The Priory School Runaways
A duke's missing son and the people who took him.
In "The Adventure of the Priory School", Thorneycroft Huxtable, founder and principal of a preparatory school in Northern England called the Priory School, asks Sherlock Holmes to look into the disappearance of one of his pupils. The boy is the ten-year-old Lord Saltire, whose father is the very rich and famous Duke of Holdernesse. The German master, Heidegger, has vanished as well, along with his bicycle.
Quick Facts
- Case reference
- The Adventure of the Priory School
Lore & Background
On the moor Holmes finds a bicycle track that does not match Heidegger's tyres, and later Heidegger's own track, which ends where he lies dead. Almost everything else has been obliterated by cow tracks, yet Holmes realises that he and Watson never saw a single cow, and that the hoof prints suggest an animal that trotted, cantered and galloped. At the Fighting Cock Inn, kept by Reuben Hayes, they examine the horse's hooves in the stable.
Reader's Guide
The boy is being held at the Fighting Cock. The mastermind is James Wilder, the Duke's personal secretary, who is secretly the Duke's illegitimate son. The story was first published in Collier's on 30 January 1904 and in The Strand Magazine in February 1904, and is one of the 13 stories collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
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