inquired benignly.
“A man of some little education,” I said condescendingly. “Also of extreme politeness. In my mind I think I see a clergyman. Not one of the Established Church, I feel. A Methodist? A Baptist, perhaps? Something of the kind. Will that do?”
He chuckled with such quiet pleasure that I grew uneasy. When Sherlock Holmes chuckled, it was usually an ill omen for someone. Taking a clean knife, I carefully slit the cover and drew out a single sheet of paper, written on both sides. I laughed as I saw the concluding signature.
“The Reverend Samuel Dordona of the Evangelical Overseas Medical Mission! You see? I was right!”
He slapped the table-cloth with his hand.
“Congratulations, old fellow! Were this the school’s examination-room, I should unhesitatingly award you ‘Summa cum laude.’ The instinct for divination runs in your blood at last. What can he want? Has someone rifled his Sunday collection plate or stolen his hymn-board?”
I remained suspicious of his enthusiasm. Glancing at the top of the letter, I saw that Mr. Dordona had pinned a newspaper cutting to the page. It was two inches of a single column.
“Our correspondent has sent us this as well.”
“Yes, indeed,” Holmes said airily; “I felt the enclosure as I passed the envelope to you. I believe you will find it is clipped from a page of one of the weekly papers. The newsprint of the weeklies is of so much better and fuller weave than the dailies. One feels the difference in quality quite easily, even through the covering of such an envelope.”
This air of superiority irritated me a little, but at least I should make him dependent on me for hearing what it was the newspaper had said.
“‘Captain Jahleel Brenton Carey, 98th Regiment, of unfortunate history in Zululand, has, we regret to hear, died under mysterious circumstances in India, a victim of much persecution.’ That seems to be all.”
I read it to myself again. Captain Jahleel Brenton Carey? It was a name I had heard. For the life of me, I could not place it just then. Certainly I did not connect it with my own time in India or Afghanistan. But even before Holmes could interrupt my thoughts, it came back to me.
While I was convalescing at Peshawar, I had read a magazine article. It was in that radical weekly, the Pall Mall Gazette, I believe. The editor attacked the military authorities at the Horse Guards over various cases of injustice in the Army. If I remembered correctly, one of them was to do with the death of the claimant to the French throne, the Prince Imperial, in Zululand. Zululand!—that fateful name again! Much chance the poor young fellow ever had of sitting on the throne of France. His father had lost it after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The royal family had been exiled and the Third Republic had replaced it a dozen years ago.
The young Prince Louis Napoleon was generally known as the Prince Imperial. He had been prepared for a military life from his infancy. It was everything to him. Though an exile, he had entered Woolwich Academy as a French cadet in the British Army—and in a British uniform. Of course, he still dreamed of the day when he might be Emperor of the French. Meantime, he longed for the chance of fighting someone. When war came to Zululand, he insisted that the Zulus would do as well as anyone else.
His widowed mother pleaded against this. Our own Queen protested. At last the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards, agreed to let the young man go out “on his own hook.” He was to be a battlefield tourist in the uniform of a British lieutenant. In other words, a pestering nuisance to those who would have to look after him. For the weekly picture papers, he dressed the part to perfection, complete with the sword which his great-uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, had carried at Austerlitz in 1805.
All this had been in the newspapers that reached us in Kandahar. It was already three months after Isandhlwana. The Zulu tribes had been taught no end of a lesson by a British punitive expedition. As for the Prince, the radical press howled, “What if this feckless youth gets himself killed in Africa?” Impossible—but then defeat at Isandhlwana had seemed impossible!
So that was how I had read of Captain Jahleel Brenton Carey and the 98th Regiment of Foot. This young captain had been the commander of Lord Chelmsford’s mounted