Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [100]
But how to get there?
He could rent a horse here in town, he guessed. He could ride out to where the balloons were being launched from. He’d seen the location, marked on the map that Amyus Crowe had been consulting a few hours before. He hadn’t consciously memorized it but, like so many things that he read, it had just lodged in his brain.
Should he take Virginia and Matty? Their presence would be comforting, but he had a feeling that this was his battle. They cared about it less than he did, and he had no right to drag them into it.
He got up and got dressed in fresh clothes that Amyus Crowe had managed to find somewhere in town. They were still new and made him itch, but the thought of putting on the same clothes he’d been wearing for the past couple of days filled him with horror.
Crowe was in the dining room, talking with two other men in suits. They had guns slung on low belts at their waists. Sherlock assumed they were from the Pinkerton Agency. He slipped past them while they were distracted and headed out into the open air.
The boardwalks along the edges of the street were filled with people wandering back and forth or just standing and talking. Sherlock walked along with the flow until he saw something that looked like a stables. He went inside.
‘Can I help you, son?’ a voice said. Sherlock looked around. An elderly man came out of the darkness – bald apart from a fringe of white hair around the back of his head, and a bushy white moustache.
‘I need a horse, just for the day,’ Sherlock said.
‘That’s convenient,’ the man said. ‘I got a horse that ain’t had any exercise for a while. Looks like we got ourselves a perfect match.’
‘How much?’ Sherlock asked.
‘Let’s call it a ten-dollar deposit, an’ nine dollars back when you return.’
Sherlock passed the money across, and the man led him to a stall where a brown mare patiently stood. She eyed him speculatively as the elderly man saddled her.
Sherlock glanced around the stables. Apart from the general tack – saddles, reins, stirrups – that was hanging from hooks, there was also a whole load of stuff that Sherlock didn’t recognize. They looked like weapons -bows, spears, axes – but they were decorated with feathers, and leather thongs.
‘Mementoes of the fights we had with the natives over the years,’ the man said, noticing the direction of Sherlock’s gaze. ‘The Pamunkey and Mattaponi tribes gave us a lot of trouble when we was building this town. They collected our scalps; my grandpa and my pa collected their tomahawks, spears, knives and bows.’
Sherlock thought about what he was heading into – a hostile army, an attacking force and a wilderness where coyotes prowled. He didn’t want to take a gun, and he was pretty sure nobody would give him one, but some kind of weapon might be a good thing. ‘For another dollar,’ he said, ‘could I borrow a bow, a quiver of arrows and a knife?’
‘No,’ the man said. He cocked his head to one side. ‘But five dollars would do it.’
Ten minutes later, Sherlock was riding out of the stables with a knife in his belt, a quiver full of arrows on his back and a bow strapped to his saddle. He thought he saw Matty and Virginia outside the hotel as he rode past, but they flashed by too quickly to tell for sure, and he wasn’t going to stop.
Remembering Amyus Crowe’s map, Sherlock struck out across country, at an angle to the train line. The landscape he was heading into was more hilly than the plains that the train line had been built across. He cantered along the edge of the foothills that emerged from the grasslands, rising up to a series of low, rounded peaks.
After an hour of riding through a landscape of bushes and small copses of trees he crossed a wide, shallow stream that flowed like a blue, sparkling ribbon from up in the hills. As his horse’s hoofs splashed the water and kicked up small