between Helen's room and Dr. Roylott's. Holmes and Watson take the hands-on investigation further when they spend a night in Helen's room and a poisonous snake comes through the small hole between the rooms and shimmies down the bell rope, sent there by Dr. Roylott to bite and kill Helen. The snake, chased away by Holmes, instead bites and kills Roylott.

Holmes explains at the end that he was at first confused by the sister's words about the speckled band, which she cried out as she died. Holmes thought that it referred to the band of gypsies living nearby. But when he realized nobody could enter the bedroom, he realized "band" must refer to a snake.

As is often the case in murder mysteries, the central issue is money. Both young women were due to receive a portion of their mother's money on marriage and Dr. Roylott wanted to prevent that.

The inciting incident is the arrival of the frightened and haggard Miss Helen Stoner at Holmes's flat, telling the story of her sister's mysterious death, and her own fear of being murdered. The reader is hooked by the time Helen says, having slept in her dead sister's old room, that:

Imagine, then, my thrill of terror when last night, as I lay awake, thinking over her terrible fate, I suddenly heard in the silence of the night the low whistle which had been the herald of her own death.

It seems very clear that Helen is danger of losing her life. She is also in a situation in which she must live with a strange and terrifying stepfather.

The crisis point in the story comes when Holmes and Watson spend the night in Helen's room. They hear the ominous low whistle that preceded the death of Miss Stoner's sister, and Holmes springs forward to lash madly at the bell pull with his cane. They then hear screams from Dr. Roylott's bedroom as the snake that Holmes frightened away slithers back through the ventilator and bites its owner with lethal poison in its fangs.

After this high point, the mystery of Helen's sister's death and the threat facing Helen is revealed, and the rest of the action can wind down.

Arthur Conan Doyle sets up the plot in such a way that the major conflict in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" becomes a conflict between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Grimesby Roylott. This is mainly because Dr. Roylott makes a stormy appearance at 221B Baker Street very shortly after his stepdaughter Helen Stoner has told Holmes and Watson her long back-story and left. Dr. Roylott had traced her movements all the way from Stoke Moran to Baker Street. This was not hard to do because Helen had disguised herself by wearing a mourning dress and a heavy black mourning veil. Instead of disguising herself, however, she had made herself all the more conspicuous. There would have been very few young women, if any, traveling to London by train at that early honor, and only one wearing mourning clothes. Dr. Roylott could have easily found the cabbie who took Helen from Waterloo Station in London to Baker Street, and he could have found out by inquiring in the neighborhood that it was none other than Sherlock Holmes who lived at 221B.

When Roylott barges into the room he says:

"My stepdaughter has been here. I have traced her. What has she been saying to you?”

Holmes naturally refuses to give him any information about a client. Roylott makes a scene.

“I will go when I have said my say. Don't you dare to meddle with my affairs. I know that Miss Stoner has been here. I traced her! I am a dangerous man to fall foul of! See here.” He stepped swiftly forward, seized the poker, and bent it into a curve with his huge brown hands.

This is the only time the reader will see Dr. Roylott alive, but the little scene introduces him as a character and establishes that the conflict will be between Holmes and Roylott. The entire story could have been told without introducing Dr. Roylott until the very end, when he is found dead with his own snake wrapped around his head. But then the conflict, if any, would have been vague and hard to define. With this confrontation between the two men, the story becomes a conflict between them. The threat of violence by the half-mad Dr. Roylott hangs like a storm cloud over the entire story. Roylott tells Holmes to mind his own business; Holmes defies him and makes it his business to investigate the strange happenings at Stoke Moran. In the end it is Holmes who wins. The conflict is resolved when he drives the poisonous snake back through the ventilator and it bites its owner, causing him to die in agony in a few minutes.

Later Holmes will acknowledge that he was responsible for Roylott's death. This is how the conflict between the two men is resolved. One of them kills the other. If Roylott had come back unexpectedly and had found Sherlock Holmes on his property, the violent doctor was quite capable of trying to kill the intruder with one of the hunting guns he must have had on the premises. Holmes tells Watson:

"Some of the blows of my cane came home and roused its snakish temper, so that it flew upon the first person it saw. In this way I am no doubt indirectly responsible for Dr. Grimesby Roylott's death, and I cannot say that it is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience.”

The narrator of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is John Watson, roommate of Sherlock Holmes, the main character. Holmes is renowned for his investigative skills, and together, the men take on a case brought to them by Helen Stoner. The struggle that Holmes takes on is to try to determine what caused the death of Helen Stoner's twin sister and whether or not Helen is facing a threat to her own life in light of recent similar events at the country home where she lives with her stepfather, Dr. Roylott. Holmes quickly realizes that Helen Stoner has been roughly handled by her stepfather, a man with a violent past and a taste for exotic animals.

The technique that Holmes uses to resolve the question of what killed Helen's sister and whether her life is in danger is his mastery of deductive reasoning. He begins with observation, moves to pattern, to hypothesis, and then to theory. He observes Helen as she tells her story and then travels to Stoke Moran for observation at the scene of the crime. Holmes examines the architecture of the manor home and how the rooms connect. He recognizes the pattern of the sounds that preceded Helen's sister's death. He has witnessed for himself and heard from Helen that Dr. Royloff is given to violence. Holmes's theory that the ventilator in the bedchamber is the route by which something killed Helen's sister is proved on the evening that he and Watson intervene and indirectly cause the death of Dr. Roylott when he makes an attempt on Helen's life with a venomous snake.