He stood shyly off to one side of the station platform, his flannel knee pants sagging over his stockings and his nose damply in need of a handkerchief. The boy couldn't have been more than eight or nine; there still glimmered on his face the innocent audacity of childhood as he stared unabashedly at me—no, not at myself, I realized, but at my companion. A dogeared copy of the Strand twisted in the lad's slender fingers.
"Holmes," I said tapping him on the shoulder, "I do believe you have an admirer."
My illustrious friend turned his level scrutiny from the newspaper he had been reading to the crowd standing against the station wall. He frowned slightly as he looked back to my expectant smile.
"The boy or the twin sisters?" Holmes crooked an eyebrow. "Yes, Watson, a child. Your face has that peculiar avuncular softening it gets around the little cherubim." Accounting for his not very delicate cynicism this translated to me beaming like an idiot. I sighed.
"The boy, Holmes. The lad standing over there with his…cousin?"
"Brother. Yes, the one with the profusely leaking sinuses. And the copy of—oh, ye gods, was that not the issue, Watson, that featured that Musgrave Ritual embellishment of yours?"
"It was."I let the slight to my artistic license pass, and smiled encouragingly at the boy. The sandy-haired young man—a clerk, it seemed, about ten years older than his little charge—who had been standing behind him looked up inquiringly.
Holmes made to turn back to his paper, but I seized his elbow and steered him firmly towards the lads by the station wall. "Oh, go on," I chuckled, "He obviously recognizes you. We'll go and say how do you do…"
"I shan't say how thrice-d-ned anything, Watson," he growled at me, jerking away, "Why bother dashing his hopes that I'm the omnipotent, debonair, nice man he reads about in your stories and not the cantankerous b-d I am, on occasion, wont to be!"
I should pause to explain that it had been rather an ill-starred morning; we had, in the course of three hours, returned from a thoroughly dull open-and-shut robbery case (for which Holmes had not been paid), missed the morning's only train to London, and been refused breakfast by our irate hotelkeeper for making off with two of his chickens in the course of the investigation. Needless to say, my friend was not in the mood to receive his adoring public.
"But think of the impact you could make, Holmes!" I insisted. "You can see he admires you immensely. Please, man, at least go and shake his hand. It will be the crowning moment of the year for him!"
"Alright, alright! But this is the last time I capitulate to your readership." He sighed ungraciously, pasted an artificially cordial expression on his face, and strode towards the pair of boys, twitching his newspaper irritably under his arm.
The boy's face flared suddenly into a look of pure joy. He pulled away from his brother and ran toward the detective, his shining smile breaking into a little birdlike cry as he stumbled to a halt a few inches from Holmes's feet. I was surprised to hear my friend chuckle reluctantly as his frosty eyes fell on the little face a good foot and a half below his own.
He extended a sinewy hand, bowing slightly. "Good afternoon, young man. My name is Sherlock Holmes. To what do I owe this pleasure?"
The boy said nothing, but gave another jabbering cry and shook my friend's hand as politely as his excitement would allow. His older caregiver came up behind him and gently laid a hand on his shoulder, looking kindly from his brother to the great detective.
"Sorry, sir, didn't mean for him to bother you. He likes your stories, that's all. Come along, Jackie!" He turned the child's chin to look him in the eye and pointed away down the platform.
"That's quite alright," returned Holmes, puzzled. "I saw him staring and thought I should come over to talk to him. He's obviously quite the aficionado, aren't you my lad?"
The boy looked questioningly from Holmes to his brother, who tousled his hair a little sadly.
"No, really, sir, he can't do you much in that way. He's deaf, you see." Jackie continued to look admiringly at Holmes, his smile replaced by a probing awe as he took in the detective's long grey suit and silver watch chain, his little ears unheeding to the sound of the train screeching into the station and the porters shouting for travelers to board. He caught my companion's eye again, and smiled reverently as he fiddled with his magazine and shuffled from one small foot to the other.
"He can read, though," the young man went on, his eye fixed on his brother. "Actually, I think it was your stories got him to read, sir. Adventure, faraway London and Baker Street and Scotland Yard…it's how he learns about the world now, reading, since he can't talk to nobody but me." He grinned at Holmes. "You're his hero."
Holmes looked blankly at the young clerk, and then turned slowly down to the boy. Jackie's face fell a little to see the distraught look on his idol's face. But Holmes, blinking, allowed his expression to relax into a more reassuring one as regarded the child in silence. I watched as he knelt down, smiling warmly, and put a hand on his little admirer's shoulder.
"Can you tell him that I admire him very greatly myself?" Jackie's brother paused, then looked his charge in the face and made a series of rapid movements with his hands. The little boy grinned at Holmes, and continued to wave cheerily at him as the pair of them boarded the train and were swept away into the second class carriage with their luggage.
I waited at the carriage door for Holmes, who boarded wordlessly and strode to a compartment at the back of the train, knowing I would follow close behind. He stared thoughtfully out the window at the blurring countryside as the trained pulled away from the station, and I made no attempt to break in on his thoughts.