Sherlock Holmes In America by Martin H. Greenberg Page A

serviceable whiskey Mr. Lonnegan had on hand. Eventually, however, Sasanoff drained his glass and stood up.
    â€œCome,” he said. “All must be in readiness for the denouement.”
    I followed him out of the tavern with no little reluctance. Certainly, I wanted to see him deliver the coup de grâce with my own eyes. Yet by necessity he’d be doing it out of doors, while I very much wished to remain safely behind closed ones . . . preferably beside a roaring fire with a glass of port close at hand.
    I knew better than to deny Sasanoff his audience, however, and soon we were hustling up the road toward the mine. Quite a sight I’m sure we made: Richard III and Falstaff side by side, both of them huffing and puffing in the thin, frigid air of the mountains. Though Sasanoff had given us plenty of time to beat the Whelp—the reason for his warning about the “afternoon shipments”—he still insisted on a forced march so swift it soon had my back slick with perspiration that would turn to icicles the second we stopped.
    And worse was yet to come, for Sasanoff had selected a hiding place that required us to crawl on all fours into a dense copse of prickly bramble. Of course, frames such as mine are not proportioned for easy concealment, so we had to wriggle our way into the thickest of the thicket, briers tearing at my topcoat (and my pride). Sasanoff nearly lost his false beard in one particularly dense tangle, but after some struggling he managed to free himself, whiskers intact. I’d suggested he relieve himself of his disguise, but he accused me of lacking panache. (A charge that had never before been leveled against me !) A dramatic unveiling, he insisted, was key to the whole thing.
    Once we were finally in place, I could see why Sasanoff had picked the spot he had, trying though it had been to reach. We may as well have been in box seats, for we had a perfect view down into the rocky basin in which the final act of the farce would soon play out.
    Perhaps forty feet from us was a mound of loose stones piled up that morning by Sasanoff himself. Beneath it was a shallow hole just deep enough for the battered locker that had, not long before, housed my own little treasure: my clippings. I’d volunteered it when Sasanoff outlined his plan. Now it held but a single slip of paper, upon which had been scrawled these words:
    YOU’RE SACKED!
    â€”M.S.
    The plan was this: We would wait for the Whelp; we would watch him unearth the box; we would witness his dismay upon discovering its contents; we would stand and announce our presence; we would reveal the true identity of “Mr. Goodfellow”; we would gloat; we would leave.
    Curtain.
    As it was, however, the first scene of our little production—the waiting—ran long. Every quarter hour or so, Sasanoff would pull out a watch and glumly mutter, “Any minute now . . . any minute, I’m sure.” It heartened him considerably when I pointed out that the watch he kept consulting was the Whelp’s own.
    Just as my fingers and toes were going numb with the cold, we heard something moving toward us from the road.
    â€œAt last,” Sasanoff whispered. “The fly enters the web.”
    And then someone finally stepped into the clearing below us . . . a mustachioed, bow-legged someone wearing a droopy, round-brimmed hat and rough clothes and mud-splattered boots.
    In his hands was the map Sasanoff himself had drawn that morning—the one he’d given to the Whelp.
    Hanging from the holster at his side was a revolver the approximate size of a small cannon.
    â€œWho in God’s name—?” I murmured.
    Sasanoff shushed me.
    The man moved slowly at first, glancing down and up, down and up, from the map to the glade before him. But when he spied the pile of stones (marked, but of course, with a thick-inked X on the map) he charged forward, cackling. When he reached the rocks, he began tossing them