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“The monster just left him there for the buzzards, eh?” Tex said. “Constable Roddy said Mr Carroll was dumped in the river from the bridge for the fish to eat. There was a blood stain on the railin’.”
I also learned from their conversation that Tex would take Holmes on a buckboard into the village so Holmes could speak with the blacksmith, then over to the shack of the drunkard George, and on to the home of Sir Ethan Tarleton.
I volunteered to clean up after them so they would not be delayed. I planned to walk the grounds afterwards to take in the warm sunshine and inspect the lay of the land.
“This is stimulatin’—bein’ with you while you solve the murders,” Tex said to Holmes as they seated themselves on the wagon. “Do you suppose ole George and Mr Carroll are lookin’ down with pride from heaven? That’s where they must be. Neither of ’em ever hurt a soul while they was on this earth.”
Holmes assured Tex that George and Mr Carroll had gone to their rewards, and the two consulting detectives went off, smiling broadly.
I soon finished work in the kitchen, took up my walking stick, and began to stroll through the property. The horses cropping grass in the lush pasture picked up their heads and followed me for some distance along the barbed-wire fence line. They were magnificent, muscled creatures that Mr Carroll had brought with him from the Wyoming territory, which had attained statehood in 1890, the year he left for Europe with Tex.
One red roan mustang, when I reached the place where the fence turned at a right angle, snorted and stomped the ground just beyond the corner. Something there had disturbed the animal, and I went over to investigate. To my amazement, there was a patch of sod discoloured with what appeared to be dried blood near the base of a fence post.
Could this be the spot where Mr Carroll lost his life? I wondered. Holmes, I was certain, would be intrigued by what I had found and would want to see it for himself, so I marked the location with my bowler by placing it atop the post.
I continued walking until I reached a neighbouring barnyard, then reversed my direction when a tall, sturdy man about the age of thirty emerged from the grey, frame farmhouse to warn me in an unfriendly voice that I was trespassing on his land. I apologized and quickly made my way back onto the property of Mr Carroll. I attributed his demeanour to the fear the residents must have shared because a killer was prowling among them.
I took a different route back to our quarters, and when I entered, the Carroll home was unoccupied. Since Holmes and Tex had not yet returned, I decided to busy myself with some reading from the bookshelves in the sitting-room. I studied the titles in the classics section, and one volume in particular caught my eye, Shakespeare Analysed, by the British playwright Sidney Humphries. I took it down from the shelf, and to my surprise, the gap it left revealed the dial to a safe in the wall. How fascinating, I thought. “Holmes will be enthralled with yet this second discovery of mine,” I said aloud to myself. My inquisitiveness was heightened further when I learned that a button on the shelf, when depressed, caused the entire bookcase to swing away from the wall to allow access to the small hide-away safe. I returned the bookcase to its normal position.
I tried to concentrate on the book I had selected, but my anticipation of telling Holmes about my detective work prevented me from absorbing the words. So, I put Shakespeare Analysed back on the shelf. I began to pace back and forth across the room, much like Holmes’s habit when lost in thought.
Finally, at about two o’clock, I heard the horses and buckboard arrive at the front gate. Holmes came into the farmhouse alone, while Tex went on toward the barn to unhitch the wagon and cool down the team.
“Tex is a talker, to be sure,” Holmes started to say, but I interrupted him to tell him my news about the discoloured patch on the trail.
“Excellent, Watson!” he exclaimed. “It fits perfectly into my theory of this case! Now to the bookcase. Tex advised me that Mr Carroll kept important documents and Yankee dollars in a safe hidden behind the shelves.”
I was crestfallen, and my disappointment was obvious. “I discovered the safe while you were gone, and I wanted to shock you with it,” I informed Holmes when he asked me if he had said something to offend me. I showed Holmes the button and he pressed it.
The safe now exposed, Holmes placed his ear tightly against the door and began to turn the dial to the right and to the left. I knew he was proficient in the skills of a burglar, but I had been unaware that safe-cracking was a part of his repertoire.
“I heard the tumblers click,” he whispered after a few moments. He turned the handle and the safe opened. “Halloa!” he blurted.
Holmes marvelled at the contents. There was fifty thousand dollars in cash, deeds to all of Mr Carroll’s properties, a document from an orphanage in Wyoming, a carbonated copy of a forty-year-old agreement between Mr Carroll and Sir Ethan Tarleton, bank deposit slips, plus a will enscrolled with a date after Mr Carroll had relocated to the farmhouse outside the village.
“I was convinced a man of his stature would be careful to maintain such records,” Holmes stated. “The only question was where.” Holmes carried the documents to the desk, organised the papers that were already on it, and sat to examine the new ones, I looking over his shoulder. He fished inside his jacket pocket, withdrew his clay pipe and a pouch of shag tobacco, filled the pipe half way, lit it, and settled against the back of the chair. The smoke curled to the ceiling as Holmes read voraciously.
“This means Mr Carroll adopted Tex when he was thirteen years old, just before they sailed for England,” Holmes summarised. “And he has bequeathed to Tex all worldly possessions. We must inform Tex promptly.”
We went to the barn as Tex was feeding the horses their evening meal. He was startled and befuddled by the information.
“Golleee,” he intoned. “Now I know why he treated me like a son. But why do you suppose Mr Carroll kept it such a secret?”
“I don’t know for certain, Tex,” Holmes replied, “but perhaps he wanted to avoid you becoming haughty and arrogant, like the disposition we found in the son of Sir Ethan Tarleton. Whatever the answer, your adoptive father took the secret to his grave.”
“This changes everythin’,” Tex went on. “I have greater responsibilities now. I’m not sure I can handle them.”
“You have a few years to prepare,” Holmes added. “The will stipulates you inherit Mr Carroll’s wealth and properties when you reach the age of twenty-one. For the time being, it is all in the hands of a trustee in America.”
We all returned to the farmhouse for supper, and Tex peppered Holmes with questions about the future.
“Right now,” he said, “there’s the matter of payin’ the field hands. And to be honest, I’m a little short of money myself.”
Holmes told him there was enough in the safe to care for those needs. “With guidance from the trustee, you will have no worries,” Holmes said.
After we ate and were refreshed, Holmes asked me to lead him to the patch of sod with the suspected blood stain. “There is ample sunlight left to go there, perform a test, and be back here before dark,” he surmised.
Although I was tired, I agreed, and we set off on foot toward the post where I hung the derby. Under the evening sun, the spot was less pronounced than in the morning. Holmes produced a leather case from his jacket pocket, and inside were several small vials containing various liquids. He removed one from the case, plucked a few blades of grass from the stained patch, and immersed them into the clear solution in the vial. “If the liquid turns yellow, then it is blood on the grass,” he informed me. It did. “Mr Carroll met his end here, then,” Holmes conjectured, “before he reached the home of Sir Ethan Tarleton.” Holmes pointed over the rise ahead and said the Tarleton farm laid just beyond it.
“Then it was someone from the Tarleton homestead who shooed me away today,” I mentioned to him, and I told him of my encounter with the tall, sturdy fellow.
“More