Death on the Moor
- Surprise! The mysterious man on the hill is none other than Holmes.
- Watson gets upset when he realizes that Holmes has been deliberately keeping him in the dark.
- And what about all those reports, which he so carefully wrote up and sent off to London?
- Holmes tries to make nice.
- He says he trusts Watson completely. But he also worried that Watson wouldn't have been able to resist making contact with Holmes on the moors.
- And Holmes has been getting the reports—he arranged to have them delivered back to him on the moors from London.
- Holmes is fascinated by Watson's account of his conversation with Laura Lyons.
- Holmes knows that Stapleton and Laura Lyons have been hooking up.
- Holmes drops another bombshell: Beryl is actually Mrs. Stapleton. She's his wife, not his sister!
- Stapleton is the one who followed Sir Henry in London, and Beryl's the one who sent that warning to Sir Henry at his hotel.
- Holmes knows that Stapleton's pose as an unmarried man helped him enlist Laura in his plotting.
- And Laura's desperate for divorce money now because she believes that she can marry him.
- Holmes is almost ready to charge Stapleton with murder.
- But he needs Watson to wait at Baskerville Hall with Sir Henry for at least another day or two.
- Just as Holmes says this, they hear a horrible scream over the moors, followed by the growling of a dog.
- Holmes fears that they may be too late.
- At the side of a cliff, they find a body with a crushed skull.
- It's Sir Henry Baskerville.
- Besides feeling guilty that they were on the moors and still failed to save Sir Henry, Holmes is deeply frustrated.
- Even though Holmes and Watson are both sure that Stapleton is involved with the Hound murders, there's no definite proof linking him to the Baskerville deaths.
- Holmes goes over to the body to carry it to the hall.
- But suddenly, he starts dancing around and shaking Watson's hand.
- It's not Sir Henry at all! The body has a beard!
- (Um—it may not be Sir Henry, but it's still a corpse with a shattered skull… is dancing the appropriate thing here?)
- In fact, the body belongs to Selden.
- Watson remembers that Sir Henry gave some of his old clothes to Barrymore; Barrymore probably passed them on to Selden.
- Stapleton's dog has obviously been trained to react to Sir Henry's smell, which lead him to attack Selden in Sir Henry's clothes.
- They see someone smoking and strolling towards them: it's Stapleton.
- Stapleton turns pale when he sees the body, since he realizes that it's not Sir Henry.
- Stapleton claims he invited Sir Henry to walk over to Merripit House and then got worried when he never turned up.
- Stapleton asks suspiciously if anybody heard the sounds of a dog, since the moors are supposed to be haunted.
- Neither Holmes nor Watson gives any sign that they might know why Stapleton's so interested in this mysterious dog.
- Watson claims to believe that Selden died from madness and stress, which drove him over a cliff.
- Holmes also pretends that he plans to go back to London the next day, since this has "not been a satisfactory case" (12.133).