Last night they took one of my brown ones, and to-day they have sneaked one of the black. I only had three pairs in the world-the new brown, the old black, and the patent leathers, which I am wearing. 'But, surely, you said that it was a new brown boot?' Holmes, but they've got a bit over the mark this time.'

By thunder, if that chap can't find my missing boot there will be trouble. 'They'll find they've started in to monkey with the wrong man unless they are careful. 'Seems to me they are playing me for a sucker in this hotel,' he cried. So furious was he that he was hardly articulate, and when he did speak it was in a much broader and more Western dialect than any which we had heard from him in the morning. His face was flushed with anger, and he held an old and dusty boot in one of his hands. 'It suggests-halloa, my dear fellow, what on earth is the matter?'Īs we came round the top of the stairs we had run up against Sir Henry Baskerville himself. That means that while they are, as we have seen, very anxious to watch him, they are equally anxious that he should not see them. 'We know now that the people who are so interested in our friend have not settled down in his own hotel. We have established a most important fact by these questions, Watson,' he continued in a low voice as we went upstairs together. 'Thank you I am afraid I cannot claim her acquaintance. She always comes to us when she is in town.' Her husband was once mayor of Gloucester.

Excuse my curiosity, but often in calling upon one friend one finds another.' Oldmore, too I seem to remember the name. 'No, sir! he has used this hotel for many years, and he is very well known to us.' 'Surely you are mistaken about his trade?' Johnson, the coal-owner, a very active gentleman, not older than yourself.' 'A lawyer, is he not, gray-headed, and walks with a limp?' 'Surely that must be the same Johnson whom I used to know,' said Holmes to the porter. One was Theophilus Johnson and family, of Newcastle the other Mrs.

The book showed that two names had been added after that of Baskerville.

'Have you any objection to my looking at your register?' said Holmes. 'He asked me to show you up at once when you came.' 'Sir Henry Baskerville is upstairs expecting you,' said the clerk. He would talk of nothing but art, of which he had the crudest ideas, from our leaving the gallery until we found ourselves at the Northumberland Hotel. For two hours the strange business in which we had been involved appeared to be forgotten, and he was entirely absorbed in the pictures of the modern Belgian masters. Sherlock Holmes had, in a very remarkable degree, the power of detaching his mind at will.

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