The Moor - Laurie R. King [130]
"May have gone with him."
"He was behind us."
"Oh God. I hope I haven't killed him." I looked in apprehension back at the cloud of dust, swirling mightily in the still shaft of light from the miraculously unbroken torch that Ketteridge had dropped. It was only then that I realised the rain had stopped. "I did not imagine that the blast would be so big."
"It should not have been. Perhaps the cliff was unstable. I shall have to leave you to deal with Scheiman. Can you do that?"
"Holmes, you can't go after Ketteridge without a weapon. At least wait until we've taken Scheiman's gun away from him."
"Russell, I will not permit a second villain to escape me on this moor," he said grimly. "Follow when you can." He caught up the torch from the ground and flung himself up the hill after Ketteridge.
I replaced the spent shell, and with great circumspection I went downstream to the site of the blast, expecting at any moment to be pounced upon by the murderous secretary. When I found him, though, he was quite incapable of pouncing, being unconscious and half buried under tons of rock from the collapsed hillside. I checked his pockets, removing the sturdy clasp knife I found in one of them, and then set about digging him out.
One ankle was broken, and the bone above it as well, and I knew he would be black from the waist down by the next day. If he lived that long. I dragged him away, tied his hands behind his back, then took off my waterproof and my woollen overcoat and tucked them securely around him. I would prefer that if this escapade cost Scheiman his life, it be at the hands of a judge, not mine.
I did not find his gun, which must either have fallen from his pocket or been flung from his grasp, but I knew that if I could not see it, he was not likely to find it either. I turned to follow Holmes and Ketteridge up onto the moor.
From high on the remains of my protective tor it was an easy thing to find the men, two beams of light moving across the darkling plain, perhaps half a mile apart and going west. It was difficult to tell how far off the closer of the torches was, but I thought not less than two miles. I started down the hill in their wake.
Following the river upstream, I reached a place where it was little more than a stream, and there I found Ketteridge's vehicle, the means Scheiman had devised to frighten the moor dwellers: Lady Howard's coach. I took a moment to look at it and found to my surprise that underneath the big square superstructure with the remains of phosphorescent paint daubed on the corners—the "glowing bones" of the Lady's hapless husbands—lay the same powerful touring car that had carried us to and from Baskerville Hall, with the standard Dunlop tyres replaced by large, highly inflated tubes that would leave no tracks and also serve to underscore the ghostly silence of the thing. They had probably been inspired by the secret amphibious tank, I realised—Mycroft would be incensed—and, the horse that had appeared to be pulling it must have been ridden by one of the men, with loose harnesses jangling for effect. Abruptly, I remembered that I had no time to moon over the device; I tore my attention from it and headed back out onto the moor.
My distance from the two men meant I had continually to climb the heights to keep track of their progress, so that run as I might, I could not gain on them. Each time I climbed, there were still the two of them, although the distance between them slowly decreased, as Ketteridge had to choose his path while Holmes merely followed. In fact, I began to wonder if Holmes was not deliberately keeping his distance. I redoubled my efforts.
The wind had calmed considerably, but when I thought I heard a faint cracking noise from the vast space before me, I could not be certain. I shone my light desperately all around, found a rise, followed it, stood on my toes on a boulder, and saw a light, one single light. It was not moving.
I ran. Oblivious of streams and stones and the hellish waterlogged dips