The Moor - Laurie R. King [23]
"Well, Holmes," I said, "I can certainly see why a person would fall in love with Dartmoor."
"It is said to be quite pleasant in the summer," he said gloomily.
"By comparison, I'm sure it is. How much farther do we have?"
We did actually have a destination in this trackless waste. We had taken on the rôle of eyes and legs for Baring-Gould, but even Holmes, who had covered much of this same ground thirty years before, did not have the man's intimate knowledge of the place from which judgements could be drawn. The old man back in Lew Trenchard might instantly visualise the lie of the land at any given spot on the map, but his representatives needed to walk it first. Hence our expedition, and if the weather was not as we might wish, it did not appear that waiting for a clear day was a practical option. For all I knew this was a clear day, for Dartmoor.
Our trip was to be a large circle, putting up at a public house for the night halfway along. We were looking now for the place where the dead tin miner had last been seen, and after that would try to find the spot where in July a benighted farmhand had been terrified by a ghostly coach and a dog with a glowing eye, and the other place, two miles away and a month further on, where the courting couple had been rudely interrupted by the same coach.
I finished my apple, Holmes knocked out his pipe and stowed it, and we both settled our hats more firmly over our noses and ducked out of the leather doorway.
"Holmes," I said, raising my collar and resuming the hunched-over walking position that was necessary in order to keep the rain off my spectacles. "If Lady Howard stops her ghostly carriage to offer us a ride, I for one will accept. With pleasure."
***
Josiah Gorton's last known path told us nothing whatsoever. Other than being one remote area among 350 square miles of remote countryside, there was nothing to distinguish it. According to Baring-Gould, the farm labourer who stopped to talk with Gorton lived over the hill and often travelled that way of a Saturday night, on his way to the inn where Gorton had spent the afternoon.
"Why, if he'd been snug inside all afternoon, did Gorton leave?" I asked. "I'd have thought Saturday evening the high point of the week, particularly for someone accustomed to cadging drinks."
"According to the publican when I was through here the other day, Gorton said he had business to attend to, unlikely as that might sound. No need to enquire further at the inn." And so saying he turned, not in the direction of the inn, but towards the remote farm over the hill. Stifling a sigh, I followed.
It was a small farmstead, mossy and pinched and cowering down into the hillside away from the elements.
"A place this size couldn't have more than one hired man," Holmes observed, heading for the barn. There we found him, a young man with a head like a furry turnip, scratching the broad, flat expanse of it beneath his cap and pursing his lips as he stood staring down at a prostrate cow. He glanced at us incuriously, as if we were oft-seen residents of the place rather than that rarity, the unexpected visitor, and then returned immediately to his perusal of the huge, heaving sides of the animal at his feet.
"I doan s'pose you knaw how ta turn a calf," were his first words to us.
"Er, no," Holmes admitted. "Unless?" He turned to me, and the young man looked up in hope.
"No," I said firmly. "Sorry."
His face fell back into its morose state. "I can't do'n. I tried an' tried, but my hand, she just gets squeezed and dies. Poor ole cow," he said with unexpected affection. "Her'll just have to bide 'til Doctor gets here, that's all. He'll charge me half what the calf be worth," he added. Long, contemplative seconds ticked by before he looked up, realising at last that he was not conversing with family members or two spirits of the moor. He asked,