When I looked up again, "Scott" had already disappeared—and the ragged man, looking as weightless as a fly, was clambering rapidly toward the closed trapdoor.
Moore had now seized me by the arm, and was shouting as he tugged at me. Following with my eyes the direction of. his pointing finger, I could see the villainous-looking fellow who had been with "Scott" and Barley embarking upon a more orthodox climb of his own. He had reached a wooden ladder crudely built against one wall, which evidently furnished the normal means of ascent to the trapdoor and the roof, and around which a throng of men still struggled for the chance to get away.
The crush in general was now thinning out, and the noise diminishing, as men either made good their escapes or, more frequently, fell quiet in the hands of the police. "Dr. Watson!" It was Tobias Gregson at my side. "Is Mr. Holmes here too?"
"No longer," I choked out, meanwhile glancing upward, to where the trap opening now yawned black and empty against the night. "Come this way, and quickly! There is a man who must not escape."
Gregson, shouting to one of his men to join us, came with Moore and me in a rush. Together we made short work of getting through the group of men who were still struggling around the ladder for a chance to climb. Our latest quarry was himself just on the point of being able to get up and away, but, seizing his feet, we dragged him down by main force, despite his desperate struggles to avoid capture.
Gregson and Moore pinioned his arms, and I drew my pistol and presented it to his head, at which point he ceased to struggle.
"Got you, my beauty!" Gregson shouted. "Now where is Dr. John Scott?" And at the same instant I was demanding of the prisoner: "What is your name?"
The wiry form we had surrounded slumped in resignation. "As to Dr. Scott's whereabouts," came the dry answer, "I fear I have been prevented from gaining any useful information. You will oblige me greatly, Watson, by putting up your pistol; my name is Sherlock Holmes."
Chapter Eleven
In his good journeyman style—if not in what I should count as sparkling prose—the late Dr. Watson has provided a substantially correct account of the affair at Barley's upon that long-ago June night. Still there are, to my mind, one or two points where the reader may benefit from a change of viewpoint and a small amount of overlap. Therefore I resume my history at approximately the moment when the police pushed open Barley's front door.
Of course I might have heard them coming from afar, had my attention not been riveted upon that same small private office into which Watson and Moore had been so clumsily attempting to spy. As Watson has noted, my duties as rat-factor had brought me upstairs; but, at the risk of seeming boastful or tedious, let me reiterate for the last time that my hearing is far keener than that of almost any breathing human; so keen that, had the animals and enthusiasts about me been less noisy over their blood sports, I would have had a good chance of understanding almost all that Barley and the other two were saying down in the office, though their voices were quite low.
Their talk was on a subject that lately had begun to grow in fascination for me—rats. One participant of course was Barley—the booming rumble of his voice was unmistakable, however he tried to mute it. The second voice I did not recognize; but the third was indubitably that of my old acquaintance, the still-nameless doctor. I heard it with a throbbing in the needle-marks that scarred my arms—yes, metal can sometimes wound and torture even those it cannot kill.
Regrettably, the hubbub of slaughtered rodents and wounded dogs, and the scarcely more human sounds emitted by the men who watched and wagered, prevented my hearing more than scraps of that distant conversation. And what I could hear of it was damnably oblique and fragmentary, as conversations are wont to be when the subject is a familiar one to all participants and they are arguing technical details. About all I could learn was that the doctor was out to buy several thousand rats as quickly as he could. I thought he expressed some preference for Rattus rattus; and it seemed that Barley and the other man were going to act somehow as brokers.
This was not much learned, yet was I content with my situation. I had determined that when my erstwhile oppressor left Barley's, as sooner or later he must, I should not be far behind him; that I should then take the first opportunity to find a place where we would not be interrupted, and speak with him alone; and that in the course of this tjte-`-tjte he would recite to me in a loud, clear voice the names, descriptions, and probable locations of each and every one of his associates in the damnable and mysterious scheme wherein my kidnapping and death were to have been the merest incidents.
The three of course left their real business in the little office, and when they emerged were talking loudly and cheerily about some famed bitch rat-slayer of a past decade. Looking up as he began to climb the stairs, the doctor brushed with his eyes my figure on the high stool, but there was not the faintest hint of recognition in his glance. His mind was no doubt full of things he counted as more important than one dead—as he supposed—old man, however strange. He must have known by then of Frau Grafenstein's demise—the papers had begun to carry the story—but I suppose that like the police he chalked it up to the enterprise of some stray madman, and did not connect it at all with her own efforts in the field of health care. It may have been that any chagrin he felt at the loss of a key employee was offset by relief at the removal of a budding rival. The three men were just starting up the stair, when the figure of a girl separated itself from a small group near the front of the parlor and came hurrying after them, with the half-furtive manner of someone trying to impart private information. She did not look up in my direction, but I was surprised to recognize the lithe form and scarred face of Sally.
One glance back over her shoulder as the front door came pushing open, and she realized that she was not going to have the time to keep her warning private—she drew in a good breath, and broadcast to the entire establishment the word she had been trying to save for her employer's ears alone: "Peelers!"
In the next instant her shout was echoed by a score of others. A window crashed, and all was pandemonium, which the good Doctor has already described, although it caught him rather flat-footed when it came.
Whatever the reason for this official exercise by the police, I did not purpose to play a part in it. No more did my enemy the nameless doctor. With a reaction if anything more decisive than my own, he sprang upstairs past Barley—who was stunned to absolute immobility—and had sprinted almost the entire length of the upper room before most of the people in it were aware that anything out of the ordinary was going on. Then from a high bench my foe leaped nimbly for the rafters, into which he swarmed as agile as a sailor.
I had just got myself into motion, calculating to overtake him immediately outside, when there came to my ears a cry of feminine despair, choked and muted but still recognizable as issuing from the throat of Sal. A vital second or two passed before my eyes found her amid the tumult of the crowd below; when I spied her at last she was almost at the front door, unwillingly on her way out in the grip of a sturdy policeman.
For a long moment I was irresolute, which is perhaps the worst possible error when action is required. On the one hand, the strictest demands of honor bound me to Sal's defense. On the other, she was in no grievous peril from the police, whilst across the room my chief known enemy was escaping, a man who would have had Sal killed in an instant had he ever discovered her efforts to set me free.