Page:The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927).djvu/148

 will ease your mind. You wife is a very good, a very loving, and a very ill-used woman.”

Ferguson sat up with a cry of joy.

“Prove that, Mr. Holmes, and I am your debtor for ever.”

“I will do so, but in doing so I must wound you deeply in another direction.”

“I care nothing so long as you clear my wife. Everything on earth is insignificant compared to that.”

“Let me tell you, then, the train of reasoning which passed through my mind in Baker Street. The idea of a vampire was to me absurd. Such things do not happen in criminal practice in England. And yet your observation was precise. You had seen the lady rise from beside the child’s cot with the blood upon her lips.”

“I did.”

“Did it not occur to you that a bleeding wound may be sucked for some other purpose than to draw the blood from it? Was there not a Queen in English history who sucked such a wound to draw poison from it?”

“Poison!”

“A South American household. My instinct felt the presence of those weapons upon the wall before my eyes ever saw them. It might have been other poison, but that was what occurred to me. When I saw that little empty quiver beside the small bird-bow, it was just what I expected to see. If the child were pricked with one of those arrows dipped in curare or some other devilish drug, it would mean death if the venom were not sucked out.

“And the dog! If one were to use such a poison,