This chapter opens part five. And the most widely quoted passage in the whole series sits here.
One morning at breakfast Holmes says he must go down to Dartmoor.
Watson is not surprised. He has been wondering why the man has stayed out of this case so long.
Why He Waited Three Days
All England is talking about one thing. The favourite for the Wessex Cup has vanished and his trainer has been murdered.
Yet Holmes had two telegrams on Tuesday evening and does not move until Thursday morning.
Why not yesterday, Watson asks.
Because he blundered, comes the answer. People who know him only through Watson’s writing will think such a thing rare, he adds, and in fact it is a good deal commoner than that.
He did not believe the most famous horse in England could stay hidden long. Not in the north of Dartmoor, where people are few.
So he expected news any hour that the horse had been found, and that whoever had taken him would prove to be the murderer.
Instead the day passed with nothing but the arrest of young Fitzroy Simpson.
Fact and Ornament
On the train he lays the case out.
In a case of this kind, he says, the work is less in gathering new evidence than in sifting what is already there.
“The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable fact—from the embellishments of theorists and reporters.” (Silver Blaze)
That one sentence is the whole method of this chapter. It is also what the twenty-five chapters before it have been doing.
The Night at the Stables
Here is what he has sifted out.
Silver Blaze is five years old and first favourite for the Wessex Cup. He stands at three to one, so a great deal of money rides on him.
Which means a great many people would be glad if he were not at the post next Tuesday.
John Straker, the trainer, is a former jockey and has served this owner twelve years. He passes for an honest and diligent man.
There are three stable lads. One sits up in the stable each night and two sleep in the loft above.
At nine on Monday night the stable is locked. Two of the lads go up to the trainer’s house for supper and Ned Hunter stays on watch.
A few minutes after nine the maid Edith Baxter carries his supper down. Curried mutton. There is water laid on in the stable and the man on duty drinks nothing else, so she brings no drink.
The Man Out of the Dark
Thirty yards from the stable a man steps out of the darkness and calls to her to stop.
By the lamplight she sees someone well dressed, very pale in the face, and uneasy in his manner. Past thirty, she would say.
Where is she, he asks. He had almost made up his mind to sleep on the moor when he saw her lamp.
Near the King’s Pyland training stables, she says.
At that he brightens. He has heard a stable lad sleeps there alone, and is that not his supper she is carrying, and would she care to earn the price of a new dress?
Out of his waistcoat pocket he takes a folded paper. Give this to the lad tonight, he says, and she shall have the prettiest frock money can buy.
Frightened, she runs to the window. Hunter is sitting inside, and she is beginning to tell him what has happened when the man comes up and looks in at them.
What is his business here, the lad demands.
Business that may put something in his pocket, says the man. Two horses from this stable are entered for the Wessex Cup, and which way is the money going?
He is one of those touts, the lad shouts, and runs to loose the dog. The maid flies off, and looking back she sees the man leaning in at the window.
When the lad comes round with the hound, he is gone.
The Man Who Went Out Before Dawn
Here Watson asks one thing. Did the lad lock the door when he took the dog out?
Excellent, says Holmes. The point struck him as so important that he wired down yesterday to make sure. The lad locked the door, and the window is not large enough for a man to pass.
Hunter sends word up to the trainer. Straker is excited by the story, though he does not seem to grasp all it means.
Still it leaves him uneasy. At one in the morning his wife wakes and finds him dressing.
He cannot sleep for thinking of the horses, he says, and will walk down to the stables. She can hear rain on the window and begs him to stay, but he puts on a large waterproof and goes.
At seven she wakes to find that he has not come back.
The stable door is open, Hunter is huddled insensible in his chair, the favourite’s stall is empty, and the trainer is not there.
The Hollow in the Ground
The two lads in the loft heard nothing all night.
Hunter is so heavily drugged that nothing can be got from him. They climb the rise and look about, and there is no sign of the horse, but they see something else.
A quarter of a mile from the stables the trainer’s overcoat is flapping from a furze bush.
Beyond it, at the bottom of a bowl-shaped hollow, they find him dead.
His head has been shattered by some heavy blow, and there is a long clean cut on his thigh.
In his right hand is a small knife, clotted with blood to the handle. In his left is a red and black silk cravat, which the maid recognises as the one the stranger had worn the evening before.
Hunter, when he comes round, confirms whose it is. And he is positive the man drugged his curry while standing at the window.
The remains of the supper are analysed and hold a quantity of powdered opium. The same dish was eaten up at the house with no ill effect.
The Story the Police Have Built
Inspector Gregory is an able man, Holmes says. Were he but gifted with imagination he might rise high.
On arriving he arrested the obvious person, Fitzroy Simpson, who was lodging nearby.
He is a man of birth and education who has run through a fortune on the turf and now quietly takes bets in the London clubs. His book shows five thousand laid against the favourite.
Arrested, he freely admits he came down for word of the horses. He does not deny the evening’s business either.
What he cannot begin to explain is how his cravat came to be in the dead man’s hand.
His wet clothes show he was out in the storm, and his heavy stick, weighted with lead, would make such a wound.
On the other hand there is not a mark on him. Yet the state of Straker’s knife says that at least one of his assailants should carry the sign of it.
Down at Dartmoor
They reach Tavistock in the evening. Colonel Ross and Inspector Gregory meet them.
Next day Holmes goes to the ground. Searching the mud, he picks something up.
A half-burned wax vesta, so caked with mud that it had looked like a splinter of wood.
The inspector is put out that he had missed it.
It was invisible in the mud, says Holmes. He only saw it because he was looking for it.
He saw it because he was looking for it. That one line sums up his work in this chapter.
The Value of Imagination
Holmes settles on the direction the horse is likely to have gone and walks it.
And he finds the tracks of a horse in the soft earth. A shoe he takes from his pocket fits the impression exactly.
“See the value of imagination,” said Holmes. “It is the one quality which Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified.” (Silver Blaze)
Imagination here is not invention. It is setting up first what ought to have been there, then going to the place and checking.
And that method produces the second passage of this chapter.
The Point to Attend To
Before he leaves, the inspector asks whether there is any point to which he would wish to draw his attention.
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” (Silver Blaze)
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident.”
Those three lines are the passage that is quoted well outside this series.
The Curry and the Dog
Days later, on the train home, Holmes explains.
The first link was the curry.
Powdered opium is not tasteless. It is not unpleasant, but it is perceptible. Mixed into an ordinary dish a man would notice it and put down his spoon.
Curry is exactly the dish to cover that taste.
Now could this stranger have arranged that curried mutton be served in that house that night? He could not.
Then did he happen to carry opium on the one night when a dish was served that would hide it? That will not do.
So Simpson drops out of the case. What remains is the two people who could settle what was for supper, the trainer and his wife.
And the opium went in after the lad’s portion had been set aside, since everyone else who ate the dish was unharmed.
That It Did Not Bark
Then comes the dog.
Simpson’s visit had shown there was a dog in the stables. The lad ran to loose it.
Yet that night someone came in and led a horse out, and the dog did not bark enough to wake the two men in the loft.
So the midnight visitor was someone the dog knew well.
This is the centre of the chapter. Nobody heard the dog bark. Nothing was heard, so there is no testimony and no object.
And yet that absence narrows the field of men.
What the Pockets Held
If the trainer drugged his own stable lad at midnight and led the horse out, his reason cannot have been an honest one.
What did he mean to do? The answer comes out of his pockets.
The knife in the dead man’s hand is not a thing any sane man would choose as a weapon. Watson sees at once that it is made for the most delicate surgery.
Delicate surgery was exactly what he meant to do that night.
There is a way of nicking the tendon of a horse’s hock, subcutaneously, so as to leave no mark. A horse so treated goes a little lame, and people put it down to overwork in training or a touch of rheumatism.
Nobody thinks of foul play.
That is why he had to take the horse out onto the moor. A creature of that spirit would rouse the soundest sleeper at the touch of the knife.
And to see the leg in the dark he needed a light. The vesta from the mud was there for that.
The Dressmaker’s Bill
Then comes the motive.
The pocket held a dressmaker’s bill made out to another man’s name. People do not carry other men’s bills about. Their own are enough.
The figures show a woman, and one with expensive tastes. No stableman’s wages buy a walking dress at twenty guineas.
Holmes puts a question to the wife about that dress without letting her see its drift, and learns it never reached her.
Then he notes the address of the shop. Later he calls there with a photograph of the trainer, and finds he had been a good customer under another name.
The Order of That Night
Now the order falls into place.
Straker led the horse to a hollow where his light would not be seen. Simpson, in his flight, had dropped his cravat, and Straker picked it up, perhaps meaning to secure the horse’s leg with it.
In the hollow he got behind the horse and struck a light.
But the creature was startled by the sudden glare. And with the strange instinct of animals he felt that some mischief was intended.
The hoofs flew out, and the steel shoe caught him full on the forehead.
Rain or no rain, he had taken off his overcoat to do the delicate work. So as he fell his own knife cut his thigh.
And Holmes adds one thing. A man as clever as that would not have attempted such delicate work without practice.
On what could he have practised? His eye went to the sheep nearby, and his question proved him right.
Today, Counting What Is Not There
The two things Holmes seizes in this chapter are both invisible.
One is a taste. That opium powder has a taste, and that a dish able to cover it happened to be served that night.
The other is a sound. More exactly, a sound that was not made.
The second is the harder. The list of things that did not happen has no end. Thousands of things failed to happen at that stable that night.
To pick out the one fact that the dog did not bark, you must first know there is a dog there and that the dog barks at strangers.
Simpson’s commotion is what supplied that. In the moment the lad ran to loose the hound, Holmes learned that the house had a dog and that the dog was good for something.
So the eye for absence comes out of knowledge. If you do not know what ought to have been there, the fact that it is missing never reaches your eye at all.
And this is also the door into part five. In the chapters ahead Holmes meets a man who thinks the way he thinks.
When something that was always there goes missing around me, do I notice?