Sherlock Holmes: The American Years by Michael Kurland Read Free Book Online Page A

Avenue heading toward the ball grounds near Dutch Point. At several places I had a prickly sensation of being watched—more than usual, that is—and took the trouble to ensure that my billfold resided in its customary pocket. Once I spun around but found nothing to provoke suspicion beyond some noisy street-boys, whose numbers grew thick outside the grounds. I watched a squad of fly-cops try to keep young invaders from gaining entry over, under, or between the planks of the tall fence. They also labored to pacify those who had not purchased tickets ahead, and now found the sales office closed.
    “But it’s a glorified game of rounders!” I heard a decidedly English voice protest, and turned to see a tall, thin young man in London-cut tweeds engaged in negotiations with a shady-looking hawker. “Why the deuce is your price so dear?”
    He would prove to be Holmes.
    Inside the gates I moved to the Pavilion, a new covered stand built for the occasion. Tickets for it, originally 75 cents, had been trading upwards of five dollars, and the dullest saphead could see that these seats had been criminally oversold. Now they were fairly bursting. With gyrations to make a snake blush, I worked my way to my allotted space near the top. From there I could see the 50-cent “bleaching boards” that flanked the Pavilion likewise packed with raw humanity, and beyond them, behind ropes stretching around the outfields, men standing shoulder to shoulder in the 25-cent“bullpens.” With a seasoned eye I put the throng at ten thousand—surely the biggest ever for a New England sporting event.
    Who was pocketing all the gate money?
    As if galvanized by the thought, my lefthand neighbor, an overstuffed banker by the name of Ashcroft, introduced himself—or rather,
re
introduced himself, claiming we’d met the previous winter—and presented his prune-faced wife, seated on his other side. She gave me a sour stare through an ivory lorgnette, her general demeanor lifted from a chromo ad for galloping dyspepsia. Noting Ashcroft’s jowls quivering with each utterance, I
did
recall him: I’d been trapped with him in a club room and sorely regretted the experience. Politically, he regarded high tariffs as proofs of God’s workings. Personally, he was a raging dullard.
    The red-legged Bostons trotted on to the field; then came the Hartfords, natty in their navy blues. I leaned back contentedly, ignited a cigar (only my fifth of the day; I was heeding Livy’s dictum to cut back), and inhaled an elixir of tobacco, pungent mustard, and the Pavilion’s fresh-planed pine. The grass of the outfield radiated emerald green. Vendors’ cries—
Soda water here! New York ginger snaps!
—sounded in my ears.
    How perfect, I thought, tracking wrens in the rafters above me, how
dear
to be playing hooky like the rawest of schoolboys. Like my own Tom Sawyer, whose adventures I’d nearly finished writing—
should be at home working on it that very instant
—but instead of squeezing out Tom’s story up in my study, here I was free,
being
Tom. Work on the boy’s novel had thrust me deep into the territory of my own youth. Today’s sporting affair, though conducted by top-paid professionals, quickened memories of town-ball games in Hannibal played in drowsy summer afternoons during thosetoo-brief years before my pap died and I’d apprenticed as a typesetter, my boyhood effectively ended.
    “Sorry,” a voice said, as I was jostled and felt a hand briefly grip my shoulder. I looked up and saw the Englishman I’d glimpsed outside the gate; he must have accommodated the hawker. Squeezing in on my right side, he looked no more cheerful than I about the tight circumstances. “Yours?” With a bony finger he indicated the umbrella, perched at the bench’s rear edge. I thanked him and moved it to safety.
    Staring idly at urchins trying to scale the weathered boards bordering the grounds, I felt an idea stirring. The whitewashing scene wherein Tom is