August 15th, continued
I returned from the club I had gone to today, after Mortimer had left. I wanted time to think, and however close Sherlock and I may be, he needs to be completely alone to process. Regardless, I didn't want to write down any details from the crime that had been brought to us until we discussed them together. To start on the details of the man himself, Sir Charles Baskerville seemed to be the exact opposite of his ancestor, Hugo. He was a kind man; donated to charity on a regular basis. Charles seemed to generally enjoy people. He had made quite a bit of money in South Africa, and while HOW exactly he made it was not specified, the only real way to make money over there is to work in diamonds. Charles quickly realized what he had earned, and instead of trying to earn more he took it back to America with him, lest he lose anything. This is a quality I admire more than anything, he was clearly intelligent to a point. Interestingly enough, his health had always been a bit shoddy, nervous energy getting the better of him more often than not. Whether or not this was because of his knowledge about the manuscript one cannot know for sure, but one can assume it had some sort of impact. Perhaps he smoked to calm himself down a tad.
Despite his history of bad health, the crime scene seemed too strange to be attributed to simple health issues. The Yard didn't do a particularly good job investigating as they didn't have reason to, but Mortimer knew better and inspected the scene a bit more intensely. As I mentioned above, he found the footprints of an unnaturally large dog around 6 meters away from the body. There were no humanoid footprints to be found, other than those of Sir Charles himself, and those were hurried and frantic, as if he had been running for his life. The strangest part about that was that the prints led away from his house. The body was lying face down, and his fingers were dug into the soil as he had been dragged, but there were no marks to be found upon the body. 3 people witnessed the hound before the death, but none after, which is an admittedly strange parallel to the manuscript's legend (along with the fact of his face, which was twisted into an expression similar to the lady's). Charles usually avoided the moor, though, and Holmes believes he must have been waiting for someone. Other than that, though, neither he nor I can make anything of the case. It's such a strange one, and there are so many details that seem unrelated.
Both of us will sleep on the details, and we will see if anything new has come to us in dreams once the morning hits.
John Watson