Young Sherlock Holmes_ Red Leech - Andrew Lane [97]
‘What’s a coyote?’ Matty called from the back.
‘It’s like a wolf,’ Virginia replied.
‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘I wonder what they taste like.’
‘Funnily enough,’ Virginia said, ‘that howl probably means they’re wonderin’ the same about you.’
The moon rose above the horizon: a bloated white disc, seemingly much larger than Sherlock remembered from England. Surely America wasn’t any nearer the moon? The world was round, after all. Every point on its surface had to be the same distance from the moon. The only explanation he could come up with was that there was something about the atmosphere, some trick of the heated air, that magnified the image and made the moon look larger.
After a while he realized Matty was talking to himself. Sherlock had assumed that he was talking to Virginia, but Matty was leaving gaps and Virginia wasn’t filling them. It was as if Matty could hear a voice that nobody else could. A hallucination? Maybe the tiredness and the lack of food was getting to him. He’d had a stressful couple of weeks, after all.
Even though he was thinking about Matty hallucinating, it didn’t seem odd to Sherlock that Mrs Eglantine, the housekeeper from his aunt and uncle’s house, was walking alongside him for some of the journey. She didn’t say anything to him. She just looked at him with disapproving eyes, her mouth pursed into a tight little bud, her head shaking from side to side. He didn’t know when she had appeared and he didn’t know when she vanished. All he knew is that for at least part of the journey, she had been there, a silent companion keeping pace with him. Odd, he thought – of all the people he might have imagined walking beside him, why her? Why not Mycroft, or Amyus Crowe? Come to that, if his mind was disturbed, why not any of the people whose lives he had been responsible for – Mr Surd, Gilfillan, Ives or Grivens? Even Plato would have been a better travelling companion than Mrs Eglantine.
If Virginia saw anyone who wasn’t there then she never said anything about it, either then or later.
By the light of the moon, Sherlock saw the occasional barn or farmhouse silhouetted on the horizon. He thought about diverting off their path and stopping to ask for help, or at least food and drink, but something kept him going along the line of the tracks. Explanations would take time, and might just land them in more trouble. And besides, the one thing they needed was a telegraph office, and that would only be found at a train station in a town.
After a while the few scattered barns and farmhouses turned into a handful, and then what looked like a scattered community. They were on the outskirts of something. If they were lucky, it would be the town. Sherlock didn’t remember the train passing through any other large collections of buildings after leaving the station at Perseverance, but he hadn’t been looking out of the window all the time. Other things had been happening to distract his attention. It was possible this was a different town, one without a station or a telegraph office, in which case he decided that they would stop, if only for a short while. Maybe they could pay someone to drive them to Perseverance.
A flush of rose-hued colour spread across the horizon as they walked. The sun was coming up. Had they really been walking all night? Judging by the stiffness of his muscles and the dryness of his throat, Sherlock suspected they had.
Or was it just another hallucination, like Mrs Eglantine?
After hours of travelling in a straight line across the landscape, the train lines curved now, leading into the centre of the town. And finally, there ahead of them, was the cluster of buildings that Sherlock remembered from when the three of them had briefly got off the train – the station, and the outhouses. They had arrived. Against the odds, they had arrived.
A train was drawn up in the sidings beside the station. It was shorter