Page:The Return of Sherlock Holmes, edition published in 1905 by McClure, Phillips & Co., New York..djvu/321

 XI

THE ADVENTURE OF

THE MISSING THREE-QUARTER

E were fairly accustomed to receive weird telegrams at Baker Street, but I have a particular recollection of one which reached us on a gloomy February morning, some seven or eight years ago, and gave Mr. Sherlock Holmes a puzzled quarter of an hour. It was addressed to him, and ran thus:— “Please await me. Terrible misfortune. Right wing three-quarter missing, indispensable to-morrow.—.”

“Strand postmark, and dispatched ten-thirty-six,” said Holmes, reading it over and over. “Mr. Overton was evidently considerably excited when he sent it, and somewhat incoherent in consequence. Well, well, he will be here, I dare say, by the time I have looked through the Times, and then we shall know all about it. Even the most insignificant problem would be welcome in these stagnant days.″

Things had indeed been very slow with us, and I had learned to dread such periods of inaction, for I knew by experience that my companion’s brain was so abnormally active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work. For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug-mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable