'll take him with me."

Meantime the road in front of the tavern was blocked with villagers
waiting and hoping for a glimpse of the great man. But he kept his room,
and did not appear. None but Ferguson, Jake Parker the blacksmith, and
Ham Sandwich had any luck. These enthusiastic admirers of the great
scientific detective hired the tavern's detained-baggage lockup, which
looked into the detective's room across a little alleyway ten or twelve
feet wide, ambushed themselves in it, and cut some peep-holes in the
window-blind. Mr. Holmes's blinds were down; but by-and-by he raised
them. It gave the spies a hair-lifting but pleasurable thrill to find
themselves face to face with the Extraordinary Man who had filled
the world with the fame of his more than human ingenuities. There he
sat--not a myth, not a shadow, but real, alive, compact of substance,
and almost within touching distance with the hand.

"Look at that head!" said Ferguson, in an awed voice. "By gracious!
that's a head!"

"You bet!" said the blacksmith, with deep reverence. "Look at his nose!
look at his eyes! Intellect? Just a battery of it!"

"And that paleness," said Ham Sandwich. "Comes from thought--that's what
it comes from. Hell! duffers like us don't know what real thought is."

"No more we don't," said Ferguson. "What we take for thinking is just
blubber-and-slush."

"Right you are, Wells-Fargo. And look at that frown--that's deep
thinking--away down, down, forty fathom into the bowels of things. He's
on the track of something."

"Well, he is, and don't you forget it. Say--look at that awful
gravity--look at that pallid solemness--there ain't any corpse can lay
over it."

"No, sir, not for dollars! And it's his'n by hereditary rights, too;
he's been dead four times a'ready, and there's history for it. Three
times natural, once by accident. I've heard say he smells damp and cold,
like a grave. And he--"

"'Sh! Watch him! There--he's got his thumb on the bump on the near
corner of his forehead, and his forefinger on the off one. His
think-works is just a-grinding now, you bet your other shirt."

"That's so. And now he's gazing up toward heaven and stroking his
mustache slow, and--"

"Now he has rose up standing, and is putting his clues together on his
left fingers with his right finger. See? he touches the forefinger--now
middle finger--now ring-finger--"

"Stuck!"

"Look at him scowl! He can't seem to make out that clue. So he--"