The Hound of the Baskervilles: Watson's First Report

Watson now sent Holmes regular letters from Baskerville Hall, and in the first he described how the lonely moor slowly sinks into a person’s soul.Everywhere stood the stone huts and graves of prehistoric people, so that walking there felt like leaving modern England far behind.The escaped convict had not been seen for two weeks, and most people now believed that he had left the moor.

Sir Henry, meanwhile, had become strongly attracted to Miss Stapleton, and Watson suspected that the feeling was shared.Strangely, her brother seemed to dislike it whenever Sir Henry paid her attention, and he took pains to keep the two of them from being alone together.Holmes had told Watson never to let Sir Henry go out alone, and Watson joked that a love affair would make that order much harder to follow.

Stapleton had taken them to see two great stones, worn sharp like the fangs of some huge beast, where the legend of wicked Hugo was said to have begun.Dr. Mortimer had shown them the yew alley too, and standing at the moor gate, Watson pictured the old man seeing something on the moor and running until his heart gave out.Another neighbour was Mr. Frankland of Lafter Hall, a hot-tempered old man who loved lawsuits and spent his days watching the moor through a telescope on his roof.

Then Watson turned to the Barrymores, for the butler had admitted that he had not received Holmes’s telegram with his own hands.Mrs. Barrymore, a solid, respectable woman, often showed traces of tears, and Watson wondered whether some guilty memory haunted her.

Then, at two o’clock one morning, Watson heard soft footsteps pass his door and saw Barrymore creeping down the corridor with a candle.Watson followed him to an empty room and saw him crouching at the window, holding the candle against the glass and staring out into the dark moor.After some minutes the butler gave a deep groan and put out the light, and Watson hurried back to his room before he could be seen.

Much later, half asleep, Watson heard a key turn in a lock somewhere in the house.Some secret business was going on in that house of gloom, Watson wrote, and he and Sir Henry had already made a plan to find out what it was.He would say no more for now, he promised Holmes, but his next report should make interesting reading.