The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (99 page)

The president, lying on the carpet in the arms of his secretary and Mr. Milburn, called out, “Don't hurt him, boys!” The calm, wise words seemed to bring the men to their senses. They subdued the culprit and took him out to a police van that was parked near the building.

Meanwhile, I pushed my way to the president's side. “I'm a doctor,” I called out, and the guards made room. I opened his coat as I leaned close to listen to his breathing. As I did, I surreptitiously produced a small vial of fresh chicken blood from my waistcoat and spilled it on the white shirt just above the belt. “He's wounded, but alive,” I said. “Lift the president to his carriage,” I ordered. “We'll take him to the field hospital on the Exposition grounds.”

The strong young soldiers nearby lifted the president and placed him in the carriage. I joined him and Captain Allen jumped into the driver's seat and whipped the horses to such a gallop that I feared the president would die in a carriage accident and take me with him. I managed to speak with him a bit in a low voice. “How are you, sir?” I asked.

“Excellent, Dr. Watson,” he said. “Seldom better.”

“Good. We'll try to keep you that way. Now put on this coat and hat.” It was a rather dull brown coat that looked very different from his tailored black one, and a bowler hat like the ones many men wore that day. When we were near the Indian Congress, Captain Allen drove the coach into a horse barn. Allen and I got into a second coach that was waiting there. Our horses had easily outrun word of the attack on the president, and as we pulled away, I could see that none of the visitors touring the Exposition noticed Mr. McKinley in his new garb entering the Indian Congress.

Captain Allen whipped the new set of horses, and I went to work on the substitute patient already waiting on the seat, a cadaver that Dr. Park and I had selected at the medical school the previous day. I covered his torso with Mr. McKinley's black coat, and his face with my handkerchief, as though keeping the sun out of his eyes. When we reached the field hospital, I jumped out, and Captain Allen and I put the corpse on a stretcher. Two orderlies loitering outside rushed to carry it in. “To the operating room immediately,” I shouted. We took the stretcher inside and locked the door.

After a few minutes, Dr. Roswell Park arrived at the door with several of his assistants and nurses, and made the little hospital look as though it were being run with great professional skill. With him to assist, I began the operation. I had removed bullets from a number of soldiers while on duty in India, so I was extremely familiar with the procedure and the many ways in which it can succeed or fail. As I worked on the cadaver to make it look as though it had been opened to search for the bullet, he complimented my technique several times.

We had only the open part of the abdomen uncovered by sheets, and the deceased man who was supposed to be the president lay on his back with a face mask over his mouth and nose and a surgical cap on his head. Nonetheless, it occurred to me that we were fortunate that while millions of lightbulbs were displayed everywhere throughout the Exposition, nobody had thought to install a single bulb in the hospital.

Through Dr. Park's nurses and assistants, we slowly fed our fiction to the outside world. We said the president was a healthy specimen, and he had been lucky. The first bullet had hit a brass button and ricocheted, leaving a shallow gash along his side. The second shot entered
the abdomen at close range, but the pistol had been a small caliber, and most likely Dr. Mann would find and remove the bullet in the present surgery. Once that happened, McKinley could be expected to recover fully. But after more than four hours of surgery, we changed the news slightly. Dr. Mann had not found the bullet, which must have fragmented in the body.

This was the story all that evening. It was still the story when we moved the cadaver to Mr. Milburn's house to recover. At various times during the next few days we issued reports that the president was recovering nicely, that his spirits were high, and that we expected an early return to health.

Meanwhile, as Holmes told me later, the rest of the deception went tolerably well. The assassin captured at the Temple of Music was taken to the police station. He, of course, was Mr. Booth. He identified himself as Leon Czolgosz, the son of Polish immigrants, who had been struck by the inequality in the way the president was treated compared with an ordinary man. Because of Chief Bull's fears of public emotion aroused by his crime, Czolgosz was kept apart from other prisoners.

The president had made his way into the Indian village, where he met Holmes, no longer an Italian madman. Holmes was waiting for the president with three Iroquois Indians he had met while they were studying at the University of London years before—two Senecas and a Mohawk. Holmes applied some of the makeup he had brought, and within a few minutes he and the president were the fourth and fifth Iroquois Indians. After nightfall, the five men left the Exposition in the midst of a growing crowd, and rowed across the Niagara River into Canada.

With the help of his Iroquois friends, Holmes conveyed Mr. McKinley to Montreal, where he put him on the steamship
Arcturus
, which sailed on September 9 for London. I'm told he was an impressive figure, registered in the ship's manifest as Selim Bey, first cousin to the third wife of the Sultan of Turkey. He wore some makeup, a large turban, and a sash with a curved dagger in it. After he reached London he took another ship for Tangiers as the Reverend Dr. Oliver McEachern, a Methodist missionary.

Five days after the
Arcturus
sailed, on September 14, I was forced to declare President William McKinley dead. He had been said to be recovering, but a few days later he succumbed to blood poisoning. There was some speculation, especially in the papers in New York City and Washington, that Dr. Mann had botched the surgery. There was even some lamentation that on the grounds of the Exposition had been an experimental X-ray machine, which could easily have found even fragments of a bullet. That was precisely why I, or Dr. Mann, had forbidden its use.

Nine days later, on the testimony of eyewitnesses, Leon Czolgosz, the young man who had shot the president, was convicted of murder. He was taken from the court to Auburn Penitentiary, where he was executed in an electric chair, another application of the marvels of electricity celebrated by the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. The one flaw of the modern method in comparison to hanging was that when a single wire was loosened, an electric chair became simply a chair. A fine actor can perform a set of death throes that would make a gravedigger faint.

Holmes and Dr. Mann were among the dignitaries who attended the very small funeral held at the penitentiary for the murderer. The casket had been nailed shut because the face of the killer Czolgosz had been disfigured by sulfuric acid poured on the corpse by persons unknown. Presiding over the funeral was a young clergyman who gave an extremely impressive elegy, inspiring all listeners with the notion that even the worst sinner can be forgiven and admitted to the kingdom of heaven. Afterward we took him to the nearest railway station and bought him a ticket, not to heaven, but only to New York, where he was in time to begin rehearsals for a Broadway play called
Life
, which opened the following March to appreciative notices.

After the state funeral of the president in
Washington, it was popularly supposed that Mrs. Ida McKinley returned to Ohio where she was to live with her sister. I often thought of her during the next seven years, knowing that she was living happily by turns as the wife of Selim Bey or of the Reverend Dr. McEachern—a veiled Moslem to the Christians, and a Christian to the Moslems, a person who pretended never to speak the language of those around her, and never had to explain herself. When she died after seven years, her body was secretly shipped back to Ohio and then buried by her sister, as though she had lived as a reclusive widow all along.

On the fourteenth of September, 1901, when it was first announced that President McKinley was dying, a number of notables rushed to Buffalo. One of them was his old friend Senator Mark Hanna, and another was the young vice president, Theodore Roosevelt. He stayed at the Ansley Wilcox mansion at 641 Delaware Avenue, where he was sworn in late that night as the twenty-sixth president of the United States. Whether in later years Roosevelt lived up to his predecessor's hopes, I cannot say. As Selim Bey or Dr. McEachern, the former president declared himself to be happy in retirement and never gave another political opinion. But the Great War he had feared did not begin until 1914, did not involve America until 1917, and ended a year later as he had hoped it would, with his country victorious and growing stronger.

Curator's Note:
Although Dr. Watson's claims cannot be verified, the circumstances of the manuscript's discovery in a locked metal box hidden in his great-grandson's home in London with several other, equally startling manuscripts might add credibility for some readers. Many personalities in Dr. Watson's story were real people, e.g. Mark Hanna, Ida and William McKinley, Dr. Roswell Park, Mr. John Milburn, George Cortelyou, Chief William Bull, “Dr. Mann,” Leon Czolgosz, Theodore Roosevelt, Ansley Wilcox, and Sherlock Holmes. Watson's description of the assassination appears to agree with descriptions by eyewitnesses, even in the particular of the distraction of the guards by the unidentified Italian. Czolgosz's body actually was rendered unrecognizable because of sulfuric acid poured on it by persons unknown after his execution. The actor Sydney Barton Booth really was a descendant of Edwin Booth, a pro-Lincoln member of the acting family, and he had a fine career that lasted long enough for him to appear in several successful motion pictures. As for timing, we do know that the whereabouts of Holmes and Watson are unknown between Thursday, May 16, 1901, when the “Priory School” events took place, and Tuesday, November 19, 1901, when they were seen during the “Sussex Vampire” case.

AFTER TEN YEARS
as a professional actress on the West Coast, Lyndsay Faye (1980– ) moved to New York in 2005 to further her career but quickly found the competition and lifestyle daunting so turned to writing.

A lifelong aficionado of Sherlock Holmes, Faye pitted Holmes against Jack the Ripper in her first book,
Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson
(2000). It was given blessings by the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate and received praise from many sources, including Caleb Carr, who wrote his own pastiche,
The Italian Secretary
, in 2005.

Faye followed
Dust and Shadow
with
The Gods of Gotham
(2012), an ambitious first novel in a series about Timothy Wilde, a bartender who becomes a policeman at the time that New York was creating its police department in 1846, coincidentally the year of the great Irish potato famine; it was nominated for an Edgar Award. Her massive historical research was put to use again for the second Wilde novel,
Seven for a Secret
(2013), which deals with “blackbirders,” underworld thugs who kidnap northern Negroes and sell them into slavery in the South.

“The Case of Colonel Warburton's Madness” was selected for the prestigious
The Best American Mystery Stories 2010
, edited by Lee Child; it is one of ten stories Faye has written about Holmes, the most recent and longest being “The Gospel of Sheba” (2014). “The Case of Colonel Warburton's Madness” was first published in
Sherlock Holmes in America
, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Jon L. Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower (New York, Skyhorse, 2009).

MY FRIEND
Mr. Sherlock Holmes, while possessed of one of the most vigorous minds of our generation, and while capable of displaying tremendous feats of physical activity when the situation required it, could nevertheless remain in his armchair perfectly motionless longer than any human being I have ever encountered. This skill passed wholly unrecognized by its owner. I do not believe he held any intentions to impress me so, nor do I think the exercise was, for him, a strenuous one. Still I maintain the belief that when a man has held the same pose for a period exceeding three hours, and when that man is undoubtedly awake, that same man has accomplished an unnatural feat.

I turned away from my task of organizing a set of old journals that lead-gray afternoon to observe Holmes perched with one leg curled beneath him, firelight burnishing the edges of his dressing gown as he sat with his head in his hand, a long-abandoned book upon the carpet. The familiar sight had grown increasingly unnerving as the hours progressed. It was with a view to ascertain that my friend was still alive that I went so far against my habits as to interrupt his reverie.

“My dear chap, would you care to take a turn with me? I've an errand with the bootmaker down the road, and the weather has cleared somewhat.”

I do not know if it was the still-ominous dark canopy that deterred him or his own pensive mood, but Holmes merely replied, “I require better distraction just now than an errand which is not my own and the capricious designs of a March rainstorm.”

“What precise variety of distraction would be more to your liking?” I inquired, a trifle nettled at his dismissal.

He waved a slender hand, at last lifting his dark head from the upholstery where it had reclined for so long. “Nothing you can provide me. It is the old story—for these two days I have received not a shred of worthwhile correspondence, nor has any poor soul abused our front doorbell with an eye to engage my services. The world is weary, I am weary, and I grow weary with being weary of it. Thus, Watson, as you see I am entirely useless myself at the moment, my state cannot be bettered through frivolous occupations.”

“I suppose I would be pleased no one is so disturbed in mind as to seek your aid, if I did not know what your work meant to you,” I said with greater sympathy.

“Well, well, there is no use lamenting over it.”

“No, but I should certainly help if I could.”

“What could you possibly do?” he sniffed. “I hope you are not about to tell me your pocket watch has been stolen, or your great-aunt disappeared without trace.”

“I am safe on those counts, thank you. But perhaps I can yet offer you a problem to vex your brain for half an hour.”

“A problem? Oh, I'm terribly sorry—I had forgotten. If you want to know where the other key to the desk has wandered off to, I was given cause recently to test the pliancy of such objects. I'll have a new one made—”

“I had not noticed the key,” I interrupted him with a smile, “but I could, if you like, relate
a series of events which once befell me when I was in practice in San Francisco, the curious details of which have perplexed me for years. My work on these old diaries reminded me of them yet again, and the circumstances were quite in your line.”

“I suppose I should be grateful you are at least not staring daggers at my undocketed case files,” he remarked.

“You see? There are myriad advantages. It would be preferable to venturing out, for it is already raining again. And should you refuse, I will be every bit as unoccupied as you, which I would also prefer to avoid.” I did not mention that if he remained a statue an instant longer, the sheer eeriness of the room would force me out of doors.

“You are to tell me a tale of your frontier days, and I am to solve it?” he asked blandly, but the subtle angle of one eyebrow told me he was intrigued.

“Yes, if you can.”

“What if you haven't the data?”

“Then we shall proceed directly to the brandy and cigars.”

“It's a formidable challenge.” To my great relief, he lifted himself in the air by his hands and crossed his legs underneath him, reaching when he had done so for the pipe lying cold on the side table. “I cannot say I've any confidence it can be done, but as an experiment, it has a certain flair.”

“In that case, I shall tell you the story, and you may pose any questions that occur to you.”

“From the beginning, mind, Watson,” he admonished, settling himself into a comfortable air of resigned attention. “And with as many details as you can summon up.”

“It is quite fresh in my mind again, for I'd set it down in the volumes I was just mulling over. As you know, my residence in America was relatively brief, but San Francisco lives in my memory quite as vividly as Sydney or Bombay—an impetuous, thriving little city nestled among the great hills, where the fogs are spun from ocean air and the sunlight refracts from Montgomery Street's countless glass windows. It is as if all the men and women of enterprise across the globe determined they should have a city of their own, for the Gold Rush built it and the Silver Lode built it again, and now that they have been linked by railroad with the eastern states, the populace believes nothing is impossible under the sun. You would love it there, Holmes. One sees quite as many nations and trades represented as in London, all jostling one another into a thousand bizarre coincidences, and you would not be surprised to find a Chinese apothecary wedged between a French milliner and an Italian wine merchant.

“My practice was based on Front Street in a small brick building, near a number of druggist establishments, and I readily received any patients who happened my way. Poor or well-off, genteel or ruffianly, it made no difference to a boy in the first flush of his career. I'd no long-established references, and for that reason no great clientele, but it was impossible to feel small in that city, for they so prized hard work and optimism that I felt sudden successes lay every moment round the next corner.

“One hazy afternoon, as I'd no appointments and I could see the sun lighting up the masts of the ships in the Bay, I decided I'd sat idle long enough, and set out for a bit of exercise. It is one of San Francisco's peculiar characteristics that no matter what direction one wanders, one must encounter a steep hill, for there are seven of them, and within half an hour of walking aimlessly away from the water, I found myself striding up Nob Hill, staring in awe at the array of houses.

“Houses, in fact, are rather a misnomer; they call it Nob Hill because it is populated by mining and railroad nabobs, and the residences are like something from the reign of Ludwig the Second or Marie Antoinette. Many are larger than our landed estates, but all built within ten years of the time I arrived. I ambled past a gothic near-castle and a neo-classicist mansion only to spy an Italianate villa across the street, each making an effort to best all others in stained glass, columns, and turrets. The neighborhood—”

“Was a wealthy one,” Holmes sighed, hopping out of his chair to pour two glasses of claret.

“And you would doubtless have found that section of town appalling.” I smiled at the thought of my Bohemian friend eyeing those pleasure domes with cool distaste as he handed me a wineglass. “There would have been others more to your liking, I think. Nevertheless, it was a marvel of architecture, and as I neared the crest of the hill, I stopped to take in the view of the Pacific.

“Standing there watching the sun glow orange over the waves, I heard a door fly open and turned to see an old man hobbling frantically down a manicured path leading to the street. The mansion he'd exited was built more discreetly than most, vaguely Grecian and painted white. He was very tall—quite as tall as you, my dear fellow—but with shoulders like an ox. He dressed in a decades-old military uniform, with a tattered blue coat over his gray trousers, and a broad red tie and cloth belt, his silvery hair standing out from his head as if he'd just stepped from the thick of battle.

“Although he cut an extraordinary figure, I would not have paid him much mind in that mad metropolis had not a young lady rushed after him in pursuit, crying out, ‘Uncle! Stop, please! You mustn't go, I beg of you!'

“The man she'd addressed as her uncle gained the curb not ten feet from where I stood, and then all at once collapsed onto the pavement, his chest no longer heaving and the leg which had limped crumpled underneath him.

“I rushed to his side. He breathed, but shallowly. From my closer vantage point, I could see one of his limbs was false, and that it had come loose from its leather straps, causing his fall. The girl reached us not ten seconds later, gasping for breath even as she made a valiant effort to prevent her eyes from tearing.

“ ‘Is he all right?' she asked me.

“ ‘I think so,' I replied, ‘but I prefer to be certain. I am a doctor, and I would be happy to examine him more carefully indoors.'

“ ‘I cannot tell you how grateful we would be. Jefferson!' she called to a tall black servant hurrying down the path. ‘Please help us get the Colonel inside.'

“Between the three of us, we quickly established my patient on the sofa in a cheerful, glass-walled morning room, and I was able to make a more thorough diagnosis. Apart from the carefully crafted wooden leg, which I reattached more securely, he seemed in perfect health, and if he were not such a large and apparently hale man I should have imagined that he had merely fainted.

“ ‘Has he hurt himself, Doctor?' the young woman asked breathlessly.

“Despite her evident distress, I saw at once she was a beautiful woman, with a small-framed, feminine figure, and yet a large measure of that grace which goes with greater stature. Her hair was light auburn, swept away from her creamy complexion in loose waves and wound in an elegant knot, and her eyes shone golden brown through her remaining tears. She wore a pale blue dress trimmed with silver, and her ungloved hand clutched at the folds in her apprehension. She—my dear fellow, are you all right?”

“Perfectly,” Holmes replied with another cough which, had I been in an uncharitable humor, would have resembled a chuckle. “Do go on.”

“ ‘This man will be quite all right once he has rested,' I told her. ‘My name is John Watson.'

“ ‘Forgive me—I am Molly Warburton, and the man you've been tending is my uncle, Colonel Patrick Warburton. Oh, what a fright I have had! I cannot thank you enough.'

“ ‘Miss Warburton, I wonder if I might speak with you in another room, so as not to disturb your uncle while he recovers.'

“She led me across the hall into another tastefully appointed parlor and fell exhaustedly into a chair. I hesitated to disturb her further, and yet I felt compelled to make my anxieties known.

“ ‘Miss Warburton, I do not think your uncle would have collapsed in such a dramatic manner had he not been under serious mental strain. Has anything occurred recently which might have upset him?'

“ ‘Dr. Watson, you have stumbled upon a
family embarrassment,' she said softly. ‘My uncle's mental state has been precarious for some time now, and I fear recently he—he has taken a great turn for the worse.'

“ ‘I am sorry to hear it.'

“ ‘The story takes some little time in telling,' she sighed, ‘but I will ring for tea, and you will know all about it. First of all, Dr. Watson, I live here with my brother, Charles, and my uncle, the Colonel. Apart from Uncle Patrick, Charles and I have no living relatives, and we are very grateful to him for his generosity, for Uncle made a great fortune in shipping during the early days of California statehood. My brother is making his start in the photography business, and I am unmarried, so living with the Colonel is for the moment a very comfortable situation.'

“ ‘You must know that my uncle was a firebrand in his youth, and saw a great deal of war as a settler in Texas, before that region was counted among the United States. The pitched fighting between the Texians—that is, the Anglo settlers—and the Tejanos so moved him that he joined the Texas Army under Sam Houston, and was decorated several times for his valor on the field, notably at the Battle of San Jacinto. Later, when the War Between the States began, he was a commander for the Union, and lost his leg during the Siege of Petersburg. Forgive me if I bore you. From your voice, I do not think you are a natural-born American,' she added with a smile.

“ ‘Your story greatly interests me. Is that his old Texas uniform he is wearing today?' I asked.

“ ‘Yes, it is,' she replied as a flicker of pain distorted her pretty face. ‘He has been costuming himself like that with greater and greater frequency. The affliction, for I do not know what to call it, began several weeks ago. Indeed, I believe the first symptom took place when he changed his will.'

“ ‘How so? Was it a material alteration?'

“ ‘Charlie and I had been the sole benefactors,' she replied, gripping a handkerchief tightly. ‘His entire fortune will now be distributed amongst various war charities. Texas War for Independence charities, Civil War charities. He is obsessed with war,' she choked, and then hid her face in her hands.

“I was already moved by her story, Holmes, but the oddity of the Colonel's condition intrigued me still further.

“ ‘What are his other symptoms?' I queried when she had recovered herself.

“ ‘After he changed his will, he began seeing the most terrible visions in the dark. Dr. Watson, he claims in the most passionate language that he is haunted. He swears he saw a fearsome Tejano threatening a white woman with a pistol and a whip, and on another occasion he witnessed the same apparition slaughtering one of Houston's men with a bayonet. That is what so upset him, for only this morning he insisted he saw a murderous band of them brandishing swords and torches, with the identical Tejano at their head. My brother believes that we have a duty as his family to remain and care for him, but I confess Uncle frightens me at times. If we abandoned him, he would have no one, save his old manservant; Sam Jefferson served the colonel for many years, as far back as Texas, I believe, and when my uncle built this house, Jefferson became the head butler.'