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By Root 3082 0

springs had dried up, and the spas had been replaced by a collection of mills. In their early days these large brickworks had produced wool, cotten, linens, and a peculiar battle-axe what looked like a Turkish scimitar (this last for the Union Army during the Civil War). But even the mills had fallen on hard times by 1897. Most of them had been built along a rushing creek what ran through the town, the Kayaderosseras (an old Iroquois word what meant something to the effect of “stream of the crooked waters”), but in the years that followed so much lumbering had been done around the stream’s watershed that the Kayaderosseras itself had been reduced to a trickling little creek what couldn’t power anything of consequence. So now the black smoke of furnaces poured from the chimneys of the mills, which, though they still made some farm tools, were currently known mostly for paper products.

Cyrus’s guidebook tried to relate all this information in what you might call a positive fashion, but there wasn’t much way to avoid the conclusion that—because of their own shortsightedness and in the space of just a century—the citizens of Ballston Spa had gone from operating the best health retreats in the North to boasting that their town was home to “the world’s finest paper bags.” The old resort hotels, which couldn’t compete with a string of gigantic, luxurious competitors what’d opened in nearby Saratoga Springs, had either been converted to boarding-houses for factory workers or burned down. Still, nobody ever thought to rename the town, even though, by 1897, there wasn’t much about Ballston that brought the word “spa” to mind.

The train depot sat just below a hill what separated the industrial parts of the town from the homes of the local swells. On top of said hill ran what some imaginative mug had named High Street, where most of the town’s churches, along with the county offices, were located. The station building itself wasn’t much to look at, just a long, low structure of the type you generally find in such places; and the few people who were standing out on the platform waiting for our train to pull in seemed made to match. All, that is, except for one of them:

He was all the way out on the easternmost end of the platform, as if he knew that Mr. Moore liked sitting at the back of trains and would’ve convinced us all to do likewise (which, in fact, he had). Smoking a pipe like his life depended on it, the short, ginger-haired man was also by turns pulling on a neatly clipped beard and mustache and running a hand through his similarly cut hair, all the while looking in every direction and walking round the platform as if the thing was on fire. His eyes, which I later determined were a very light grey, seemed a sort of silvery color from a distance, and they carried an expression that was both determined and a little wild. He pulled his watch out no less than three times while our train was slowing to a stop—just why I couldn’t say, seeing as we’d already arrived—and each time he tucked it away with a look of worry, then smoked and paced some more. I lost sight of the fellow as we made our way to the door of our car; but somehow I knew this was the man we’d come to see.

Mr. Moore turned to the rest of us as the train groaned and squeaked into the station. “All right, listen, all of you,” he said, his voice urgent. “Especially you, Kreizler. There’s one thing I neglected to mention about Rupert, because I didn’t want to discourage you from trusting the case to him. He truly is brilliant, but—well, the fact of the matter is, he can’t shut up.”

The rest of us looked at each other with expressions what indicated a shared belief that this must be some kind of gag.

“What do you mean, Moore?” the Doctor asked. “If he’s excessively verbal—”

“No,” Mr. Moore answered. “I mean he can’t shut up.”

Marcus laughed. “Of course he can’t. He’s a lawyer, for God’s sake—”

“No,” Mr. Moore said again. “It’s something more—something physical. He’s been to doctors about it. Some kind of—compulsion or something, I forget what they call it.”

“Pressured