The Colonel flushed angrily. “I quite recognise that I am under obligations to you, Mr. Holmes,” said he, “but I must regard what you have just said as either a very bad joke or an insult.”
Sherlock Holmes laughed. “I assure you that I have not associated you with the crime, Colonel,” said he. “The real murderer is standing immediately behind you.” He stepped past and laid his hand upon the glossy neck of the thoroughbred.
“The horse!” cried both the Colonel and myself.
“Yes, the horse. And it may lessen his guilt if I say that it was done in self-defence, and that John Straker was a man who was entirely unworthy of your confidence. But there goes the bell; and as I stand to win a little on this next race,32 I shall defer a lengthy explanation until a more fitting time.”
He laid his hand upon the glossy neck.
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1892
We had the corner of a Pullman car33 to ourselves that evening as we whirled back to London, and I fancy that the journey was a short one to Colonel Ross as well as to myself, as we listened to our companion’s narrative of the events which had occurred at the Dartmoor training stables upon that Monday night, and the means by which he had unravelled them.
“I confess,” said he, “that any theories which I had formed from the newspaper reports were entirely erroneous. And yet there were indications there, had they not been overlaid by other details which concealed their true import. I went to Devonshire with the conviction that Fitzroy Simpson was the true culprit, although, of course, I saw that the evidence against him was by no means complete. It was while I was in the carriage, just as we reached the trainer’s house, that the immense significance of the curried mutton occurred to me. You may remember that I was distrait, and remained sitting after you had all alighted. I was marvelling in my own mind how I could possibly have overlooked so obvious a clue.”
“I confess,” said the Colonel, “that even now I cannot see how it helps us.”
“It was the first link in my chain of reasoning. Powdered opium is by no means tasteless. The flavour is not disagreeable, but it is perceptible. Were it mixed with any ordinary dish, the eater would undoubtedly detect it and would probably eat no more. A curry was exactly the medium which would disguise this taste. By no possible supposition could this stranger, Fitzroy Simpson, have caused curry to be served in the trainer’s family that night, and it is surely too monstrous a coincidence to suppose that he happened to come along with powdered opium upon the very night when a dish happened to be served which would disguise the flavour. That is unthinkable. Therefore Simpson becomes eliminated from the case, and our attention centres upon Straker and his wife, the only two people who could have chosen curried mutton for supper that night. The opium was added after the dish was set aside for the stable boy, for the others had the same for supper with no ill effects. Which of them, then, had access to that dish without the maid seeing them?
“Before deciding that question I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others. The Simpson incident had shown me that a dog was kept in the stables, and yet, though someone had been in and had fetched out a horse, he had not barked enough to arouse the two lads in the loft. Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.
“I was already convinced, or almost convinced, that John Straker went down to the stables in the dead of the night and took out Silver Blaze. For what purpose? For a dishonest one, obviously, or why should he drug his own stable boy? And yet I was at a loss to know why. There have been cases before now where trainers have made sure of great sums of money by laying against their own horses through agents and then preventing them from winning by fraud. Sometimes it is a pulling jockey.34 Sometimes it is some surer and subtler means. What was it here? I hoped that the contents of his pockets might help me to form a conclusion.
Silver Blaze.
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1892
“And they did so. You cannot have forgotten the singular knife which was found in the dead man’s hand, a knife which certainly no sane man would choose for a weapon. It was, as Dr. Watson told us, a form of knife which is used for the most delicate operations known in surgery. And it was to be used for a delicate operation that night. You must know, with your wide experience of turf matters, Colonel Ross, that it is possible to make a slight nick upon the tendons of a horse’s ham,35 and to do it subcutaneously, so as to leave absolutely no trace.36 A horse so treated would develop a slight lameness, which would be put down to a strain in exercise or a touch of rheumatism, but never to foul play.”
“Villain! Scoundrel!” cried the Colonel.
“We have here the explanation of why John Straker wished to take the horse out on to the moor. So spirited a creature would have certainly roused the soundest of sleepers when it felt the prick of the knife. It was absolutely necessary to do it in the open air.”
“I have been blind!” cried the Colonel. “Of course, that was why he needed the candle and struck the match.”
“Undoubtedly. But in examining his belongings, I was fortunate enough to discover, not only the method of the crime, but even its motives. As a man of the world, Colonel, you know that men do not carry other people’s bills about in their pockets. We have most of us quite enough to do to settle our own. I at once concluded that Straker was leading a double life, and keeping a second establishment. The nature of the bill showed that there was a lady in the case, and one who had expensive tastes. Liberal as you are with your servants, one can hardly expect that they can buy twenty-guinea walking dresses for their women. I questioned Mrs. Straker as to the dress without her knowing it, and having satisfied myself that it had never reached her, I made a note of the milliner’s address, and felt that by calling there with Straker’s photograph, I could easily dispose of the mythical Derbyshire.
“From that time on all was plain. Straker had led out the horse to a hollow where his light would be invisible. Simpson, in his flight, had dropped his cravat, and Straker had picked it up with some idea, perhaps, that he might use it in securing the horse’s leg. Once in the hollow, he had got behind the horse, and had struck a light;37 but the creature, frightened at the sudden glare, and with the strange instinct of animals feeling that some mischief was intended, had lashed out, and the steel shoe had struck Straker full on the forehead. He had already, in spite of the rain, taken off his overcoat in order to do his delicate task, and so, as he fell, his knife gashed his thigh. Do I make it clear?”
“Wonderful!” cried the Colonel. “Wonderful! You might have been there.”
“My final shot was, I confess, a very long one. It struck me that so astute a man as Straker would not undertake this delicate tendon-nicking without a little practise. What could he practise on? My eyes fell upon the sheep, and I asked a question which, rather to my surprise, showed that my surmise was correct.”38
“You have made it perfectly clear, Mr. Holmes.”
“When I returned to London I called upon the milliner, who had recognised Straker as an excellent customer of the name of Derbyshire, who had a very dashing wife with a strong partiality for expensive dresses. I have no doubt that this woman had plunged him over head and ears in debt, and so led him into this miserable plot.”
“You have explained all but one thing,” cried the colonel. “Where was the horse?”
“Ah, it bolted, and was cared for by one of your neighbours. We must have an amnesty in that direction, I think. This is Clapham Junction, if I am not mistaken, and we shall be in Victoria39 in less than ten minutes. If you care to smoke a cigar in our rooms, Colonel, I shall be happy to give you any other details which might interest you.”40
“. . . AND THE CALCULATION IS A SIMPLE ONE”
SHERLOCKIAN scholars have been fascinated by Sherlock Holmes’s apparent mathematical wizardry in calculating the speed of the train in which he and Watson went “flying along” to Exeter.
A. S. Galbraith,
in “The Real Moriarty,” finds Holmes’s assertion of the calculation’s simplicity to be inconsistent with his precise, reasoning character, because the nature of the calculation requires a standard of accuracy much looser than the exact conclusion Holmes ultimately draws. Given that the speed of the train would have varied—probably remaining constant for no more than two minutes at a time—Holmes’s casual use of an ordinary watch to count the seconds from the passage of one telegraph post to another would necessarily have produced an error of at least one or two seconds. Galbraith points out that a one-second error in a two-minute span, at the speed the train was travelling, would account for an inaccuracy of half a mile an hour. “Then the man of precise mind,” Galbraith deduces, “even if confident of almost superhuman accuracy in his measurement of the time, would say ‘between fifty-three and fifty-four miles an hour,’ and a more reasonable statement would be ‘between fifty-two and fifty-five.’ Is Holmes trying to impress Watson, or is Watson trying to impress his readers?”
Jay Finley Christ, in “Sherlock Pulls a Fast One,” concludes that the calculation was not a simple one. Guy Warrack, in Sherlock Holmes and Music, concurs, maintaining that a speed of 53½ miles per hour would have required Holmes counting 2.2439 seconds between passing poles and then figuring out a complex fraction in his head. “The only conclusion to be drawn,” Warrack believes, “is that Holmes’s precise statement was sheer bluff which took Watson in at the time and Watson’s readers ever since.”
S. C. Roberts, reviewing Warrack’s book in “The Music of Baker Street,” had this to say in response: “Mr. Warrack, if we may so express it, is making telegraph-poles out of fountain-pens. What happened, surely, was something like this: About half a minute before he addressed Watson, Holmes had looked at the second hand of his watch and then counted fifteen telegraph poles.” Using this prior observation as well as the knowledge that the poles were sixty yards apart (a fact not revealed to the reader), Holmes—according to Roberts—did make a simple calculation based on the difference (more than 10 percent) between the figures worked out for this train and for one that was travelling 60 miles per hour.
At least four other methods have been proposed that purport to be “simple,” but to the average reader, the problem appears to be similar to Moriarty’s work on The Dynamics of an Asteroid, “which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it” (The Valley of Fear).
“I STAND TO WIN A LITTLE ON THIS NEXT RACE . . .”
DID Sherlock Holmes bet on Silver Blaze? His revelation that he bet on the race following the Wessex Plate leads some to believe that Holmes may have capitalized on his inside information. “There is no evidence that Holmes actually backed Silver Blaze to win the Wessex cup, but knowing Holmes,” writes Gavin Brend, “and knowing what Holmes knew about Silver Blaze, we should be very surprised if he had neglected this opportunity.” Robert Keith Leavitt reaches much the same conclusion, fingering Silas Brown and Lord Backwater (who owned the horse Desborough and who would later do Holmes a favour by recommending him to Lord Robert St. Simon in “The Noble Bachelor”) as Holmes’s conspirators in framing the race. The large amount of money they would have won would help account for Holmes’s mysterious fortune.
Charles B. Stephens outlines one potential plot: Silas Brown kept Silver Blaze concealed while Holmes took the train to London on the night before the race, betting the longest possible odds on the ostensibly missing horse. Brown then instructed Desborough’s jockey to take an early lead, which the jockey did, little knowing that the strategy would cost him the race. “[T]he evidence seems all too clear,” Stephens deduces, “that it was Holmes, himself, who master-minded the manipulation of the betting odds to his own advantage, in derogation of his obligations to the man who had employed him for the investigation.”
This same unhappy view is held by sports columnist Red Smith, who, in his essay “The Nefarious Holmes,” criticises Holmes for having an “ethical blindspot” when it comes to sports. Smith points out that in “The Final Problem,” which took place in 1891, Holmes stated that his earnings from recent cases had left him free to live as he wished; yet by 1901 (“The Priory School”) the detective confessed, “I am a poor man.” Despite the princely fees Holmes received for his services, he was practically always broke—“obviously because the bookies took everything he didn’t have to lay out for happy dust.” Smith then charges Holmes with being “a horse player of degenerate principles who thought nothing of fixing a race, and when you bear in mind his first-hand knowledge of the use and effect of cocaine, he probably had his syringe in the veins of more than one thoroughbred.”
Edward T. Buxton, in “He Solved the Case and Won the Race,” attempts to argue that Holmes had somewhat more benign motives for hiding the horse. Rather than sending an eminently competent trainer to jail and certain ruin, Holmes elected to force Silas Brown to train Silver Blaze for the Wessex Cup. Even though this plan benefited Colonel Ross, he likely would not have approved of it, and thus Holmes kept the whole plan secret. Buxton’s view of events does not, however, rule out the detective’s making a wager on the race as well.
S. Tupper Bigelow also rises to Holmes’s defence, in “Silver Blaze: The Master Vindicated.” He argues that Holmes was not guilty of larceny, because Silas Brown did not intend to deprive Col. Ross of the horse permanently. Furthermore, because the horse that ran was not a substitute for Silver Blaze but was in fact Silver Blaze, no one was defrauded. “There is no evidence,” concludes Judge Bigelow, “of any illegal, improper, unethical or even venial conduct on the part of the Master in the entire story . . .”
Are we to believe, incidentally, that Dr. Watson, who by the time of “Shoscombe Old Place” was spending half his income on turf speculation, did not have a little something wagered on the race?
1“Silver Blaze” was published in the Strand Magazine in December 1892 and in the Strand Magazine (New York) in January 1893.
2The moorland district of Dartmoor (named after the river Dart) is located in Devon county in south-west England and is characterised by its striking tors—large blocks of granite that rise dramatically above their surroundings—as well as by several relics from the Bronze and Iron Ages. A royal forest in Saxon times, the district was converted to a national park in 1951 and remains home to Dartmoor Prison, a notoriously brutal penitentiary built in 1806–1809 to house French prisoners in the Napoleonic Wars. During the War of 1812, some 1,500 French and American prisoners died in captivity there and were buried in a field outside the prison walls. After a thirty-year period of dormancy, Dartmoor Prison was reopened to house civilian prisoners in 1850.
Dartmoor is also known for the Dartmoor pony, a small, sturdy horse with a shaggy coat. Once near extinction because it was not considered large enough to carry soldiers and armour, the breed made a comeback when Edward VII (Queen Victoria’s eldest son) began training Dartmoors for his polo teams.
Karl Baedeker, in his Great Britain: Handbook for Travellers for 1894, warned: “The pedestrian will find abundant opportunity for his prowess, but should be on his guard against bogs and mists. It is prudent to keep pretty closely to the beaten tracks, and accompanied by a guide.”
3This, and a reference in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” to a “close-fitting cloth cap,” are the only references to the “deerstalker” in which Sidney Paget depicted Holmes and which became his trademark. The Hound of the Baskervilles also refers to a cloth cap, but Paget depicted that cap as a homburg.
4Some have doubted that the train could be travelling at such a speed, but D. Marcus Hook, in “More on the Railway Journeys,” points out that the speed “was not only possible, but necessary.” He cites the fact that the Flying Dutchman and the Zulu, both of which made the run from Paddington to Swindon in 87 minutes, would have had to average 53-¼ m.p.h.; the top speed, of course, would have had to be much faster than that. Holmes is speaking here well after he a
nd Watson have left Reading, and thus the train would only be hitting its top speed right around this time. His estimate of 53-½ m.p.h., then, is not only reasonable but in fact possibly too conservative.
5See the appendix on page 418.
6In most American texts the name is given as “Somomy,” for reasons unclear. Jay Finley Christ delves into the history of Silver Blaze’s bloodline, in “Silver Blaze: An Identification As of 1893 A.D.,” discovering that Isonomy won the 1878 Cambridgeshire at the Newmarket race course as a three-year-old, capturing the Manchester Plate the following year. He was one of only a handful of horses to win the Ascot Gold Cup twice, finishing first in both 1874 and 1880. Taking a guess as to who the famed “Silver Blaze” might have been, Christ suggests Isinglass, who won the British Triple Crown (the Epsom Derby, the St. Leger Stakes, and the Two Thousand Guineas) in 1893 and broke the record at the time for most prize money won by a British horse.
Looking at similarities in the name “Silver Blaze,” Gavin Brend observes, in “From the Horse’s Mouth,” that horses named Silvio and St. Blaise were both Derby winners, Silvio in 1877, St. Blaise in 1883, but neither of them was of the Isonomy stock. “If we confine our attention to Isonomy’s progeny,” Brend concludes, “the most hopeful claimant from the standpoint of phonetics would seem to be Seabreeze, who won the Oaks and St. Leger in 1888 but who, I regret to say, was not a colt but a filly.”
Wayne B. Swift, in “Silver Blaze—A Corrected Identification,” an exhaustively researched and widely accepted work, identifies Silver Blaze with the horse Ormonde, the Triple Crown winner in 1886. John Porter, the horse’s trainer, wrote in Kingsclere (London: Chatto & Windus, 1898): “He won all his engagements. And he ran practically untried.” Ormonde, the second cousin (twice removed) of Isonomy, was owned by the Duke of Westminister.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 57
