Between breaths, I asked Holmes what the Ghost Dancers expected to achieve, and how we might stop them.
“I believe they seek revenge on Cody for his imagined part in the events leading to Sitting Bull’s death and the later slaughter at Wounded Knee.”
Holmes’s knowledge of the West’s history far surpassed mine. I knew little of the latter event other than that after Sitting Bull was killed, a number of their tribesmen, including women and children, had been killed in a fight with the U.S. Cavalry at Wounded Knee, in the Dakotas three years ago.
“They may also hope to call attention to their plight,” Holmes continued. “Most of them remain on reservation land no white man wants or could live on.” He paused. “Or Wovoka might merely crave attention. Since the Ghost Dance’s failure, he has lost influence and prestige.”
Holmes was no believer in visions, and thought little of those who held to them, especially when others were likely to suffer because of them.
“We should arrive in ample time to prevent the burning of the cabin,” Holmes continued, though he did not slacken his pace. “Did you not see the Fire and Guard building earlier?”
As always, Holmes’s powers of observation outstripped my own. I confessed I had not. “You were no doubt looking at the Ferris wheel,” he said. “The station is quite near the Indian village, and there are hundreds of guards. Perhaps a thousand or more, though of course not all in one place.”
“You did not mention them to Cody.”
“I was not entirely sure of their competence or presence, though having walked along the Midway, I am now more certain of their numbers. Did you not notice them?”
Once again I had to confess that I had not, though now that he mentioned it, I did recall a number of men in uniform.
“They were recruited especially to make the Exposition safe,” Holmes said. “In spite of my earlier misgivings, I believe we can count on them for help.”
I hoped he was correct. We reached the Midway, which bustled with a multitude of men, women, and children. The crowd at the Ferris wheel was especially impressive. We made our way through them, apologizing as we went, and soon came to the Fire and Guard building. Holmes went up to the door and asked a capped and uniformed young man there for someone in authority.
“I am in authority,” the man said, his scanty moustache fairly bristling. “You can tell me what you need.”
Holmes was not one to truckle, but this was an emergency. Instead, he said, “I believe someone plans to burn Sitting Bull’s cabin in the Indian village. We must prevent it.”
The young man did not hesitate. Fishing a whistle from a pocket, he blew a piercing note, and men ran to us from all sides as well as from within the building. The young man crammed his whistle back into his pocket and began shouting orders.
It was one of the few times that I ever saw Holmes appear dumbfounded. In fact, I cannot remember another. He had not expected such a reaction, but it seemed that the Guard had been waiting for an opportunity to show its value, apart from the usual petty annoyances of asking people for their admittance cards and harassing them for minor violations.
Unfortunately, the men were merely hired with the idea that their numbers and manner would prevent problems. Confronted with a true crisis, they dashed off in all directions, shouting at the crowds and each other, shoving people aside, and generally wreaking havoc along the Midway. Men and women clutched their children to them, while those whose offspring had wandered off looked wildly about and cried out for them.
“My word, Holmes!” I exclaimed as the mob surged around us. “What have we done?”
Holmes, though some would not expect it from him, was not without humour. He smiled a thin smile and said, “It seems my uneasiness about the Guard was justified, after all. However, if this massive disorder does not disrupt the plans for the fire, nothing will.”
“But what of those who planned it? Will they not escape in the confusion?”
“It will be our job to stop them.”
“How will we know them?”
“The Ghost Shirts,” said Holmes. “We must look for the Ghost Shirts.”
I recalled the man we had seen in the cabin earlier. I had, at least, observed that much. We forced our way through the throng and were pushed about in return. When we reached the Chinese theater with its tall towers trimmed in red and blue, Holmes tugged at my sleeve.
“There, Watson!” he said, and pointed.
I saw, over the heads of many people, a man dressed in a long black coat, his head covered by a black hat that almost concealed his face.
“That is Wovoka,” said Holmes.
No Ghost Shirt could be seen. “He has taken to wearing the clothing of civilization so as to be unrecognized,” Holmes insisted. “After him, Watson!”
We hastened in the man’s direction, but Wovoka saw us coming. He must have known we pursued him, for he took to his heels. Thanks to the crowd, however, he could move no faster than we at first, but the multitude thinned quickly, as most were drawn to the cabin where the Guard had gone. Wovoka ran faster, as did we.
By the time Wovoka reached the Ferris wheel, we had narrowed the distance. Ahead of us, the gargantuan wheel rotated slowly on the mighty axle, its heavy cars rocking gently as it turned. To my surprise, we saw Wovoka leap up the stairs to the loading platform, thrusting aside those in line, and throwing several of them to the ground and impeding us.
Perhaps he hoped we would be afraid of the machine, or perhaps he thought that he could escape into the sky from its upper heights, and hang suspended while the Ghost Dance changed the world. First, though, he had to board it, but the operators made no attempt to stop the wheel, and the cars were secured by screened windows and locked doors.
Wovoka did not intend to be captured. He leapt from the platform and grabbed hold of the roof of a passing car. Within seconds he had pulled himself atop it. The passengers in the car stood from their chairs and watched in amazement.
“He has trapped himself,” said Holmes as the car moved upward. “In the great circle, he can only come back around to us here on the platform.”
For the barest fraction of a second, I thought of the Reichenbach Falls and of a figure dropping down, down. “Holmes,” said I, “what if he chooses not to return atop the car?”
“Then he does not, but I believe he will, Watson. The Ghost Dance is a circle, and he circles now. He will return to close the circle.”
When Wovoka reached the apex of the wheel’s turn, we watched him rise to stand atop the car, look toward the sky, and spread his upraised arms. It was an amazing sight: the man of the plains rode atop the engine of civilization, stretching out his arms for something he sought, something beyond the power of man or machine to deliver. I do not know what answer he might have sought in the blue and the clouds, but I do not think he found it. He remained firmly fixed atop the car.
The wheel continued in its round, and as his car began its descent, Wovoka sat down cross-legged, his shoulders slumped. When the car reached the platform again, he jumped off, right into the waiting arms of Sherlock Holmes.
I believe he had hoped to be taken up into the sky, until the earth covered us over—me, Holmes, Buffalo Bill, the Exposition itself. Now, however, his eyes were empty of any hope whatsoever.
We sat in Cody’s tent, one even more lavishly furnished than Frank Butler’s. The show was over, and Cody was there. Wovoka was with us, as were Kicking Bear and Short Bull, whom Holmes had retrieved from the Guard while I detained Wovoka at the base of the Ferris wheel. Neither of us had said much then, and Wovoka said little now. Cody did most of the talking.
“You have shamed me,” he told the Indians. “But thanks to Sherlock Holmes, you have been prevented from doing any serious damage. It’s lucky for you he was able to stop the Guard from injuring you, or anyone else.”
Indeed. It was lucky for all of us that no one had been injured in the panic on the Midway.
“If I turned you over to
the authorities and pressed charges against you,” Cody continued, “Kicking Bear and Short Bull would be returned to the reservation. Wovoka would go to prison.”
We had learned that Wovoka was, as Cody had suspected, the leader. He had talked the other two into one last attempt to bring back the old days and the old ways.
“I don’t want to see any of you on the reservation or in prison,” Cody said. I could not be sure, but I thought the Indians relaxed a fraction at those words.
“Kicking Bear and Short Bull can stay with me here, where I can keep an eye on them. Wovoka will leave us and swear never to return.”
“Where will I go?” the Indian said.
Cody had no answer for that. He looked at Holmes, who had been sitting silent, as immobile as the Indians. His profile, indeed, resembled theirs as much or more than it did any of his own countrymen.
“Go wherever you please,” Holmes said. “You must know now that the days you long for can never return.”
Wovoka nodded, whether in agreement with the first statement or the last, or both, I never knew. He picked up his hat, which had rested on his knee, and settled it on his head. He nodded to Holmes again, and walked out of the tent without a glance at anyone else, and we never heard of him again.
That evening, Holmes and I rode the great Ferris wheel. We sat in the car with others, perhaps as many as fifty people, and all of us looked eastward. The fairground was bright with electric lights, and the people who streamed down the great street were tiny figures far below. We could see the outlines of imposing buildings stretching away to the dark inland sea beyond.
“I was wrong, Watson,” said Holmes at last. I had to strain to hear him. He gestured to the vista before us. “Revenge was not Wovoka’s motive. This is what he feared. This is what he wished to destroy with his final Ghost Dance.”
“But Holmes,” said I, “this sight is awe-inspiring. This is the future. Surely Wovoka must have realized that as he stood upon the car today.”
The car dipped downward. If Holmes answered, I did not hear, and we never spoke of it again.
RECALLED TO LIFE
Paula Cohen
Paula Cohen (Lady Mary Brackenstall) has been a member of the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes since 1975. Born seventy-five years too late, she is a lover of the opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, Old New York, and all things Victorian. A previous short story, “The Adventure of the Dog in the Nighttime,” appeared in Ghosts in Baker Street (Carroll & Graf, 2006). Her first novel, Gramercy Park, published by St. Martin’s Press in 2002, is set in New York City in 1894; she is currently working on a sequel. Paula lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her husband Roger, and her cat, Hodge.
“New York City.”
Such was the burden of the telegram I received recently, which, although terse, was instantly clear to me, as was the identity of its sender. Mr. Sherlock Holmes, from his retirement on the downs near Eastbourne, has been following my latest attempts to make known the singular successes of his career, and from time to time takes the trouble to suggest a likely candidate for, as he calls them, my “little romances.”
Although it has ever been my desire to set down the most accurate accounts of his cases, I have never succeeded in convincing Holmes that the reading public needs more than the stark facts and ineluctable logic that guide his genius. That the public has nevertheless demonstrated an abiding interest in those “romances” has been a source of some annoyance for Holmes. For the particular case to which his recent telegram refers, however, Holmes himself must bear the blame if I fail to depict his methods in all their cold rationality. I was not present at its unfolding and must rely solely upon his own later account of it for the facts, and more than usually on my own imagination for the features.
It occurred, in fact, during that interval between the spring of 1891 and that of 1894, when all the world, including I, thought Holmes dead at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls. Readers may recall that in April of 1894, and just after his “resurrection”—for so I have always thought of it—Holmes revealed to me where he had gone after his miraculous escape from death and Moriarty’s minions. He spoke of Florence, of his two years in Tibet, of his time in Arabia and Persia, and his work in the Sudan at the behest of his brother, Mycroft, and the Foreign Office.
What I was unable to relate then, because the delicacy of many of the matters he undertook required that they not be made public until long after the participants were beyond either praise or blame, was that after leaving Khartoum, Holmes headed eastward yet again, across the Indian and the Pacific Oceans, to the United States.
America had always held a fascination for Holmes; and his freedom, as an ostensibly dead man, to travel when and where he willed under different identities, as well as the ability to use his remarkable talents in the service of his country, made a stay in America both logical and advantageous. The summer of 1893 found him in Baltimore, on America’s eastern shore, once again carrying out a commission on behalf of his nation that would prove invaluable to her safety, and during which time Holmes developed a profound admiration for the American navy. He still ranks its Academy at Annapolis as every inch the equal of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich.
His assignment completed on the last few days of 1893, it was Holmes’s intention to return to England. New York City, however, was the place from which he chose to embark, for the opportunity it would give him, during a fortnight of well-earned leisure, of briefly studying the ways of a city vastly different, and yet strangely similar, to his native London.
At the suggestion of a fellow passenger on the train up from Baltimore, he took a room at the Albemarle, a reputable hotel of middling size not far from Madison Square. As he made his way down to the dining room at eight o’clock that first evening in the city, his eye was caught by a quietly dressed man walking through the crowds of other guests and visitors, looking ever about him as if seeking someone he could not find. The public parlors were crowded with ladies and gentlemen in full dress, the corridors filled with parties heading out to the opera or other festive events, and Holmes, no stranger to the great houses of England, was struck by the opulence of some of the women’s finery, which would not have been out of place at a royal audience.
Still, he kept the quietly dressed man in sight, and followed him at a distance through the glittering throngs, until he saw the man approach and then touch an exceptionally well-dressed youth lightly on the shoulder, then steer him into an alcove. The two exchanged a few quiet words, something changed hands, and the young man exited quickly from the corridor and disappeared hastily down the grand staircase.
The quietly dressed man examined what he had taken from the other, slipped it unobtrusively into his breast pocket, and eased his way back into the flow of the crowd, this time heading in Holmes’s direction. As he neared, Holmes stepped aside to let him pass, but leaned toward him and spoke quietly into his ear.
“His companion is the elegant young woman in green,” he said, “sitting just over there, beneath the clock. I believe that if you examine her reticule, you’ll find the watch and chain you’re seeking.”
The man started and swiveled quickly to look at Holmes, sparing the seated woman one swift glance before he did so. His brown eyes were sharp. “Might I ask your name, sir?”
“My name is Greaves,” said Holmes. “Simon Greaves.”
“Then I would ask you to wait here for me, Mr. Greaves,” the man replied, “and please not to leave this spot.”
“By all means,” Holmes said. “I will remain here.”
With a last look at Holmes, the man turned and made his way across the corridor to the woman in green. As he bent to speak to her, he turned back the lapel of his coat slightly, and the woman flushed, half rose, and then fell back into her seat. Her hands shook as she opened her reticule, reached inside and withdrew something which glinted briefly in the light as she placed it in the man’s upturned palm. A few more words were exchanged between them, and then she rose, a
nd she, too, swiftly disappeared down the staircase, her face pale.
“You let them go,” Holmes said, as the man returned to where he waited. “Was that wise?”
The man sighed. “They are very young, and this game was for the thrill of it, not for gain. Neither the watch nor the money has as yet been missed, and the gentleman from whom they were lifted will have received an object lesson in guarding his person when I return them to him.”
“And the young couple?”
“Newlyweds, on honeymoon, and well able to afford to stay here. What they need, and what I gave them, is a good fright. They are not of the criminal class, and neither of them is suited to a night in a jail cell.” He shrugged his shoulders. “If I’m any judge of character, they’ll behave themselves from now on.”
He gazed at Holmes. He was slim in build, an inch or two shorter than Holmes, but his eyes were cool as they sized him up.
“They say it takes one to know one, Mr. Greaves. You are from England . . . from London if my ear isn’t wrong. Are you with Scotland Yard?”
“I am not, Mr. . . . ?”
“Battle. Robert Battle.”
The detective extended his hand and Holmes took it. “A good name,” he said, “for one in our line of work. I work independently. My practice is a private one, and Scotland Yard considers me an amateur.”
Battle snorted. “An amateur? No one has ever ‘made’ me before, Mr. Greaves. I should say you are no amateur.” He glanced quickly at Holmes’s attire. “You arrived this afternoon, you have not left the hotel since, and you were near the dining room when you saw our young friend boost the watch and money from his victim’s pocket and slip the watch to his wife. My surmise, therefore, is that you’d like your dinner, as would I . . . and as my shift is now over, might I invite you to join me, if you have no other plans? Just one moment, please, while I let my replacement know that I’m going off duty.”
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