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Later when he escapes from prison, Small kills one of the prison guards. That man “had never missed a chance of insulting and injuring” Small, but killing him was petty vindication. Small plays no part in the deaths of Captain Morstan or Major Sholto, the two men who betrayed him, but he says he would willingly have shown them the door to eternity, if he had only had the chance. Small also played no direct part in the death of Bartholomew Sholto, but because Sholto died during the assault on his stronghold planned and executed by Small, he bears some responsibility for that death, too. In short, Small is neither completely vindicated for his crimes nor completely damned. While he’s a man more sinned against than sinning, he isn’t given any sort of pardon. Watson’s reaction to him is our surest guide to what Conan Doyle felt was Small’s moral standing: “For myself, I confess that I had now conceived the utmost horror of the man not only for this cold-blooded business in which he had been concerned but even more for the somewhat flippant and careless way in which he narrated it” (p. 175). The last we hear of him, he’s off to jail.
    On a cheerier note, The Sign of Four contains what I think is the most impressive of all Holmes’s displays of logic, the series of deductions about Watson’s watch. The scene is a sideshow, of course, as it plays no part in the case to follow, but like many scenes in the coming stories, it dazzles us with its brilliance while establishing another link between Holmes and Watson. It also manifests some subtle traits possessed by each man. Watson reveals his emotional side here. He is upset because he has concluded that Holmes has been snooping into his family background. A gentleman wouldn’t make such inquiries. Holmes, of course, has done no such thing, but we can’t help but think, after we get to know Holmes better, that had doing so helped him solve some crime, he wouldn’t have hesitated. Watson believes in the conventional Victorian code of conduct. He is shocked at even the suggestion that his friend could disregard it. By the end of their adventures, he will have been so influenced by Holmes that he’ll throw smoke-rockets into apartments, break into houses, attempt to steal private documents, and even let murderers go. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes could be subtitled and the Education of Dr. John H. Watson.
    As a result of the popularity these novels enjoyed, Conan Doyle decided to write shorter tales that could be published in a literary magazine. He first penned “A Scandal in Bohemia” in April 1891, sending it to his agent to shop it around to the magazines. The Strand , a new publication, accepted it without fanfare, but when Conan Doyle’s agent sent them two more stories, “The Red-headed League” and “A Case of Identity,” the magazine’s editors, realizing they had something special, asked Conan Doyle for more. After he submitted “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” Conan Doyle asked for an increase in the price the magazine paid him for the stories, from £25 to £35 per story. The grateful editors immediately agreed, so Conan Doyle wrote the fifth and sixth stories, “The Five Orange Pips” and “The Man with the Twisted Lip.”
    Conan Doyle conceived of his six stories as a series, to be run in sequence. Serialized works in the past had been chapters from a single continuous work, either a novel or a long story. But Conan Doyle felt that serializing long stories in magazines was a mistake, because a reader who missed one issue would lose interest. He saw that if he made each story independent, “while each retained a connecting link with the one before and the one that was to come by means of its leading characters,” it didn’t matter if a reader missed an episode or two. “In this respect, I was a revolutionist, and I think I may fairly lay claim to the credit of being the inaugurator of a system which has since been worked by others