ving by the
conjuring tricks that I had learned. What use was it for me, a wretched
cripple, to go back to England or to make myself known to my old
comrades? Even my wish for revenge would not make me do that. I had
rather that Nancy and my old pals should think of Harry Wood as having
died with a straight back, than see him living and crawling with a stick
like a chimpanzee. They never doubted that I was dead, and I meant that
they never should. I heard that Barclay had married Nancy, and that he
was rising rapidly in the regiment, but even that did not make me speak.

"But when one gets old one has a longing for home. For years I've been
dreaming of the bright green fields and the hedges of England. At last I
determined to see them before I died. I saved enough to bring me across,
and then I came here where the soldiers are, for I know their ways and
how to amuse them and so earn enough to keep me."

"Your narrative is most interesting," said Sherlock Holmes. "I have
already heard of your meeting with Mrs. Barclay, and your mutual
recognition. You then, as I understand, followed her home and saw
through the window an altercation between her husband and her, in which
she doubtless cast his conduct to you in his teeth. Your own feelings
overcame you, and you ran across the lawn and broke in upon them."

"I did, sir, and at the sight of me he looked as I have never seen a man
look before, and over he went with his head on the fender. But he was
dead before he fell. I read death on his face as plain as I can read
that text over the fire. The bare sight of me was like a bullet through
his guilty heart."

"And then?"

"Then Nancy fainted, and I caught up the key of the door from her hand,
intending to unlock it and get help. But as I was doing it it seemed to
me better to leave it alone and get away, for the thing might look black
against me, and any way my secret would be out if I were taken. In my
haste I thrust the key into my pocket, and dropped my stick while I was
chasing Teddy, who had run up the curtain. When I got him into his box,
from which he had slipped, I was off as fast as I could run."

"Who's Teddy?" asked Holmes.

The man leaned over and pulled up the front of a kind of hutch in
the corner. In an instant out there slipped a beautiful reddish-brown
creature, thin and lithe, with the legs of a stoat, a long, thin nose,
and a pair of the finest red eyes that ever I saw in an animal's head.

"It's a