by David Marcum
“Whom are these for?” I asked. “The man with the broken shoe?”
Holmes nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “I expect we shall find him out alone about midnight. You know how to use these now.”
It was fully eleven before the cart was ready and we started. A quarter of a mile or so from the gipsy encampment Holmes stopped the cart and gave the driver instructions to wait. We got through the hedge, and made our way on the soft ground behind it in the direction of the vans and the tent.
“Roll up your handkerchief,” Holmes whispered, “into a tight pad. The moment I grab him, ram it into his mouth - well in, mind, so that it doesn’t easily fall out. Probably he will be stooping - that will make it easier; we can pull him suddenly backward. Now be quiet.”
We kept on till nothing but the hedge divided us from the space whereon stood the encampment. It was now nearer twelve o’clock than eleven, but the time we waited seemed endless. But time is not eternity after all, and at last we heard a move in the tent. A minute after, the man we sought was standing before us. He made straight for a gap in the hedge which we had passed on our way, and we crouched low and waited. He emerged on our side of the hedge with his back towards us, and began walking, as we had walked, behind the hedge, but in the opposite direction. We followed.
He carried something in his hand that looked like a large bundle of sticks and twigs, and he appeared to be as anxious to be secret as we ourselves. From time to time he stopped and listened; fortunately there was no moon, or in turning about, as he did once or twice, he would probably have observed us. The field sloped downward just before us, and there was another hedge at right angles, leading down to a slight hollow. To this hollow the man made his way, and in the shade of the new hedge we followed. Presently he stopped suddenly, stooped, and deposited his bundle on the ground before him. Crouching before it, he produced matches from his pocket, struck one, and in a moment had a fire of twigs and small branches, that sent up a heavy white smoke. What all this portended I could not imagine, but a sense of the weirdness of the whole adventure came upon me unchecked. The horrible corpse in the wood, with its severed wrist, Holmes’s enigmatical forebodings, the mysterious tracking of the man with the broken shoe, the scene round the gypsies’ fire, and now the strange behavior of this man, whose connection with the tragedy was so intimate and yet so inexplicable - all these things contributed to make up a tale of but a few hours’ duration, but of an inscrutable impressiveness that I began to feel in my nerves.
The man bent a thin stick double, and using it as a pair of tongs, held some indistinguishable object over the flames before him. Excited as I was, I could not help noticing that he bent and held the stick with his left hand. We crept stealthily nearer, and as I stood scarcely three yards behind him and looked over his shoulder, the form of the object stood out clear and black against the dull red of the flame. It was a human hand.
I suppose I may have somehow betrayed my amazement and horror to my companion’s sharp eyes, for suddenly I felt his hand tightly grip my arm just above the elbow. I turned, and found his face close by mine and his finger raised warningly. Then I saw him produce his wrist-grip and make a motion with his palm toward his mouth, which I understood to be intended to remind me of the gag. We stepped forward.
The man turned his horrible cookery over and over above the crackling sticks, as though to smoke and dry it in every part. I saw Holmes’s hand reach out toward him, and in a flash we had pulled him back over his heels and I had driven the gag between his teeth as he opened his mouth. We seized his wrists in the cords at once, and I shall never forget the man’s look of ghastly, frantic terror as he lay on the ground. When I knew more I understood the reason of this.
Holmes took both wrist-holds in one hand and drove the gag entirely into the man’s mouth, so that he almost choked. A piece of sacking lay near the fire, and by Holmes’s request I dropped that awful hand from the wooden twigs upon it and rolled it up in a parcel - it was, no doubt, what the sacking had been brought for. Then we lifted the man to his feet and hurried him in the direction of the cart. The whole capture could not have occupied thirty seconds, and as I stumbled over the rough field at the man’s left elbow I could only think of the thing as one thinks of a dream that one knows all the time is a dream.
But presently the man, who had been walking quietly, though gasping, sniffing and choking because of the tightly rolled handkerchief in his mouth - presently he made a sudden dive, thinking doubtless to get his wrists free by surprise. But Holmes was alert, and gave them a twist that made him roll his head with a dismal, stifled yell, and with the opening of his mouth, by some chance the gag fell away. Immediately the man roared aloud for help.
“Quick,” said Holmes, “drag him along - they’ll hear in the vans. Bring the hand!”
I seized the fallen handkerchief and crammed it over the man’s mouth as well as I might, and together we made as much of a trot as we could, dragging the man between us, while Holmes checked any reluctance on his part by a timely wrench of the wristholds. It was a hard two hundred and fifty yards to the lane even for us - for the gipsy it must have been a bad minute and a half indeed. Once more as we went over the uneven ground he managed to get out a shout, and we thought we heard a distinct reply from somewhere in the direction of the encampment.
We pulled him over a stile in a tangle; and dragged and pushed him through a small hedge-gap all in a heap. Here we were but a short distance from the cart, and into that we flung him without wasting time or tenderness, to the intense consternation of the driver, who, I believe, very nearly set up a cry for help on his own account. Once in the cart, however, I seized the reins and the whip myself and, leaving Holmes to take care of the prisoner, put the turn-out along toward Ratherby at as near ten miles an hour as it could go.
We made first for Mr. Hardwick’s, but he, we found, was with my uncle, so we followed him. The arrest of the Fosters had been effected, we learned, not very long after we had left the wood, as they returned by another route to Ranworth. We brought our prisoner into the Colonel’s library, where he and Mr. Hardwick were sitting.
“I’m not quite sure what we can charge him with unless it’s anatomical robbery,” Holmes remarked, “but here’s the criminal.”
The man only looked down, with a sulkily impenetrable countenance. Holmes spoke to him once or twice, and at last he said, in a strange accent, something that sounded like “kekin jin-navvy.”
“Keck jin?”[9] asked Holmes, in the loud, clear tone one instinctively adopts in talking to a foreigner, “Keckeno jinny?”
The man understood and shook his head, but not another word would he say or another question answer.
“He’s a foreign gipsy,” Holmes explained, “just as I thought - a Wallachian, in fact. Theirs is an older and purer dialect than that of the English gypsies, and only some of the root-words are alike. But I think we can make him explain tomorrow that the Fosters at least had nothing to do with, at any rate, cutting off Sneathy’s hand. Here it is, I think.” And he gingerly lifted the folds of sacking from the ghastly object as it lay on the table, and then covered it up again.
“But what - what does it all mean?” Mr. Hardwick said in bewildered astonishment. “Do you mean this man was an accomplice?”
“Not at all - the case was one of suicide, as I think you’ll agree, when I’ve explained. This man simply found the body hanging and stole the hand.”
“But what in the world for?”
“For the Hand of Glory. Eh?” He turned to the gipsy and pointed to the hand on the table: “Yag-varst,[10] eh?”
There was a quick gleam of intelligence in the man’s eye, but he said nothing. As for myself I was more than astounded. Could it be possible that the old superstition of the Hand of Glory remained alive in a practical shape at this day?
“You know the superstition, of course,
” Holmes said. “It did exist in this country in the last century, when there were plenty of dead men hanging at cross-roads, and so on. On the Continent, in some places, it has survived later. Among the Wallachian gypsies it has always been a great article of belief, and the superstition is quite active still. The belief is that the right hand of a hanged man, cut off and dried over the smoke of certain wood and herbs, and then provided with wicks at each finger made of the dead man’s hair, becomes, when lighted at each wick (the wicks are greased, of course), a charm, whereby a thief may walk without hindrance where he pleases in a strange house, push open all doors and take what he likes. Nobody can stop him, for everybody the Hand of Glory approaches is made helpless, and can neither move nor speak. You may remember there was some talk of ‘thieves’ candles’ in connection with the horrible series of Whitechapel murders not long ago. That is only one form of the cult of the Hand of Glory.”
“Yes,” my uncle said, “I remember reading so. There is a story about it in the Ingoldsby Legends, too, I believe.”
“There is - it is called ‘The Hand of Glory,’ in fact. You remember the spell, ‘Open lock to the dead man’s knock,’ and so on. But I think you’d better have the constable up and get this man into safe quarters for the night. He should be searched, of course. I expect they will find on him the hair I noticed to have been cut from Sneathy’s head.”
The village constable arrived with his iron handcuffs in substitution for those of cord which had so sorely vexed the wrists of our prisoner, and marched him away to the little lock-up on the green.
Then my uncle and Mr. Hardwick turned on Sherlock Holmes with doubts and many questions:
“Why do you call it suicide?” Mr. Hardwick asked. “It is plain the Fosters were with him at the time from the tracks. Do you mean to say that they stood there and watched Sneathy hang himself without interfering?”
“No, I don’t,” Holmes replied, lighting a cigar. “I think I told you that they never saw Sneathy.”
“Yes, you did, and of course that’s what they said themselves when they were arrested. But the thing’s impossible. Look at the tracks!”
“The tracks are exactly what revealed to me that it was not impossible,” Holmes returned. “I’ll tell you how the case unfolded itself to me from the beginning. As to the information you gathered from the Ranworth coachman, to begin with. The conversation between the Fosters which he overheard might well mean something less serious than murder. What did they say? They had been sent for in a hurry and had just had a short consultation with their mother and sister. Henry said that ‘the thing must be done at once’; also that as there were two of them it should be easy. Robert said that Henry, as a doctor, would know best what to do.
“Now you, Colonel Brett, had been saying - before we learned these things from Mr. Hardwick - that Sneathy’s behavior of late had become so bad as to seem that of a madman. Then there was the story of his sudden attack on a tradesman in the village, and equally sudden running away - exactly the sort of impulsive, wild thing that madmen do. Why then might it not be reasonable to suppose that Sneathy had become mad - more especially considering all the circumstances of the case, his commercial ruin and disgrace and his horrible life with his wife and her family? - had become suddenly much worse and quite uncontrollable, so that the two wretched women left alone with him were driven to send in haste for Henry and Robert to help them? That would account for all.
“The brothers arrive just after Sneathy had gone out. They are told in a hurried interview how affairs stand, and it is decided that Sneathy must be at once secured and confined in an asylum before something serious happens. He has just gone out - something terrible may be happening at this moment. The brothers determine to follow at once and secure him wherever he may be. Then the meaning of their conversation is plain. The thing that ‘must be done, and at once,’ is the capture of Sneathy and his confinement in an asylum. Henry, as a doctor, would ‘know what to do’ in regard to the necessary formalities. And they took a halter in case a struggle should ensue and it were found necessary to bind him. Very likely, wasn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” Mr. Hardwick replied, “it certainly is. It never struck me in that light at all.”
“That was because you believed, to begin with, that a murder had been committed, and looked at the preliminary circumstances which you learned after in the light of your conviction. But now, to come to my actual observations. I saw the footmarks across the fields, and agreed with you (it was indeed obvious) that Sneathy had gone that way first, and that the brothers had followed, walking over his tracks. This state of the tracks continued until well into the wood, when suddenly the tracks of the brothers opened out and proceeded on each side of Sneathy’s. The simple inference would seem to be, of course, the one you made - that the Fosters had here overtaken Sneathy, and walked one at each side of him.
“But of this I felt by no means certain. Another very simple explanation was available, which might chance to be the true one. It was just at the spot where the brothers’ tracks separated that the path became suddenly much muddier, because of the closer overhanging of the trees at the spot. The path was, as was to be expected, wettest in the middle. It would be the most natural thing in the world for two well-dressed young men, on arriving here, to separate so as to walk one on each side of the mud in the middle.
“On the other hand, a man in Sneathy’s state (assuming him, for the moment, to be mad and contemplating suicide) would walk straight along the centre of the path, taking no note of mud or anything else. I examined all the tracks very carefully, and my theory was confirmed. The feet of the brothers had everywhere alighted in the driest spots, and the steps were of irregular lengths - which meant, of course, that they were picking their way; while Sneathy’s footmarks had never turned aside even for the dirtiest puddle. Here, then, were the rudiments of a theory.
“At the watercourse, of course, the footmarks ceased, because of the hard gravel. The body lay on a knoll at the left - a knoll covered with grass. On this the signs of footmarks were almost undiscoverable, although I am often able to discover tracks in grass that are invisible to others. Here, however, it was almost useless to spend much time in examination, for you and your man had been there, and what slight marks there might be would be indistinguishable one from another.
“Under the branch from which the man had hung there was an old tree stump, with a flat top, where the tree had been sawn off. I examined this, and it became fairly apparent that Sneathy had stood on it when the rope was about his neck - his muddy footprint was plain to see; the mud was not smeared about, you see, as it probably would have been if he had been stood there forcibly and pushed off. It was a simple, clear footprint - another hint at suicide.
“But then arose the objection that you mentioned yourself. Plainly the brothers Foster were following Sneathy, and came this way. Therefore, if he hanged himself before they arrived, it would seem that they must have come across the body. But now I examined the body itself. There was mud on the knees, and clinging to one knee was a small leaf. It was a leaf corresponding to those on the bush behind the tree, and it was not a dead leaf, so must have been just detached.
“After my examination of the body I went to the bush, and there, in the thick of it, were, for me, sufficiently distinct knee-marks, in one of which the knee had crushed a spray of the bush against the ground, and from that spray a leaf was missing. Behind the knee-marks were the indentations of boot-toes in the soft, bare earth under the bush, and thus the thing was plain. The poor lunatic had come in sight of the dangling rope, and the temptation to suicide was irresistible. To people in a deranged state of mind the mere sight of the means of self-destruction is often a temptation impossible to withstand. But at that moment he must have heard the steps - probably the voices - of the brothers behind him on the winding path. He immediately hid in the bush till they had passed. It is probable that s
eeing who the men were, and conjecturing that they were following him - thinking also, perhaps, of things that had occurred between them and himself - his inclination to self-destruction became completely ungovernable, with the result that you saw.
“But before I inspected the bush I noticed one or two more things about the body. You remember I inquired if either of the brothers Foster was left-handed, and was assured that neither was. But clearly the hand had been cut off by a left-handed man, with a large, sharply pointed knife. For well away to the right of where the wrist had hung the knife-point had made a tiny triangular rent in the coat, so that the hand must have been held in the mutilator’s right hand, while he used the knife with his left - clearly a left-handed man.
“But most important of all about the body was the jagged hair over the right ear. Everywhere else the hair was well cut and orderly - here it seemed as though a good piece had been, so to speak, sawn off. What could anybody want with a dead man’s right hand and certain locks of his hair? Then it struck me suddenly - the man was hanged; it was the Hand of Glory!
“Then you will remember I went, at your request, to see the footprints of the Fosters on the part of the path past the watercourse. Here again it was muddy in the middle, and the two brothers had walked as far apart as before, although nobody had walked between them. A final proof, if one were needed, of my theory as to the three lines of footprints.
“Now I was to consider how to get at the man who had taken his hand. He should be punished for the mutilation, but beyond that he would be required as a witness. Now all the foot-tracks in the vicinity had been accounted for. There were those of the brothers and of Sneathy, which we have been speaking of; those of the rustics looking on, which, however, stopped a little way off, and did not interfere with our sphere of observation; those of your man, who had cut straight through the wood when he first saw the body, and had come back the same way with you; and our own, which we had been careful to keep away from the others. Consequently there was no track of the man who had cut off the hand; therefore it was certain that he must have come along the hard gravel by the watercourse, for that was the only possible path which would not tell the tale. Indeed, it seemed quite a likely path through the wood for a passenger to take, coming from the high ground by the Shopperton road.
