The Hound of the Baskervilles: Sir Henry Baskerville

At exactly ten o’clock the next morning, Dr. Mortimer brought the young baronet, Sir Henry Baskerville, to Baker Street, where Holmes was waiting in his dressing-gown.Sir Henry was a small, sturdy man of about thirty, with thick black eyebrows and a strong face, and he had the weather-beaten look of someone who had spent most of his life outdoors in America and Canada.He said that he had received a puzzling letter that morning, and he laid on the table a grey envelope addressed in rough printed letters to “Sir Henry Baskerville, Northumberland Hotel.”

Nobody could have known that he would stay at that hotel, for he had decided only after meeting Dr. Mortimer, so Holmes said that someone was very interested in his movements.Inside was a half-sheet of paper on which a single sentence had been made from printed words pasted onto it: “As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.”Only the word “moor” was written in ink, and Sir Henry asked what in thunder it meant and who was so interested in his affairs.

Holmes asked Watson for yesterday’s Times and read out a passage from an article on free trade, until Sir Henry said that they had wandered away from the trail.“On the contrary,” said Holmes, “we are very hot on it,” and he showed them that the words of the warning had been cut from that very article, and that two of the words had even been cut out in one piece.Dr. Mortimer, amazed, asked how he could know this, and Holmes replied that an expert in crime can tell one kind of printing from another, just as a doctor knows his own subject at a glance.

Holmes added that the sender had used nail scissors, had pasted the words in a crooked line as if in a hurry, and was probably an educated man pretending not to be, since the Times is seldom read by anyone else.He was almost sure that the address had been written in a hotel, because the pen had spluttered twice and run dry three times, which showed that the ink bottle was nearly empty.Then he asked whether anything else unusual had happened, and Sir Henry, smiling, said that he had lost one of his new brown boots, which he had put outside his door at the hotel to be cleaned.

Holmes called it a strangely useless thing to steal, and then Dr. Mortimer told the story of the hound again, which Sir Henry heard with the deepest attention, saying afterwards that he had known it since childhood but had never taken it seriously.Holmes warned him that there seemed to be danger in going to Baskerville Hall, but Sir Henry, his dark face flushed, answered that no devil in hell and no man on earth could stop him from going to the home of his own people.He asked Holmes and Watson to lunch with him at two o’clock, and he left with Dr. Mortimer to walk back to the hotel.

The moment the door closed, Holmes changed from a dreamy man in a dressing-gown into a man of action, and he and Watson hurried after their visitors, keeping a hundred yards behind.Suddenly Holmes noticed a cab that was following the two men, and Watson glimpsed a bushy black beard and piercing eyes at its window, but the cab raced away before they could reach it.