on the moor whom Holmes and Watson fear is Sir Henry, but Barrymore had given the former's clothes to Selden, who is his brother-in-law, and Selden dies instead. Holmes decides to use Baskerville as bait to catch Stapleton red-handed by having Sir Henry accept an invitation to Stapleton's house and walk back after dark, giving his enemy every chance to unleash the hound on him. Holmes and Watson pretend to leave Dartmoor by train, but instead they hide near Stapleton's house with Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. Despite the dark and a thick fog, Holmes and Watson are able to kill the hound when it attacks Sir Henry. They find in Stapleton’s house the bound and badly abused Beryl, while Stapleton, in his panicked flight from the scene, seemingly drowns in the mire. Back in London, Holmes remarks to Watson that not only was Stapleton a physical and spiritual throwback to Sir Hugo Baskerville, being a lost relation of Sir Charles, but also that he was one of the most formidable foes Holmes had ever encountered. Origins and background Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote this story shortly after returning to his home Undershaw in Surrey from South Africa, where he had worked as a volunteer physician at the Langman Field Hospital in Bloemfontein during the Second Boer War. He had not written about Sherlock Holmes in eight years, having killed off the character in the 1893 story "The Final Problem". Although The Hound of the Baskervilles is set before the latter events, two years later Conan Doyle brought Holmes back for good, explaining in "The Adventure of the Empty House" that Holmes had faked his own death. As a result, the character of Holmes occupies a liminal space between being alive and dead which further lends to the gothic elements of the novel. He was assisted with the legend of the hound and local colour by a Daily Express journalist named Bertram Fletcher Robinson (1870–1907), with whom he explored Dartmoor in June, 1901, and to whom a royalty which amounted to over 500 pounds by the end of 1901. Conan Doyle may also have been inspired by his own earlier story (written and published in 1898) of a terrifying giant wolf, "The King of the Foxes". Inspiration His ideas came from the legend of Squire Richard Cabell of Brook Hall, in the parish of Buckfastleigh, Devon, which was the fundamental