The Hound of the Baskervilles: The Problem

When Dr. Mortimer said that he had seen the footprints of a gigantic hound, Holmes leaned forward, his eyes bright with a hard, keen interest.He asked question after question: how far the prints were from the body, what the night had been like, and exactly how the yew alley was laid out.Mortimer explained that Sir Charles had stood by the little gate to the moor for five or ten minutes, because the ash had dropped twice from his cigar.

“If only I had been there!” cried Holmes, striking his knee, for by now the rain and the boots of curious villagers had spoiled every mark on the path.Mortimer admitted that he had not called Holmes in sooner because he feared that some things lie beyond the reach of even the cleverest detective.Before Sir Charles died, he said, three people on the moor had seen a huge, glowing creature that matched the hound of the legend exactly.

Holmes shrugged and said that he had always kept his work to this world, but that even a believer in the supernatural must admit a footprint is a real, solid thing.Mortimer had really come for advice about Sir Henry Baskerville, the last of the family, who had been farming in Canada and was arriving in London within the hour.Every Baskerville who went to the Hall seemed to meet an evil end, yet the whole poor countryside depended on someone living there.

Holmes pointed out that a devil whose powers stopped at the edge of Devonshire would be a strange devil indeed, so Sir Henry would be no safer in London.He told Mortimer to meet the young man, say nothing to him yet, and bring him to Baker Street at ten o’clock the next morning.

Watson spent the day at his club, and when he came home that evening, the sitting room was so thick with tobacco smoke that he thought there was a fire.Holmes had not left his armchair all day, yet he said that he had been to Devonshire in spirit, travelling over a large map of the moor.On the map he showed Watson the Hall, the village of Grimpen, the house of a naturalist named Stapleton, and, fourteen miles away, the great prison of Princetown.

The change in Sir Charles’s footprints did not mean that he had walked on his toes, Holmes said; it meant that he had been running for his life.Strangely, he had run away from the house instead of toward it, as if terror had already driven him half mad.And on the night before he was to leave for London, the old man had stood at the moor gate waiting for someone. “The thing takes shape, Watson,” said Holmes, and he reached for his violin.