The Perils of Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free PDF Page B

at a time, and with some enlargement and the help of a good glass, I should be able to decipher them all. How in thunder did you work it out?”
    “His brief infatuation with the Kodak stood out against the indolent portrait you painted,” Holmes said. “When you referred to his trips to the corner post office, the thing was fairly settled for me. What interest can a disinherited man, recently dismissed and without prospects, have in the post? I withheld my suspicions until I could examine the vicinity where the theft took place. The scrap of parchment near the hearth, and the missing camera, eliminated any other theory which might have proposed itself.”
    “You have rescued history.”
    “Tish-tosh. I have merely saved you the price of Patterson’s extortion. He would almost certainly have approached you with the pictures, as you surmised. In any case, the credit is as much Watson’s as mine. You’d have done well to have so nimble a companion in Africa.”
    “If I’d had you both, I’d have tracked the blasted Nile to its cradle,” he grumbled. “You let Patterson go?”
    “I thought it best the record of Tutankhamen’s tomb remain with you than in the evidence room at Scotland Yard. I did him no service. Eventually he will commit a crime for which no one can or will absolve him.”
    Burton studied each photograph in turn a second time. At last he set them down and rose, offering Holmes his hand. “I wish I’d known you in ’60.”
    “You would not have found me diverting company, Sir Richard. I was six years old.”
    The case which I have indulged myself so far as to call “The Adventure of the Arabian Knight” has shed more light upon the singular methods of Sherlock Holmes than upon the undefiled resting-place of an Egyptian Pharaoh. Twenty-six months after the events herinfore described, Sir Richard Burton died, a victim of a combination of ailments he’d contracted during his many explorations into places which before him were unknown to white society. His loss was regretted in some quarters, celebrated in others. History, in which he placed so much store, will determine whether he was a serious scholar or a reckless adventurer bent only on sensation.
    In order to protect her late husband’s reputation from malicious gossip connected to some manuscripts she found morally objectionable, Lady Isabel Burton burned most of his voluminous papers. Among them, it must be concluded, since nothing has since been heard of them, were the photographs James Patterson took of the Egyptian document and any notes Burton may have made subsequent to their recovery. In view of this calamity, it seems likely that King Tut’s tomb will remain forever buried beneath the sand of many centuries.
    John H. Watson
    10 May 1904

THE ADVENTURE
OF THE THREE
GHOSTS
    “C ompliments of the season, Watson. I note Lady Featherstone retains her childhood infatuation with you. She thinks you twelve feet tall and two yards wide at the shoulders.”
    Scarcely had I entered the ground floor at 221B Baker Street and surrendered my outerwear to the redoubtable Mrs. Hudson when I was thus greeted by Sherlock Holmes, who stood upon the landing outside the flat we’d shared for so long. He wore his prized old mouse-colored dressing-gown, and his eyes were brighter than usual.
    “Good Lord, Holmes,” said I, climbing the stairs. “How could you know I saw Constance Featherstone this morning? Her invitation to breakfast was the first contact I have had with her since the wedding.”
    “You forget, dear fellow, that I know your wardrobe as well as your wife does. I can hardly be expected not to notice a new muffler, particularly when it bears the Dornoch tartan. You told me once in a loquacious humour of your early romance with Constance Dornoch. Who but she would present you with such a token in honour of the holiday? And who but a sentimental lady who still thought you taller and broader than the common breed of man would knot one so