by which you deduced I would proceed south from there, instead of east to Denver.”

“You’re a detective, the piece said, vacationing from England. I’m in sort of that line myself, tracking stagecoach robbers and such, and it occurred to me nobody who’s truly interested in crime and them that commits it would bother with a place where there’s a policeman on every corner. I wouldn’t give a spruce nickel for a blue-tick hound that didn’t head straight for the brambles.”

“The brambles in this case being Arizona, where the savages don’t all wear paint and feathers. It’s crude reasoning, filled with flaws, but I warrant that within six months you’d make chief inspector at Scotland Yard.” Holmes shook his hand firmly. “My associate, Dr. John H. Watson.”

The sun broke in the man’s features. “Doc, is it? Well, if that’s not a good show card, I’ll give up the game.”

I accepted the grip of Mr. Wyatt Earp, late of Tombstone. When winters are damp, I still feel it in my fingers.

“I’m glad to see you traveling with a friend.” Earp sipped from his glass of beer, which after thirty minutes was not half gone; he seemed a man who kept his appetites tightly in rein. “I don’t know how things are in England, though I expect they’ve settled a bit since Shakespeare, but no matter how much attention a man pays to his cuffs and flatware, he needs a good man at his back.”

Holmes said, “Dr. Watson is my Sancho Panza. You would have marveled to see his stone face just before I clapped the irons on Jefferson Hope.”

We were relaxing in the cool dry shade of the Mescalero Saloon, a model of the rustic American public house, with a long carved mahogany bar standing in sharp contrast to the rough plank floor, cuspidors in an execrable state of maintenance, and the head of an enormous grizzly bear mounted on a wall flanked by portraits of the martyred Abraham Lincoln and James A. Garfield. Some marksman, possibly of a patriotic bent, had managed to put out one of the grizzly’s eyes and its left canine without nicking either president. I felt distinctly out of my element, and ordered a third whisky-and-water. Our new acquaintance’s tales of romance and gunplay in Dodge City and elsewhere required stimulants to digest. I was unclear as to whether he was a gambler or a road agent or a peace officer or a liar on the grand scale of P. T. Barnum. As a frustrated writer, I itched to commit his stories to paper, but as a man of science, I thought him a charlatan.

“I’m ignorant as to Hopes, but I pride myself on my Cervantes,” said Earp. “My father wanted me to practice law.”

“The errors of la Mancha and Richard III are most instructive in the legal profession.” Holmes drank beer. I had the impression that among Mongols he’d have pleased himself with mare’s milk. I never knew a man who assimilated himself so seamlessly with the natives. “However, we have not come to this place to discuss the classics.”

Earp seemed to concentrate upon lighting a cigar, but it seemed to me all his attention was on Holmes. “They’re set on hanging my friend. I don’t mind telling you I’m against it.”

Holmes’s eyes glittered. Directness affected him like a chemical stimulant. “Dr. John Henry Holliday.”

“I see you’re a man who squeezes all the juice he can out of a newspaper. If you know his name, you know I’d never have walked out of that alley but for Doc. He killed two men who wanted me in hell, both in the space of a half minute.”

“And he calls himself a physician? What about his oath?” My exposure to war had not prepared me for barbarianism in the humanitarian professions.

Earp’s reptilian gaze was uncannily like Holmes’s when he placed me under scrutiny. “Doc’s a dentist, if it counts. He’s separated more men from their teeth than their lives, but that was before consumption got the better of him. He came out from Georgia for his health. It don’t look like the locals mean for him to find it.”

He explained that he and “Doc” Holliday had left Tombstone to seek out and confront the conspirators who had slain Earp’s brother Morgan and severely wounded Virgil, another brother. The precise cause of these attacks, and of the murderous street fight that had preceded them, was shrouded in territorial politics I could not understand. I gathered that this mission of vengeance had succeeded to some extent, but that Holliday had suffered a relapse of his corrosive pulmonary disease and gone into Youngblood for medical attention. When after a few days his friend arrived to look in on him, he found him in jail charged with murder.

“It happened last night; I just missed it. Doc don’t make friends easy, but he draws enemies like flies to sorghum. They say he disagreed with a tin-panner over the proper number of aces in a deck. The tin-panner knocked him down, which you can do with a finger when Doc’s ailing. They say Doc gunned him in front of a gang of witnesses down the hill an hour or so later.”

“Is he guilty?” Holmes asked.

“He says he’s not sure. He took a bottle back to his room after he got up from the floor and don’t remember a thing till the town marshal pulled him out of bed and threw him in a cell.”

Holmes asked if he’d been convicted.

“The town’s just a mining camp with no authority. They can’t hold a trial till the circuit judge gets here. That could take days or months, and these get-rich-now prospectors aren’t inclined to be patient. Hank Littlejohn was well-liked by all but three, and the other two didn’t dislike him enough to go up against a bunch of tin-panners with guns and a rope over the likes of Doc. I ask you now, does that look like a party that’d sit on its hands when hemp’s so cheap?” He inclined his head towards a group of men in muddy overalls hunched at the end of the bar, drinking straight whisky and taking turns looking over their shoulders towards our table.

Holmes kept his eyes on Earp. “I noticed them when they came in. The former teamster is their leader. He is the only one who hasn’t looked our way.”

“What makes him a teamster?” Earp asked. “They all look the same in them Tombstone tuxedoes.”

“Such muscular development as his is a common result of swinging a pickaxe or handling a team of mules or oxen. Since by calling them ‘tin-panners’ you suggest they haven’t yet advanced beyond the stage of panning streams for nuggets, I must conclude they are not ‘hardrock’ miners. That serpentine scar coiled round his neck ending at the corner of his jaw could only be the consequence of an accident with a whip-a hazard of the trade, based upon my observations since St. Louis. ‘Bull-whackers,’ I believe the men are sometimes called.”

“You’re a detective, for a fact. I’m glad to see the scribblers got it right for once. That’s Elmer Dundy, Hank Littlejohn’s old partner. When they got here, they quit the freighting business to find their fortune in the hills.”

“Holmes, he’s coming this way.” I slid my hand into my pocket.

“Hold, Doctor. We can’t shoot them all.”

Elmer Dundy was burned the color of the native sandstone, with a great bald head sunk between shoulders built for a yoke. His eyes were tiny black pebbles above a broken nose and a thick lower lip that sagged to show a row of brown teeth and green gums. He’d been drinking whisky from a beer glass, which he held by its handle in a fist the size of a mutton roast.

“So you dug up some friends,” he told Earp in a Londonderry brogue-filtered, it seemed, through cactus spines. “They don’t look like the killers you run with regular. What’s the matter, they fly the coop?”

Holmes intervened. “You’ll pardon my speaking without invitation, but I’m unaccustomed to being discussed in the third person when I am present. If you wish to address a question to myself or my companion, be kind enough to do so directly.”

Dundy regarded the speaker. Holmes was stretched languidly in his chair with one arm slung over the back and his stick resting alongside his legs, crossed at the ankles. “English!” The former teamster spat viciously, splattering the floor an inch from Holmes’s boot, and swung the heavy beer glass at his head.

What happened then took place in less time than I can describe it. Holmes seemed merely to shift his grip on the handle of his stick, the ferrule end flashed so swiftly it was a blur, and dropping one shoulder and twisting the handle slightly, he inserted the stick between the oaf’s ankles and sent him crashing to the floor.

Only when the building shook beneath this impact did I claw out my weapon, but before I had it free, Wyatt Earp scooped out his enormous revolver, thumbing back the hammer and leveling the barrel at Dundy’s friends, stopping them in midcharge.

Belatedly, as it seemed, Dundy’s beer glass, released as he fell, struck the floor with a thump. The gaggle of miners stared at it comically.

“Drag him out before he gives the place a bad name.” Earp’s tone was as hard and cold as steel.

“Wait.” I got up to examine the insensate man. I asked the bartender for brandy.

That fellow had come around from behind the bar with a length of billiard cue in his fist, only to find the drama ended. “Busthead’s all I got,” he growled.

I looked to Earp for a translation, but it was Holmes who supplied it. “Whisky, in the regional argot; I’m assembling a glossary. The term may be ironic in the current context, but the spirits should prove more than strong enough, though the flesh be weak.”

The remedy was produced-“Bill it to Dundy, when he’s perpendicular,” Earp instructed the bartender-and in a little while we were quit of the miners, who needed no further encouragement to conduct their friend outside.

Earp shook his head. “I must tell Doc. Your partner’s slow on the draw, but I doubt even Doc would think to pull a bad tooth from a man I buffaloed. I’d hire you both in a minute, but apart from my interest in the faro game here in the Mescalero, I haven’t a cartwheel dollar to pay you for your trouble. My luck’s gone sour since the fight at Fly’s.”

Holmes finished his beer at a draught. “I shall play you for my fee when the thing’s done, and accept your promise of payment should I win. When may I speak with Holliday?”

We placed our bags in the bartender’s charge, with a warning from Earp to look after them as if they were his own, and repaired to the jail. The town’s only building of substance was constructed of stone around an iron cage transported from some wild railhead that had been dismantled the last time the tracks moved westward; American civilization, I learned, was a portable thing in that rapidly developing wilderness. A gimlet-eyed deputy bit down upon Holmes’s pound sterling, inspected the result, and gave us five minutes with the prisoner.

I have remarked frequently upon the ascetic gauntness of Sherlock Holmes, but he appeared well-fed in comparison with Dr. John Henry Holliday. Holliday was an exemplar of the attenuated Southern aristocrat, saffron in color, with the skull plain under a crown of pale thinning hair and a lank set of imperials blurred by days without a razor. He sat in a six-by-eight-foot enclosure on a cot, with a deck of sweaty pasteboards laid out on the blanket in a game of patience. A dirty collarless shirt, wrinkled trousers with the braces dangling, and filthy stockings, of good quality notwithstanding, comprised his entire costume.

“I detest this game,” he said in lieu of salutation. “It’s like making love to a mirror, with the prospect of humiliating yourself through failure.”

“If it’s the latter you wish to avoid, I should move the queen of clubs from the king of spades to the king of hearts.”

The prisoner corrected the error with a throaty noise of self-disgust that turned into a paroxysm of coughing. He stifled it against a sleeve, which bore away with it a pink stain. His gaze, bright and bloodshot, took in Holmes. “God’s wounds, an Englishman. Is business so good we’re importing hangmen now?”

Wyatt made introductions. Holmes began his interrogation before Holliday could form another ironic comment. “Your friend said Hank Littlejohn was well-liked by all but three. Who, pray, are the other two?”

“Algernon Woods and Jasper Riley. Woods stopped playing poker with Hank for the same reason I did, and Riley got into a dust-up with him on the road here over a sporting woman they both liked in Bisbee; but I wouldn’t waste my time trying to pin it on either one.” He coughed and turned up another card.

“Are their alibis so sound?”

“Jasper’s is. The Chinaman who runs the opium concession here swears he was in his establishment smoking up dreams the night Hank got it. Being a celestial, he’s got no friends in town and no reason to lie.”

“Lies don’t always need reasons. What about Woods?”

“Algernon says he was working late in his shop alone. He’s not your man, or even half of him. He’s a dwarf, and fat besides. No one would mistake him for me even on a dark night, and there was a moon out big as a pumpkin.”

“You said he has a shop. He is a merchant?”

“He’s a combination tailor and undertaker. I was his customer once and it looks like I will be again.”

“Where were you when Littlejohn met his fate?”

“Sleeping off a drunk in Mrs. Blake’s boardinghouse. Whisky’s a thief, but if I was to start killing poker cheats, I’d never be quit of it, and I’m a lazy man.”

“Thank you. Dr. Watson and I will do what can be done.”

Holliday chuckled, coughed, placed a red ten on a black knave. “I’d get to it directly. There’s another big moon tonight, dandy for tying a knot and finding the right tree.”

“I cannot understand such a man,” said I, when we were outside the jail.

Wyatt Earp dropped his cigar and crushed it under his heel. “You get used to that honey-and-molasses drawl. The Wester he goes, the Souther he gets.”

“I was referring to his character. My training tells me he’s a consumptive in the tertiary stage, but that’s hardly a reason to joke about hanging.”

“Life’s a joke to Doc. What part of it he’s got left is too small to take serious.”

“It’s not so small to you, however,” Holmes observed.

“Nor mine to him neither, comes to that. He’s innocent.”

“Of that I have no doubt. A man who’s so willing to accept death would sooner lie and say he’s guilty.”

“It’d stick in his craw.”

“Let us see if this Chinese opium seller suffers from that condition. There is no such thing as a watertight boat or an ironclad alibi.”

Earp led us to a large tent pitched upon a slope so steep it would flood during rains and collapse before a mild rockslide. The moss growing upon it made it as dark as a cave inside, lit only by greasy lanterns suspended above rows of folding campaign cots, some occupied by men mostly insensible. Evil smoke fouled the air. Earp slid his bandanna over his nose and mouth while I buried mine in my handkerchief. Holmes took in a deep breath and let it out with a contented sigh.

“Wantee pipee?”

This invitation came from an Oriental in a black silk robe and mandarin’s cap, round as Buddha and no taller than a child, albeit plainly in his sunset years. Gold shone in a wicked smile.

“No wantee pipee. Wantee straight talk, and not in pidgin. I know an Oxford accent when I hear it.” Holmes held up a gold sovereign, snatching it back when a yellow claw grabbed at it.

The old man shrugged and folded his hands inside the sleeves of his robe. “The missionary who taught me was a retired don. If you are here on behalf of a wife or mother, you may browse among these wretches for him who is lost. I do not insist upon introductions and so am ignorant as to their names.”

“If that is the case, how were you able to identify Jasper Riley among your customers the night Hank Littlejohn was killed?”

“I did not say I never pay attention to faces. In election years, many of my former colleagues in San Francisco went to jail because they failed to recognize the same undercover policemen who had arrested them before.”

“Did Riley pay you to say he was here all night?”

“Had he been here and made the proper offer, I should have accepted; but honestly, do you think a common teamster could meet my fee for such a risk? I bring in more in a night than he sees in a month, and it is nothing to hang a Chinaman here.”

“Very well. Here is your sovereign.”

The old man left his hands folded. “That is not the coin you showed me. You are not the magician you fancy yourself.”

Holmes grunted as if put out, slipped the coin into his waistcoat pocket, and produced another from inside his cuff. This the opium seller took with a mocking bow.

We went out, where Earp and I drew in great lungfuls of fresh air. Holmes chuckled, without mirth. “My good luck piece benefits me yet again. I took it from a German ironmonger who thought to ingratiate himself with Chancellor Bismarck by devaluing the British currency. Our educated friend inside is neither a liar nor a myopic. His price would exceed Littlejohn’s ability to pay, and it’s a very good counterfeit.”

“Then we’re licked,” Earp said. “I met Woods. He’s short as a rooster and fat as a hog. No one would confuse him with Doc with the moon out.”

“I should like to see the scene of the atrocity.”

We followed Earp to an open area a hundred yards from the nearest structure, barren but for rocks and scrub and grading downward from the mining camp, our guide reminding us to be alert for rattlesnakes. The dry earth was scored and spotted with wagon tracks and complex patterns made by overlapping hoof prints.

“A train of supplies and provisions came in from Tucson that night,” Earp said. “Littlejohn and Dundy came out to visit, and the teamsters sat around passing the jug. They say Doc came in to the top of that rise, coughing and cussing and calling for Littlejohn to show himself. When Littlejohn got up from the ground, Doc plugged him in the belly. That’s the story they told, anyway, to the last man.”

“Where was Littlejohn standing when he was shot?”

“Right where I am.”

“Doctor, will you stand where Mr. Earp indicated that Doc Holliday stood?”

I went to that spot.

“Mr. Earp, could you mistake Dr. Watson for Holliday under these circumstances?”

“No, sir. A bat wouldn’t. Watson’s a head shorter and twice as thick through the chest.”

“What about at night? Disregard for the moment his mode of dress.”

“The moon was just shy of full that night. What clothes he had on don’t feature. You can make a skinny man look fat in the right clothes, pillows and such, but you can’t make a fat man skinny, nor a short man tall, without a pair of stilts.”

“I think it’s time we met Mr. Woods.”

A crude wooden placard hung suspended by twine above the open flap of a tent with wooden framework, reading Tailor’s Shop & Undertaking Parlor, A. Woods, Prop. in whitewash. We ducked inside and were greeted by a man who rose from a canvas chair. The fellow was neatly dressed in a striped waistcoat, black garters, and grey flannel trousers, but the first thing one noticed was his unnaturally brief stature-four feet two at the outside-and cherubic roundness. He was highly colored and close-shaven, with clear blue eyes, and were I his physician I might have treated him for obesity, but never consumption. His welcoming expression became a frown when he saw Earp.

“Mr. Algernon Woods? I am Sherlock Holmes. This is Dr. Watson, my associate, and I believe you know this other gentleman.”

“We’ve met.” His voice, astonishingly deep for the size of its chamber, had a harsh edge. “He accused me of hiring someone who looked like Holliday to kill Littlejohn.”

“I considered and rejected that hypothesis in the case of Jasper Riley. Youngblood is small and lightly populated as yet. Any local resident who resembled Holliday would be certain to fall under suspicion, and no stranger could fail to be noticed and questioned. In the absence of other suspects, I must conclude that one of three men is a murderer.”

“Your man’s in jail.”

“I understand Holliday made use of your tailoring services.”

“He’s particular. Grey coats, never black, and he likes his shirts colored. I doubled the size of my scrap pile with the stuff he rejected.” He indicated a heap of odds and ends of cloth between trestle tables covered with bolts of material.

“A man of distinction,” Holmes said.

“A man who likes to stand out.”

“In his condition he can hardly hope not to. As undertaker, did you conduct a post-mortem examination upon Littlejohn?”

“I dug for the slug, but it passed on through.”

“Hardly thorough. Has he been interred?”

“Buried? Not yet; he’s in back. What are you, Pinkerton?”

“I am merely a visitor who desires justice. Would you object if Dr. Watson examined the corpse?”

Woods began to speak, but at that moment Wyatt Earp spread his coat casually, exposing the handle of his revolver. The small man closed his mouth and led us with a waddling gait around the edge of a canvas flap bisecting the tent.

I won’t belabor the reader with the clinical details of my examination. At Holmes’s direction I probed the ghastly wound, then covered the naked body with a sheet and wiped my hands.

“Downward trajectory through the abdomen,” I said. “Thirty degrees.”

“Holliday was taller than Littlejohn,” Woods said. “It’s natural he would fire at a downward angle.”

Holmes didn’t appear to be listening. “Mr. Earp, would you say the ground sloped thirty degrees at the scene of the crime?”

“About that. I worked on a track gang once and learned a thing or two.”

“Thank you. My compliments, Mr. Woods, upon your reconstructive skills. With rouge and wax you’ve managed to make Mr. Littlejohn appear in excellent health. Would you allow me to buy you a whisky at the Mescalero Saloon, to apologize for having wrongly suspected you?”

“I won’t drink with Holliday’s friend. I don’t trust him.”

Holmes took Earp aside. The pair spoke in low tones. At length the frontiersman left, but not before casting a dark glance back at Woods over his shoulder. “Mr. Earp understands and has recused himself from our celebration,” Holmes said.

One whisky became three, then four. I am not a man of temperance, but neither am I bibulous, and I measured carefully my ingestion while marveling at the little man’s capacity and Holmes’s. Their speech grew loud, their consonants less crisp. I had not seen my companion in a state of inebriation and felt embarrassed for him and for my country. I became distinctly ill at ease as darkness fell and the saloon filled with teamsters and miners, all of whom seemed to share my tablemates’ fondness for spirits. I remembered what Holliday had said about a bright moon being ideal for a hanging. The guard at the jail could not withstand them all.

Holmes was insensitive to the danger. He suggested we walk Woods back to his establishment, but in truth, when he rose he was as unsteady on his feet as was our guest. I kept my hand in my revolver pocket as we walked through that den of smoke and evil plans, feeling very much upon my own.

My fears for my companion’s clouded faculties were realized when he steered Woods in a direction opposite the path to his tent. “Holmes, this isn’t-”

He cut me off with a sloppy hiss, a finger to his lips and his other hand clutching the little man’s collar, essentially holding him up; Woods was nearly walking upon his ankles. Holmes winked at me, and in that moment I knew that he was sober.

Confused and only partially encouraged, I accompanied the pair outside the mining camp and down the slope where the murder of Hank Littlejohn had occurred. “Holmes!” I jerked out my revolver. A group of men stood at the base of the descent. I recognized Elmer Dundy, Littlejohn’s truculent teamster partner, and the miners who had been with him when he’d accosted us in the saloon.

“Spare them, Doctor,” Holmes said. “They’re witnesses.”

“Let’s get this done with.” Dundy’s tone now was free of bluster. I considered him more dangerous in this humour than ever. “I came prepared.” He held up a length of rope ending in a noose.

“One moment. Mr. Earp?”

“Here.” That fellow strode out of the shadow of a piñon tree into the light of a moon, in Holliday’s words, “as big as a pumpkin.” His revolver was in his hand.

Dundy and his friends fell into growling murmurs. Algernon Woods, who until this moment had been talking and singing to himself, grew silent, and to a great measure less incoherent. “What’s this about? Where’s my tent?”

“It’s Holliday! He’s busted out!” One of the miners pointed.

We turned to observe a tall, emaciated figure at the top of the slope, wearing a voluminous pale coat and a broad-brimmed hat that shadowed the top half of his face and the hollows in his cheeks. One bony arm stuck far out of its sleeve as the figure raised his arm to shoulder level and pointed a long-barreled revolver directly at Holmes and Woods.

Several of Dundy’s friends clawed at their overalls, only to stop at a command from Earp, accompanied by the crackling of the hammer as he leveled his weapon at the crowd.

Holmes, with a foolhardiness I could attribute only to the bottle, left Woods weaving to ascend the slope. When he stood beside the figure at the top, he said, “Observe his stance. Is it habitual with Holliday?”

“Ask anyone,” Earp said. “Only a fool fires from the hip.”

“Mr. Dundy?”

The teamster conferred with his friends, nodded. He was hesitant. All could see that Holmes stood two heads higher than the man identified as Holliday.

Holmes produced a ball of string, one end of which he tied to the barrel of the gunman’s pistol, then relieved him of it and assumed the former’s stance. “Watson!”

I abandoned my weapon to its pocket, the better to catch the spool as he threw it in my direction.

“Mr. Earp, you are Littlejohn’s height, are you not?”

“Give or take an inch. I only saw him horizontal.”

“Kindly take Mr. Woods’s place.”

There was nothing kind in the way Earp shoved the little tailor aside and supplanted him. He stood, holding his aim upon the group of witnesses, as seeing Holmes’s purpose, I unwound the spool.

“Taut, dear fellow! A bullet observes no principle other than the shortest distance between two points.”

I pulled the string taut and placed the spool against Earp’s person. It touched him high on the chest.

“Littlejohn was struck low in the abdomen. You will observe, gentlemen, that I stand at about Holliday’s height.”

No objections were raised. Holmes then returned the pistol to the much shorter man at his side, who raised it to shoulder level and aimed it down the slope. When at this angle I tightened the string, it touched Earp at his abdomen.

“Perspective, gentlemen. A short man standing at an angle thirty degrees higher than the man he is facing must appear taller; but the laws of physics are inviolate.” So saying, he snatched the hat off the man dressed as Holliday.

“So sorry.” The Chinese opium seller smiled and bowed to his audience. “One pipe apiece, courtesy of Mr. Holmes.”

“The thing was simplicity itself,” said Holmes, once we were settled in Mrs. Blake’s boardinghouse, across from the room where Doc Holliday snored and coughed by turns, resting from his incarceration. “Woods knew Holliday’s sartorial preferences and designed a similar wardrobe for himself whose cuffs fell short of his wrists and whose trousers swung free of his insteps; he was foolish enough to leave it among his scraps, where Earp found it while the rest of us sampled the fare at the Mescalero. The subliminal impression is of a man too tall for his garb, hence tall. A loose coat implies emaciation regardless of the portliness contained, and an undertaker’s knowledge of cosmetics paints hollows in plump cheeks as easily as it fills in the ravages that scoop out flesh in the final stages of debilitating illness. I am guilty, through Earp, of burgling Woods’s store. I also took the liberty of palming a spool of his string.

“Coughing and cursing, in Holliday’s distinctive drawl, could only have contributed to the illusion,” he continued. “As Woods said himself, Holliday is a man who likes to stand out. The rest was theater.”

I said, “I’ll wager it cost you another sovereign to enlist the Chinese’s cooperation.”

“I rather think he enjoyed performing, and would have done it for half. But what price a man’s life, be it even so tenuous and sinister as Holliday’s?”

“And what of Woods’s? That tiny cell won’t hold off Dundy’s vengeance for long.”

“Wyatt Earp has pledged to protect him until the circuit judge arrives. I do believe his sense of justice is equal to mine; as his loyalty to his friend is to yours.”

This warmed me more than I can say. I felt that a barrier between us had fallen. “And what is your gain, beyond justice?”

He rubbed his hands. “The chance to drub Wyatt Earp at the game of faro. I take my profits as they come.”