Of all the cases in which I was privileged to stand at my friend's elbow, there is none he was more unwilling to see in print than the affair of the barque Matilda Briggs. More than once in later years, when I proposed it, he shook his head and told me the public was not ready to hear it. I am not sure that the public is ready now. But the box at Cox's grows no lighter, and I have decided to set down at least the beginning of the matter, and to let the reader judge.

It was in the third week of November, 1887, in a fog that had lain upon London for four days and showed no inclination to leave, that Mrs. Hudson showed into our sitting-room a square, weather-beaten man of fifty, with a beard like a wire brush and the seaman's habit of standing with his feet apart, as though our carpet might at any moment take a roll to starboard.

"Captain McNerney," said Holmes, before our visitor had opened his mouth, "you are three or four days in from the East, by way of the Cape; you carry pepper and coffee, a good deal of both; you have not slept for two nights; and you have brought with you, on the skirts of your coat, the smell of something that is neither."

The captain stared at him, and then at the card in his own hand, which Holmes had certainly not read.

"My name was in the shipping news, Captain," said Holmes, "with the name of your barque, and her port of departure, which was Padang. The pepper I can smell from here, and the coffee is in the creases of your sleeves, where a man gets it who has stood over the hatches watching it come up in sacks. Your eyes tell me the rest. Pray sit down. It is the third smell that interests me."

"It's the beast," said Captain McNerney heavily, and sat. "God help me, Mr. Holmes, it's the beast. It's been on my ship a hundred and twenty days, and I can't get it out of my clothes, nor my crew's heads, nor my own. And now it's gone, and I'm not sure that isn't worse."

His story, when he had collected himself, was this. The Matilda Briggs, six hundred and forty tons, had sailed from Padang, on the west coast of Sumatra, in the last week of July, with coffee and black pepper for London. On the morning she sailed, his first mate, a Mr. Timothy Atchley, had come aboard with two porters carrying a wooden cage with iron bars, perhaps two feet long, and a creature in it. Atchley said he had bought it from a native dealer up the coast for a dealer in live animals in the Ratcliff Highway, a Mr. Philip Hutzler, who paid well for anything curious and had commissioned him to bring home whatever he could find. Such private ventures are common enough among ships' officers, and the captain had made no objection.

"I wish to God I had," said he. "The men named it the first day. The giant rat. It's the size of a cat, Mr. Holmes, with a long snout and a white face and a bare tail like a rope's end, and it stinks. I've carried hides, and I've carried guano, and I never smelt the like. Like a cartload of onions left to rot in the sun. You could smell it from the fo'c'sle with the wind aft. The cage was lashed on deck behind the deckhouse, and no man would go near it but Atchley. He fed it and cleaned it himself, every night, by lantern, and wouldn't have anyone else do it."

"Every night," said Holmes softly. "Pray go on."

"Well, you know sailors. Before we were round the Cape the men were saying it got out at night and walked the deck. One swore he'd seen it in the rigging, in the middle watch, sitting on the main yard like a Christian. The cook wouldn't go below without a light. Two of my best hands jumped ship at Gravesend sooner than sail up the river with it. I put it down to nerves. A long passage does that. But it's been one thing after another since we came into the East India Docks."

He ticked them off on fingers like belaying pins. The customs rummagers had come aboard on the day of arrival and searched the barque from truck to keelson, as is their right, and found nothing amiss; but none of them would put a hand inside the cage, because Atchley told them, very gravely, that the creature's bite was venomous. Yesterday morning Mr. Hutzler had come down to the dock with a handcart to collect his purchase, and the cage was found empty, its door unlatched, and Atchley said the beast must have worked the latch in the night and got loose about the ship. Hutzler had gone away in a temper. And last night the dock watchman, a man named Welch, going his rounds along the quay near the barque's berth, had been knocked down from behind in the fog.

"He's not much hurt," said the captain. "A lump on his head and his lantern smashed. But he swears that as he lay there he saw a great grey shape going away along the quay, low down, quick. And this morning there's a police inspector on my deck, a man called Lestrade, asking questions about thefts from the warehouses, and looking at my crew as though every one of them had his pockets full of other people's tobacco."

"And your mate?"

The captain hesitated. "Atchley's a good seaman," he said at last. "I've sailed with him three voyages. But I don't like how easy he's taking this, Mr. Holmes. My crew's half out of their wits, and he laughs. I don't like a man who laughs at the wrong time."

Holmes had been lying back in his chair with his eyes closed and his fingertips together. Now he opened his eyes.

"One more question, Captain. When the porters carried the cage aboard at Padang, did they carry it easily?"

McNerney looked at him oddly. "No," he said. "Now you ask, they didn't. They were sweating. I thought it was the heat."

"It very likely was," said Holmes, and sprang up. "Watson, your coat. Captain, you have a cab below? Excellent."

~

I have seen the docks of London in many weathers, but never so dismally as that afternoon. The fog lay on the basin like wet wool, the masts of the shipping rose into it and were lost, and every sound came from no direction at all. The Matilda Briggs lay at the far end of the basin, and even at forty yards I caught upon the air a sour and pungent reek, like an onion-cellar in which something has died.

Inspector Lestrade met us at the foot of the gangway, with his collar up and a look on his sallow face of a man who has been hoping all day not to see us.

"Mr. Holmes. I might have known. This is a plain matter of warehouse thieving, and some fool of an animal that's got loose, and I don't see what there is in it for you."

"Then you won't object if I look at the cage," said Holmes pleasantly, and went up the gangway.

The cage stood where the captain had said, behind the deckhouse, still lashed to its ringbolts. It was a stout, plain box of teak, with a barred front and a door that fastened by a simple hook, and a quantity of foul straw within. Holmes knelt and examined the hook with his lens, and then the straw, which he turned over with a pencil. He held up for my inspection a few glossy fragments.

"Wing-cases of beetles, Watson. Here are more. And this, unless I am mistaken, was once a large earthworm. Our giant rat is a particular feeder. I have known a good many rats in my time, both four-footed and otherwise, and I never knew one to turn down bread for beetles."

Then he did a thing I did not understand. He took hold of the cage by one end and attempted to lift it, and set it down again, and motioned to me to do the same. I did so, and very nearly strained my back. The thing was out of all proportion heavy for its size. Holmes rapped the floor of the cage with his knuckles, listened, and rapped again, and bent close to look at the heads of four brass screws set in the corners of the floor. Their slots were bright, as screws are bright when a screwdriver has lately turned them.

He had just straightened up, with an expression I knew very well, when there came from forward a shriek, a clatter of tin, and the voice of the ship's cook, raised in a prayer which was not entirely respectable.

We ran forward. In the gloom of the forepeak, wedged into the coils of a great hawser, crouched the cause of all the trouble. I confess that I had expected something terrible. What I saw was a creature about the size of a cat, with a long, pointed, twitching snout, a face as white as if it had been dipped in flour, small black eyes, and a long bare tail. It blinked at the lantern, and it smelt, at that close range, beyond anything I can describe.

The cook had retreated to the ladder, with a ladle held before him like a cutlass. Holmes went past him without a word, took a canvas bag from a hook, and with a quickness and a gentleness I have seldom seen in him, gathered the creature into it.

"Calm yourself, cook," said he. "It lives on beetles, and you are not a beetle." He held up the bag, which squirmed. "Lestrade, whatever else this animal may be, it is not a rat, and it was never in its life a danger to any man. Look at its teeth when you have a moment. They are not a rat's teeth."

"Then what is it?" said Lestrade.

"An innocent," said Holmes, "which is more than I can say for the box it travelled in." He turned to Captain McNerney. "Captain, where is your mate?"

It was the captain's second officer who answered. Mr. Atchley had gone ashore not half an hour after the captain left for Baker Street, he said, carrying his sea-bag, and saying he was going up to Mr. Hutzler's to make his apologies about the beast. He had not come back.

Holmes stood a moment in the dim forepeak with the bag in his arms and the fog drifting in at the hatch. Then he looked at Lestrade, and there was a light in his eyes that I had not seen there for a week.

"In that case, Inspector," said he, "I think we had better unscrew the floor of Mr. Atchley's cage, and see what his rat has been sitting on for a hundred and twenty days."

To be continued in Part Two.

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