The Adventure at Baskerville Hall & Other Cases

all day waiting for the rain to clear. Towards the evening, when it became apparent that it would not stop before nightfall, I grimly donned my waterproofs and ventured out regardless.
    I walked far upon the sodden moor, full of dark imaginings, the rain beating upon my face and the wind whistling about my ears, and I thought with apprehension of those beings – human and animal – who might wander into the Great Mire now, for even the firm uplands were becoming a morass. I found the Black Tor and from its craggy summit I looked out across the melancholy downs. Rain squalls drifted across their russet face, and the rain clouds hung low over the landscape, trailing in gray wreaths down the sides of the fantastic hills. In the distant hollow on the left, half-hidden by the mist, the two thin towers of Baskerville Hall rose above the trees. They were the only signs of human life that I could see, save only the prehistoric huts that lay thickly upon the slopes of the hills.
    I mused on the two men who were living out in such conditions. One of them I now knew to be Selden, the escaped convict, thanks to Mrs. Barrymore's recent revelations, but I wondered who the other could be. Sir Henry and I had seen him when we gone out onto the moor that night with the intention of apprehending the convict. A tall, forbidding figure atop one of the tors on the moor, he had seemed to be watching us silently and I had assumed he must be one of the prison warders who had succeeded in following his charge this far.
    As a particularly savage gust of wind pushed icy fingers through a chink in my waterproofs, I shivered and wondered what passionate hatred could induce a man to live in such a place, and the next moment I began to make my way back towards the road, thinking with longing of supper and a good fire.
    As I walked back I was overtaken by Dr. Mortimer driving in his dogcart over a rough moorland track, which led from an outlying farmhouse. He had been very attentive to Sir Henry and me, and hardly a day had passed that he had not called at the Hall to see how we were getting on. He insisted upon my climbing into his dogcart, and he gave me a lift homewards. I found him much troubled over the disappearance of his little spaniel, for it had wandered onto the moor and not come back. I gave him such consolation as I could, but I thought of the pony on the Grimpen Mire and privately doubted that he would see his little dog again.
    "It is a dangerous place," he said sadly, and I suspected that his thoughts echoed my own. "I imagine you must have come prepared for it."
    He did not seem to require an answer, and I found my thoughts irrepressibly turning to the cab ride that I had shared with Holmes when on our way to meet Sir Henry and Dr. Mortimer at the station so that I could travel with them.
    "Watson, you do have your revolver, don't you?"
    "Yes, Holmes," I answered wearily, looking out of the window of the hansom cab as we rattled towards Paddington Station. It was the second time in as many hours that he had put that question to me, in addition to casually dropping the suggestion the previous night that perhaps I might want to take my firearm with me.
    His sudden solicitude rang somewhat hollow with me, as had all his previous attempts at assuring himself of my physical safety while we were to be parted. Doubtless it would be deuced inconvenient for such a man of logic if his assistant got himself killed by a giant spectral hound, the existence of which Holmes had scoffed at, I thought bitterly.
    "Keep your revolver with you night and day, and never relax your precautions. Furthermore, I would strongly recommend that you avoid the moor after dark. I know your wholly admirable inclination to confront danger head on, but in this case I think it would be prudent to tread carefully, at least until you have more information."
    "Very well," I said, keeping a tight rein on my temper at his fashion of addressing me as though I were an impulsive boy of seven and not an Army veteran.
    Holmes was silent for a few more minutes, then made as if to say something more but checked himself.
    "What is it?" I asked, after watching him fidget.
    "No, nothing," he said haltingly. "I do not wish to bias your mind by suggesting theories or suspicions; I wish you simply to report facts in the fullest possible manner to me."
    "What sort of facts?" I asked. I strongly suspected that such an inane, self-evident suggestion was not what he had originally been