The Seventh Bullet by Daniel D. Victor Read Free Book Online

the darkness outside thewindow lessened, and the more superfluous seemed the dim glow in the fireplace. Nonetheless, message completed, Mycroft turned to the grate and held his hands before the dying red embers.
    “I do believe, Watson,” Holmes said, “that before we both go running off to America, I really ought to see if this American and his wife who are both so closely tied to one of the principals in the case have anything of interest to tell me.”
    I was forced to concur, of course, much as I didn’t relish travelling to New York to begin the investigation on my own. Still, the charming Mrs. Frevert, who promised to be so very hospitable, would be waiting, and I could begin gathering information for Holmes as I had done so many times before.
    Suddenly Mycroft turned from the fire to face me.
    “Since you seem determined to get yourself implicated in my brother’s rashness, Doctor,” he said, “I feel compelled to tell you what I have already told him. Mrs. Frevert’s point about the seventh bullet? Absolute poppycock. Typical fancy of an overactive female mind. I can understand my quixotic brother falling for that kind of nonsense, Dr. Watson, but I was counting on you, a man of science, to be more sensible. I had hoped of talking you both out of this fool’s errand, but I see now that I was sadly mistaken.”
    Having finished speaking, Mycroft turned his back on us and resumed facing the grate, a position that Holmes and I rightly took as his announcement that our meeting had ended.
    At least, by the time we left the Diogenes Club, the rain had disappeared.
    Thanks to Mycroft’s arranging my travelling papers, the preparations for the trip went smoothly. Within two days, I hadbeen able to send my wife on a month’s visit to Lincolnshire, refer all of my patients to Harley Street, provide the appropriate instructions to our maid Polly, and pack the various clothes and necessities I thought I would be needing on such an adventure, including my old Eley’s No. 2. “Be sure to carry a pistol, Watson,” Holmes had warned me. “You’re going to America, after all.”
    Despite the distance of my impending voyage, our leave-taking was hardly a sentimental affair. Holmes gave me my instructions: to gather information on as many of the personages involved with Phillips’s death as I could before his own arrival, which he estimated at about a week after mine. Just before my departure, however, he did offer me some final thoughts on the enormity of the crime we were about to scrutinise, and these he pronounced with the greatest degree of seriousness. “Murder is a monstrous act, Watson,” he said, “but political assassination is more heinous still; in a political murder, not only is the victim destroyed, but also the aspirations of those whose ideals and dreams he champions.”
    With those words still reverberating in my mind, I found myself about to travel south for the second time in less than a week. On this occasion, however, my ultimate destination was not the southern coast of England but rather the eastern seaboard of the United States of America, a prospect that filled me with both excitement and trepidation.
    The boat-train for Southampton left from Waterloo. This, the largest railway nexus in London, was in the throes of reconstruction. Over the first six platforms, workmen were toiling on a mammoth glass and steel roof that allowed a hazy morning sunshine to flood the hall.
    Although many compartments in the first-class carriages werecrowded, mine was occupied by only a solitary traveller, an ageing, bespectacled vicar whose balding head was fringed with grey. Reading a well-fingered Bible, he looked up as the warning whistle sounded, but returned to his text once the train had lurched into the start of its eighty-mile journey.
    Rattling past shops and warehouses and later suburban gardens filled with crocuses and daffodils, we soon left London. Indeed, even before the slate-roofed houses of the