rbing him.

Budd was a pretty good runner, so he was about a hundred feet ahead of
us when Holmes dashed up to the open front door of the Earl's great
stone stable-building. He took another shot at Budd as the latter fled
up the stairs to the hay-loft, and then disappeared suddenly, thus
frightening the eight horses in their stalls at the rear, who neighed
loudly, while Holmes and the rest of us piled up the stairs after him,
like a pack of dogs after a rabbit!

When we got up to the loft we found that it covered the entire upper
floor of the building; was at least two hundred feet long by a hundred
and fifty feet wide, and except for a small space just around the head
of the stairs, was filled up eight feet deep with odorous hay and
piles of straw.

Of course, not a trace of that scoundrel Budd was to be seen. He was
evidently somewhere under the hay, because the shuttered windows were
too high up for him to have made his escape through them in the short
time that had elapsed; and the pigeons that roosted around on the
rafters cooed their darned heads off just as if they didn't know that
a desperate crook was concealed somewhere beneath the wide-spreading
piles of hay.

Holmes ground his teeth with rage as he recognized his temporary
defeat by the resourceful guy from Australia, and it was a good thing
the Countess was still back in the castle being assisted out of her
fainting-spell by her Spanish maid Teresa, because the language that
Hemlock Holmes used as he called down imprecations on the head of the
hay-hidden Budd was frightful to hear!

"Gol darn it!" he said, when he had somewhat recovered his usual
equanimity; "this is certainly the first and only time in my life that
I've been held up and stalled by such a common thing as a load of hay!
What in thunder did you ever get in such an enormous lot of the darned
stuff for, anyhow?" he demanded, turning to the Earl. "I should think
there was enough hay in here to feed a regiment of horses for three
years!"

"Well, you don't need to take it out on me, Holmes," returned the Earl
with some asperity. "How could I foresee that some one would steal my
cuff-buttons and then run up here and hide in the hay? I bought the
hay two months ago, when prices were lower than they are now, so I got
a lot of it, anticipating the rise in prices that has followed since
then; and I also bought a large lot of corn, oats, bran, and so on,
which I keep downstairs. You're getting t