by Bill Peschel
It did not seem an auspicious opening for “Marvelous!” and Epaminondas did not know what else to say; so he said nothing. He grinned.
“Every clew into this case,” said Mr. Gubb, “points out that I am the criminal malefactor what stole Mrs. Quimby’s cash money away from her. Also furthermore,” he added, “I’ve got into my pants pocket right now bills and change of more than $50, and a woman with a jaw like Mrs. Quimby has got wouldn’t hesitate to identify it as her currency cash. It is a serious kind of matter, Watson. There ain’t nothing whatsoever into the Rising Sun Deteckative Bureau’s Correspondence School of Deteckating’s twelve complete lessons that tells a deteckative what to do when the clews say the deteckative is the criminal thief.
“I’m into a serious kettle of predicament, Watson!”
“Marv—” Epaminondas began, and then saw that it was no time to say it.
“If this here theft case,” continued Mr. Gubb, “was one that would be tried out into the courts, I wouldn’t be afraid of nothing whatsoever. No judge would jail a deteckative like what I am. But Mrs. Sarah Quimby ain’t going to trifle with no jury judge by no manner of means. As soon as she finds out to whom the clews point at, Watson, she’s going to tear the victim limb from limb, and—”
There was a heavy knock at the door, and Mrs. Quimby entered. It was evident she was madder than ever.
“Well,” she snapped. “What’s what? What you found out?”
Mr. Gubb swallowed twice before he could speak.
“Into the deteckative business and profession, Mrs. Quimby,” he said falteringly, “things can’t be hurriedly rushed. Up to the present moment of time I have only so far as yet examined the clews you fetched here. They point quite immediately direct at one individual person—”
“Man or woman?” asked Mrs. Quimby sharply.
“A—a male man,” said Mr. Gubb reluctantly.
“Just wait until the proof is complete, Philo Gubb! I’ll male man him.”
“Oh!” cried Mrs. Quimby with intense anger, slapping her fists together in a way that would have destroyed any ordinary knuckles. “I knew it! Just wait until the proof is complete, Philo Gubb! I’ll male man him—”
Mr. Gubb dared not look the lady in the eye. The watery drab button was in his fingers, and he turned it over and over nervously. As his downcast eyes noticed what his fingers held, he slipped the button hurriedly into his vest pocket.
“Be—before proceeding to start beginning the revenge,” he faltered, “deteckative procedure demands the requirements that the deteckative into charge of the case had ought to disguise himself up and—and detect that way to a more or less extent.”
“I want to be sure! I want to be sure,” explained Mrs. Quimby. “When I think what I’m going to do to the man when I am sure, I don’t want to turn myself loose on him until I am sure! You go right on, Mr. Gubb, and go on quick. That’s all I say! Work quick. The longer I wait, the madder I get, and I don’t want to commit absolute murder, which I am liable to if I get madder and madder much longer.”
“Yes’m,” said Mr. Gubb. “I think I’ll get into disguise No. 18B, East Indian Snake-Charmer, which cost me $18.40 out of the Rising Sun Deteckative Bureau’s supply catalogue, and—”
“Get into anything you want to,” said Mrs. Quimby, “but I’ll be back here at 4 o’clock and when I do come back I want to know what’s what!”
With this Mrs. Quimby left the place, and Mr. Gubb turned to Epaminondas.
“Watson, the needle!” he said, and Epaminondas turned flatly and, after several attempts, clasped the sewing needle in his fat fingers and handed it to Philo Gubb. The detective ran it through his coatsleeve and replaced it in the pincushion. “And now, Watson,” he said, “just kindly be so good as to help to assist me into this disguise.”
Disguise No. 18B was one of the most ornate in Mr. Gubb’s collection. There was a violently purple turban and a robe of screaming red. To complete the effect Mr. Gubb removed his shoes and stockings and covered his feet and legs, arms, hands and face with brown grease paint and slung on his arm a small grass basket containing a stuffed cotton snake. Thus prepared, he left the room and proceeded to the home of Mrs. Quimby, leaving Epamonindas in charge of the office-bedroom.
Time passed. Epaminondas, after testing the folding bed, put a pillow on the floor and indulged in sleep. He awoke, ate what remained of Mr. Gubb’s sugared bun and drank the milk remaining in the bottle, and slept again. Again he awoke and seemed greatly refreshed and fatter than before. His brain seemed amazingly clear, as it always did for perhaps five minutes after a good nap. For a minute or two he sat in the desk chair thinking deeply. His Uncle Philo was in trouble! Clews over which his Uncle Philo seemed to have no control were the cause of all the trouble.
Epaminondas turned the chair toward the desk. With the side of his forefinger he scraped the broken knife blade to the edge of the desk and into his fat palm. His eyes fell on a rat—hole in the corner of the room. Wheezing loudly, he walked to the corner and bent down and dropped the knife blade down the rat-hole. He returned to the desk, and with his handkerchief carefully wiped the entire surface of the japanned—tin cash box. Then, with a happy wheeze he dropped to the floor again and went to sleep.
Shortly before 4 o’clock Philo Gubb returned to his room. He was a discouraged detective. Not a clew had he found to turn aside the rude hand of a logic that pointed to himself as the thief. At 4 o’clock Mrs. Quimby would return with blood in her eye, and he would be forced to report that, so far, the evidence pointed to himself. Then, as Noah and the late Mr. Louis Fourteen of France remarked, the deluge! but it would be a deluge of blood. Mr. Gubb put his bare browned foot on Epaminondas and pushed him. Epaminondas sat up, and Mr. Gubb removed the scarlet robe and drew on his trousers and vest.
“Uncle Philo,” Epaminondas wheezed in his thin treble, “the clews are gone.”
“Gone!” exclaimed Philo Gubb, his drawn face brightening. “Uh-huh,” said Epaminondas. “They’re all gone. I wiped them off the tin box and lost the knife-blade.”
For a moment Mr. Gubb’s eyes glowed with joy.
“Why, in that case of circumstances,” he exclaimed, “there don’t nothing point to me in no manner of way! I ain’t no more indicated at than what nobody is. You shouldn’t ought to tamper with no clews, whatsoever, Watson, under no manner of circumstances, but—but into this particular case I’ll forgive—forgi—”
His voice hesitated and died away, for his fingers were feeling in his vest pocket, and they touched the watery drab button. And then the door opened violently, and Mrs. Quimby entered.
“Well?” she asked harshly.
“Madam—Mrs. Quimby—ma’am,” said Mr. Gubb slowly and reluctantly, “into this case I am obligated to be obliged to beg to report that the only remaining clew points into the direction of one male gentleman not heretofore guilty of any crime whatsoever.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Quimby with remarkable calmness.
“The fatal button clew which I have into my hand points out the indication that P. Gubb, paper-hanger and decorator, whilst paper-hanging and decorating into your house and home must have thefted the $44 and odd cents, which P. Gubb, deteckative, is ready here and now to return back to you. While P. Gubb, paper-hanger and decorator, refuses to confess he done it, P. Gubb, deteckative, so begs to report.”
“Marv—” Epaminondas began. Mr. Gubb cast a glance at him, and Epaminondas subsided.
Mrs. Quimby did not leap into Philo Gubb with hands like cat’s claws; nor did she instantly attack him with the hard fists of Maggie the Kid, champion female boxer of the U.S.A.
“Well!” she exclaimed mockingly. “I declare I never was so relieved in all my life! I made up my mind that nobody took that money but Orpheus Butts, and I declare it made me rousing mad to think the man I was going to marry would bust into my cash-box and rob me when the orange blossoms was all but upon my brow! My, my! What a relief to know you stole it yourself.
I’m that happy I don’t know what to do!”
“I’m prepared to return back the forty—four dollars—” Mr. Gubb began, but Mrs. Quimby waved a careless hand.
“Oh, tut! How you talk!” she laughed. “Keep it! I’d give twice that to have my feelings relieved the way you have relieved them. I don’t harbor ill will, Mr. Gubb. The best of us might be tempted when money is left around like that. If an old rounder like me hasn’t sense enough to put her money in a safe place when paper-hangers or plumbers or such are around the house, she ought to lose it. I can make allowance for human nature, Mr. Gubb, but if a bridegroom has the meanness to rob his blushing bride—! Mr. Gubb,” she added seriously, “Susan Dickelmeyer has confessed she stole the money—and that she stole a button and a knife-blade from you and left them on the sideboard where the cash-box was, so as to throw suspicion on you.”
It is not too much to say that it was enough for Mr. Gubb also. He bowed low when the happy Mrs. Quimby left the room. Then he turned to Epaminondas. The glad light in Philo Gubb’s birdlike eyes seemed to call for some remark.
“Marvelous!” said Epaminondas.
“Into the deteckative profession,” said Mr. Gubb, “there is quite a considerable much that is more marvelous than some folks imagine to think, Watson.”
“Yes, Uncle Philo.”
With the careless air of a great but successful detective who has one success after another and thinks little of them, Mr. Gubb walked to the wall and took down his workday coat. From a spool of No. 8 black cotton on his dresser he unreeled about a yard of thread and snapped it off. From his vest pocket he took the watery drab coat-button. Seating himself on the edge of the folding-bed, he turned to Epaminondas.
“The needle, Watson!” he said, in the calm, unexcited tone of a bachelor about to sew on a button.
The Adventure of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons
Being one of the exciting episodes in the career of the famous detective Hemlock Holmes, as recorded by his friend Dr. Watson
James Francis Thierry
One wonders why it took so long for someone to take the Holmes parody to novel length, but James Francis Thierry (b. 1887) gave it a game try as part of a contentious, undistinguished career notable in its variety. He started his career writing poetry, although one book (The Deluge of England and Other Poems, 1911) appears lost, and at 128 pages, the sole copy of another (Heaven; a poetic vision of the better part of the next world, 1927) is perhaps best left unread.
The same year that he published “The Adventure of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons,” he ran for Congress in his native Ohio. His religion and anti-Prohibition stance drew the attention of The Menace, a virulent anti-Catholic newspaper, which lashed Thierry as a proponent of “Rome, rum and boodle” on its front page under the headline “Braying Papists for Congress.” He lost, but maintained his interest in politics by penning pamphlets defending Catholic politician Al Smith (The Protestant Plot Against Al Smith, 1928) and a scattershot satire of Franklin Roosevelt’s policies that left one wondering whose side he was on (When Roosevelt Is Dictator—and How!, 1936).
Thierry seemed to have a problem with authority figures of any kind. He was arrested in 1926 for sending a poison-pen letter to a magazine editor over the rejection of his travel article, and he sued the American Newspaper Guild when it refused to print the Roosevelt pamphlet. During World War II he supported the war effort by writing a poem, “Kill the Japs,” that was read into The Congressional Record. His last recorded work was in 1948 when he registered the copyright to Southern Old Timers, a comedy based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Chapter I
Well, you see, it was like this:
After my illustrious friend, Hemlock Holmes, champion unofficial detective of the world, had doped out “The Adventure of the Second Stain,”—the last one to be pulled off after his return to life—thereby narrowly averting a great war, he got sick of London life and hiked over to the United States. He prevailed upon me to accompany him to that remarkable country; and we stayed there for three years, living in New York City all the time. There, on many occasions, Holmes displayed to great advantage his marvelous powers, and helped the New York police to clear up many a mystery that they had been unable to solve; for we found the police of that city to be just as stupid and chuckle-headed as those of London.
While in New York Holmes and I both learned to use American slang, and in case this little book should happen to be read by any of London society’s “upper crust,” I humbly beg their pardon for any examples of slang that may have crept into its pages.
Upon the death of King Edward in May, 1910, Hemlock Holmes was called back to London by the Scotland Yard officials to solve the mysterious disappearance of the British royal crown, which somebody had swiped the same day that Ed kicked the bucket; and of course I had to trail along with him! Well, to cover up a “narsty” scandal, my unerring friend, Hemlock Holmes, detected the guilty wretch within two days, but the culprit was so highly placed in society that the cops couldn’t do a thing to him. In fact, he was one of the dukes, and after King George, Ed’s successor, had recovered the crown—which was found in an old battered valise in a corner of the duke’s garage—and had got a written confession out of him in Holmes’s old rooms in Baker Street, in the presence of myself and Inspector Barnabas Letstrayed, we all swore a solemn oath, on a bound volume of Alfred Austin’s poems, that we would never, never tell who it was that had stolen the English crown in the year 1910! Wild horses shall not drag from me the name of that ducal scoundrel, and, besides, there might be a German spy looking over your shoulder as you read this.
Holmes and I decided to stay back in the tight little isle for a while after that episode, and there in the same old den, at 221-B Baker Street, in the city of London, we were domiciled on that eventful April morning in 1912 that saw us introduced to what turned out to be positively the dog-gonedest, most mixed-up, perplexing, and mysterious case we ever bumped up against in all our long and varied career in Arthur Conan Doyle’s dream-pipe. It completely laid over “The Sign of the Four” and “The Study in Scarlet,” and had “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” all beaten to a frazzle.
To be painfully precise about it, it was just twenty minutes after nine, Monday morning, April the eighth, 1912, the day after Easter, and it was raining something fierce outside. The whirling raindrops pattered against our second-story windows, and occasional thunder and lightning varied the scene.
Holmes was sitting, or, rather, sprawling in a Morris chair, wrapped in his old lavender dressing-gown, and was wearing the red Turkish slippers King George had given him for Christmas a few months before. He had his little old bottle of cocaine on the table beside him, and his dope-needle, which he had just filled, in his hand. I was sitting on the opposite side of the littered-up table, engaged in rolling a pill, that is to say, a coffin-nail. I had just poured out the tobacco into the rice-paper, and Hemlock Holmes had pulled back his left cuff, baring his tattooed but muscular wrist, just ready to take his fifth shot in the arm since breakfast, when all of a sudden there was a terrible clatter and racket down at our front door; we heard the door jerked open and then slammed shut; somebody rushed up the stairway three steps at a time; our own door was kicked open, and a tall, bald-headed man, about forty years old, wearing a monocle in his right eye, and with a derby hat in one hand, and a wet, streaming umbrella in the other, stood before us.
“Say! The cuff-buttons are gone—the cuff-buttons are gone! One pair of them, anyhow. Come quick! The earl is nearly wild about it. Money’s no object to him!” the apparition yelled at us.
I was so completely taken aback by the way that chump had burst in on us that I spilled all the beautiful tobacco off the cigarette-paper onto the floor. Holmes, however, like the cold-blooded old cuss that he always was, didn’t even bat an eye, but calmly proceeded to squirt the cocaine into his wrist, and then, with the usual deep sigh of contentment, he stretched out full length in the chair, with his arms above his hea
d, and yawned.
“Well, my hasty friend from Hedge-gutheridge, so you haven’t got all your buttons, eh?” he drawled. “I congratulate you upon your frankness, as it isn’t everybody who will admit it. But sit down, anyhow, and make yourself at home. Watson has the ‘makings’ over there; I’ve got a cocaine-squirter here you can use, if you wish, and you will find a nice dish of red winter apples up on the mantelpiece. Beyond the mere facts that you are a bachelor, live at Hedge-gutheridge in County Surrey, do a great deal of writing, belong to the Fraternal Order of Zebras, and shaved yourself very quickly this morning, I know nothing whatever about you.”
Of course, I knew that was the cue for my little song and dance.
“Marvelous! marvelous!” I shouted.
But our visitor was a long ways more surprised than I was. He flopped down in a chair, stared at Holmes as if he were a ghost, and said:
“Good Lord! How in thunder did you get onto all that?”
My eminent friend smiled his old crafty smile, as he waved his hands, and replied:
“Why, you poor simp, it’s all as plain as that little round window-pane called a monocle that you’ve got stuck in your eye there. I knew right away that you were a bachelor, because there is a general air of seediness about you and two buttons are missing from your vest; I knew that you live at Hedge-gutheridge, because you’ve got a ticket marked to that place sticking out of your vest-pocket; I knew that you do lots of writing, for the perfectly obvious reason that you have ink smeared over the thumb and first two fingers of your right hand; I knew that you belong to the Fraternal Order of Zebras, because I can see an F. O. Z. watch-charm on your pocket; and, finally, I knew that you scraped the incipient spinach off your mug very rapidly this morning because I can see three large recent razor-cuts on your chin and jaws! Perfectly easy when you know how!” And old Hemlock winked at me. “So spill out your little story to me, one mouthful at a time, and don’t get all balled up while you’re telling it either—or eyether.”
