Death on a Pale Horse by Donald Thomas Page B

Let me explain.
    While I was convalescing at Peshawar our attendants used to wheel us out in our beds every morning on to the balconies of the wards. The clear air from the Khyber hills and the mild breezes from the fertile plains of the Punjab were supposed to invigorate our constitutions. There was little to do but lie propped on the pillows, talking or reading.
    One morning my neighbour, a captain from the Somerset Light Infantry, was sitting on the edge of his bed in his dressing-gown and cap reading a copy of London Life . This was an illustrated periodical full of the gossip and humour of the day at home. Its features relied much on news or pictures of the West End stage and the London season. It was sent out monthly to the mess-rooms and clubs of the British Army in India, no doubt to boost our morale in what was now being called “The Second Afghan War.” Captain Coombes handed his copy to me, his finger indicating a small paragraph at the foot of the page.
    I read what followed.
    W. S. Scott Holmes is an English Shakespearean actor now entertaining the best society in New York. He sends us a puzzle. His grandfather, William Sigismund Holmes, lived a hundred years ago. It was a world before steam engines or telegraphs. In 1786 the good Sigismund bet one of his creditors a hundred guineas that he could send a letter fifty miles in an hour. At this time, a carriage horse would only cover six miles in an hour, while at twenty miles an hour the fastest racehorse would be exhausted in a few minutes. A ship under full sail in a strong wind would not even equal that. How did Sigismund Holmes do it? See the answer on page fifty-four.
    I leafed my way through the magazine and came to the solution.
    Sigismund employed the twenty-two young men who had represented the varsity teams of Oxford and Cambridge at their first game of cricket. They appeared dressed in white flannels and shirts, with caps and padded gloves, on the Old Steine at Brighton. Here they formed a line, twenty yards apart from one another, a quarter of a mile in all. All this was done under the eyes of the Prince Regent himself—a sportsman if ever there was one! The letter was enclosed in a cricket ball. It flew with great speed and accuracy from one expert fielder to the next, along the line and back, over and over. At the end of the hour the letter had travelled fifty-one and a half miles. The ingenious Sigismund Holmes was a hundred guineas less in debt. Any doubters may find this feat confirmed by the celebrated sporting writer C. J. Apperley, popularly known as “Nimrod.”
    NB: For every curiosity of this kind printed, the proprietors of the London Life will be pleased to pay the correspondent two and a half guineas.
    I was amused by Sigismund’s trick but gave not a second thought to his grandson. As his admirers will know, in those early days W. S. Scott Holmes was the stage name of William Sherlock Scott Holmes. He returned to the chemical laboratory of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and resumed his career as a criminal investigator after a year on the boards in America with the Sassanoff Shakespeare Touring Company. Thereafter, as a consulting detective, he chose to be known more simply as “Sherlock Holmes.”
    Those who have read my narrative of the Brixton Road murder, given to the public under the somewhat sensational title of A Study in Scarlet , may recall something of the events which led to my first meeting with this future friend. When I had disembarked from the Orontes at Portsmouth, I was classified as a military invalid with little or no prospect of a further career in my chosen profession. Until their final decision was communicated, the Army medical board left me to lead a comfortless London existence at a private hotel in the Strand. The place was no better than a boarding-house for impoverished widows and widowers in their last years. My princely income was an allowance of four pounds and six pence a