The Moor - Laurie R. King [26]
I panted up to him some time later, and tried to catch my breath before I addressed him. "We're not going to reach the inn before nightfall," I observed casually. It was easier to talk out of the wind, and one could even find patches of rain-shadow against the sides of the ravine.
"No."
"Nor are we sleeping in the Drake barn."
"I fervently hope not."
"You're looking for Gorton's shelter?" I ventured.
"Of course. Ah." This last was at a scuff on a stone half grown over with turf, a scuff such as a rough-shod man might have made some months before. It might as easily have been made by a hundred other things, but there was little point in mentioning this to Holmes: He was off like a hound on a scent, and I could only follow in his wake and see where we might end up.
Where we ended up was a heap of rubble piled between a stream and one wall of the low ravine that the water had cut over the millennia. I could see nothing there but a heap of stones, albeit an orderly heap; however, Holmes walked up to it, walked around it, and vanished. I waited until he emerged, looking satisfied and standing back in order to study the adjoining walls of the little ravine.
"When Watson wrote up the Baskerville story," he told me, "he had me living on the moor in a prehistoric stone hut. Actual neolithic dwellings, of course, have long been collapsed and cannibalised by farmers, until they are marked by little more than rough circles on the ground. A person might, conceivably, lie down flat beneath the height of the remaining walls, but as any roof they once had disintegrated a thousand years ago, there would be little benefit.
"What Watson meant, although it sounds less romantic, was one of these, a tin miner's hut—or in this case, to be precise, a blowing house, judging by the remnants of the furnace in that wall and the broken mold stone that now forms the doorstep. Considerably more recent construction than the neolithic, as you can see." During the course of this informative little lecture he had begun to climb up what my eyes were only now beginning to read as a manmade ruin rather than a natural rock-slide, and he now paused, balancing precariously on a pair of shaky stones, to reach with both arms into an indentation in the ravine wall. He tugged at something, which emerged as a much-dented bucket; hugging it to his chest, he leapt lightly down. "Peat," he said, and ducked again inside the pile of rock. This time I followed, into a room which was larger than appeared likely from outside, and had indeed once been a living space. "You intend to pass the night here," I said, not as a question, for Holmes was already laying a fire with the dry peat turves.
"If there are signs left of Gorton's disappearance, we shall see them in the morning," he said placidly.
I stared into the thought of the long, hungry night ahead of me, and thought, Oh well; at least we shall be out of the rain, and reasonably warm.
***
I had, in fact, underestimated Holmes, or at any rate his preference for some degree of comfort. He pulled from his knapsack a second parcel of food, thick beef and mustard sandwiches and boiled eggs, and followed the meal with coffee brewed in a tin cup, which also served as the shared drinking vessel. We wrapped ourselves in our garments, and prepared to sleep. Holmes was soon asleep, his snores barely audible over the sound of the storm, but I was kept awake by the eerie sob and moan of the wind, like a lost child outside our stone hut, and the low gurgle of running water, sounding like a half-heard conversation; once I started awake from a doze with the absolute certainty that there were eyes watching me from the entrance. I was very grateful