The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Day was breaking now, and a line of workmen
were slowly making their way, singly and in
groups, along the blackened path.
McMurdo and Scanlan strolled on with the others,
keeping in sight of the men whom they followed.
A thick mist lay over them, and from the
heart of it there came the sudden scream of a steam
whistle. It was the ten-minute signal before the
cages descended and the day’s labour began.
When they reached the open space round the
mine shaft there were a hundred miners waiting,
stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers;
for it was bitterly cold. The strangers stood in a
little group under the shadow of the engine house.
Scanlan and McMurdo climbed a heap of slag from
which the whole scene lay before them. They
saw the mine engineer, a great bearded Scotchman
named Menzies, come out of the engine house and
blow his whistle for the cages to be lowered.
At the same instant a tall, loose-framed young
man with a clean-shaved, earnest face advanced
eagerly towards the pit head. As he came forward
his eyes fell upon the group, silent and motionless,
under the engine house. The men had
drawn down their hats and turned up their collars
to screen their faces. For a moment the presentiment
of Death laid its cold hand upon the manager’s
heart. At the next he had shaken it off and
saw only his duty towards intrusive strangers.
“Who are you?” he asked as he advanced.
“What are you loitering there for?”
There was no answer; but the lad Andrews
stepped forward and shot him in the stomach. The
hundred waiting miners stood as motionless and
helpless as if they were paralyzed. The manager
clapped his two hands to the wound and doubled
himself up. Then he staggered away; but another
of the assassins fired, and he went down sidewise,
kicking and clawing among a heap of clinkers.
Menzies, the Scotchman, gave a roar of rage at the
sight and rushed with an iron spanner at the murderers;
but was met by two balls in the face which
dropped him dead at their very feet.
There was a surge forward of some of the miners,
and an inarticulate cry of pity and of anger;
but a couple of the strangers emptied their sixshooters
over the heads of the crowd, and they
broke and scattered, some of them rushing wildly
back to their homes in Vermissa.
When a few of the bravest had rallied, and
there was a return to the mine, the murderous
gang had vanished in the mists of morning, without
a single witness being able to swear to the
The Valley Of Fear
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identity of these men who in front of a hundred
spectators had wrought this double crime.
Scanlan and McMurdo made their way back;
Scanlan somewhat subdued, for it was the first
murder job that he had seen with his own eyes,
and it appeared less funny than he had been led
to believe. The horrible screams of the dead manager’s
wife pursued them as they hurried to the
town. McMurdo was absorbed and silent; but
he showed no sympathy for the weakening of his
companion.
“Sure, it is like a war,” he repeated. “What is it
but a war between us and them, and we hit back
where we best can.”
There was high revel in the lodge room at the
Union House that night, not only over the killing
of the manager and engineer of the Crow Hill
mine, which would bring this organization into
line with the other blackmailed and terror-stricken
companies of the district, but also over a distant
triumph which had been wrought by the hands of
the lodge itself.
It would appear that when the County Delegate
had sent over five good men to strike a blow
in Vermissa, he had demanded that in return three
Vermissa men should be secretly selected and sent
across to kill William Hales of Stake Royal, one
of the best known and most popular mine owners
in the Gilmerton district, a man who was believed
not to have an enemy in the world; for he was in all
ways a model employer. He had insisted, however,
upon efficiency in the work, and had, therefore,
paid off certain drunken and idle employees who
were members of the all-powerful society. Coffin
notices hung outside his door had not weakened
his resolution, and so in a free, civilized country
he found himself condemned to death.
The execution had now been duly carried out.
Ted Baldwin, who sprawled now in the seat of
honour beside the Bodymaster, had been chief of
the party. His flushed face and glazed, blood-shot
eyes told of sleeplessness and drink. He and his
two comrades had spent the night before among
the mountains. They were unkempt and weatherstained.
But no heroes, returning from a forlorn
hope, could have had a warmer welcome from
their comrades.
The story was told and retold amid cries of delight
and shouts of laughter. They had waited for
their man as he drove home at nightfall, taking
their station at the top of a steep hill, where his
horse must be at a walk. He was so furred to
keep out the cold that he could not lay his hand
on his pistol. They had pulled him out and shot