Sherlock Holmes at the Crucible of Life by Thomas Kent Miller

Author:Thomas Kent Miller [Miller, Thomas Kent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B00905U9IY
Publisher: Rosemill House
Published: 2012-08-19T05:00:00+00:00

[Ha! Watson! You assume too much. Fairy bushes and fairy paths are very real to people who seldom travel more than twenty miles from their villages. Fairy wisdom has lived for good reason through time immemorial. As to that other matter, all I did was show that an unscrupulous man had used the Baskerville legend for murder. I did nothing to prove or disprove the legend one way or another!]

Nearby, perhaps twenty yards away, there was the hedge that was the center of so much trouble. There were about fifteen of the plants growing close together. At the end of the hedge was a weathered hole about three feet across and the dead and dried bush that had been cast aside.

“You say the stone marked a path,” I said. “Is there a real path, and where exactly is it?”

“Over here, Dr. Watson,” McCabe said, and in a few moments we came to a worn pebbly path. I asked the two men to stay just where they were for the time being as I wanted to look around, and I am proud to say that I began my investigation in emulation of you, Holmes. I had even troubled to bring a small magnifying glass. The ground was covered with footprints and shoeprints, some old, some brand new its seemed. There were also some marks that, I thought, a large snake might have made.

When I rejoined them, I jokingly wondered aloud what kind of curse the fairies would put on me. And I was surprised to see that both went white as their own sheep and didn’t respond in any manner.

With this realization that my hosts were not immune to the power of the local myths, I decided to change tactics. I wandered casually over to the standing stone, or the fairies’ road sign, as it were, and began to examine its design and substance. I used the glass to examine minutely the areas of it surface that I could easily reach. I am no geologist, but it looked to me to be ordinary black basalt that had been exposed to the elements for centuries and much weathered. As I did so my shoe must have knocked or kicked into its base, so that when I stepped back I found that a fragment of stone as big as my fist lay at the foot of the standing stone. At first I thought that the larger rock must have been cracked somehow at some point in time, and I clearly jarred this small piece loose with my shoe. Even from where I stood, I could see that the sharp edges of the small fragment exactly matched the new cavity in the bigger stone. I picked up the piece and examined it with the glass I still had in my hand. The first thing I noticed was that it was shiny, more like volcanic glass than basalt, black and oddly slippery. Furthermore it was marked on the inward facing side with what looked like organized scratches.

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