The Chronicles of Addington Peace/The Tragedy of Thomas Hearne
V
THE TRAGEDY OF THOMAS HEARNE
“Does not that sad underworld of crime in which you move sometimes drive you into a cynical disbelief in all mankind?” I suggested.
It was a bitter night, and the inspector and I were blowing our tobacco from seats confronting before a roaring fire. The wind rattling at the hasp of the window added the luxury of a reminder that it must be extremely unpleasant in the sleet-swept streets outside.
“Not how bad men are; it is how good they are that is surprising,” quoted Peace, with a nod of his head.
We sat in silence for a while before he spoke again.
“I have let a breaker of the law go free in my time—perhaps more than once,” he continued. “The law cannot take cognizance of all the tricks that Fate plays on man.”
I smelt a tale, and remained silent. Peace laughed.
“You think you have driven me into story-telling?” he said.
“I am at your mercy; but I hope so,” I told him.
He leant forward, tapping the ashes from his pipe against the brass of the fender. Then he began—
“About a year ago I received a message from Guy's Hospital that there was a patient lying very ill who wished to see me. I recognized him the moment I set foot in the ward—a gentleman born and bred who had slipped down the ladder from running his own horses to dodging the police as a bookmaker's tout. He was a half-and-half man—too lazily clever to be quite honest, and too honest to be quite a criminal. Poor Jack Henderson! A good man gone wrong—let that be his epitaph when it comes to setting up his headstone.
“'Well, Henderson,' I said, 'what's the trouble?'
“'I'm done, Peace,' he whispered. 'They've no more use for me this side of the black river; but I wanted to see you before I answered the call.'
“'You mustn't talk like that,' I said, though he was looking pretty bad. 'They'll put you on your legs again in a month. You can bet on that, my lad.'
“'It don't matter much either way'—he smiled, in a quiet way he had—so let us get to business. You had your share of trouble, I understand, in the matter of Julius Craig last spring.'
“I nodded.
“'I was in that job,' he said; 'and after what happened I should like to tell you the truth about it. I may have been a pretty bad lot in my time, Inspector; but I had my limits, and murder was one of them.'
“I won't try to give you his exact words, for the poor fellow spoke very slowly, with big pauses in between. But this is close upon the story as he told it to me.
••••••
I expect you know the Blue Shield in Percher Street. Take them one with another, the customers are about the worst crowd in all London. One Saturday night, towards the end of March—last year—I had joined the gang there, hoping to meet some friend with the price of a drink upon him, for I was broke to the wide, wide world. Bill Redman, who was afterwards lagged for bank-note forgeries in Manchester, had just ordered me a whisky, and I was sitting on a stool watching the barman reach down the special Scotch, when in walked a moon-faced fellow, very fat and prosperous, with a dark-blue overcoat and a diamond in his necktie. He looked about him, screwing up his eyes as a near-sighted man will do, and then came over to where I was sitting.
“Mr. Henderson, I believe?” he said.
“That's my name,” I told him, wondering who he might be.
“I have been recommended to you by a—by a mutual friend,” he said; “but I cannot discuss my business here. My carriage is waiting, if you will give me your company for ten minutes.”
I hesitated a moment, until Redman, who seemed to know him, leant across, whispering that I should be a fool to refuse. The stranger pushed me into a brougham that was standing by the pavement opposite the door, and we started off at a smart pace. Once in Regent's Park, however, the driver pulled his horse to a walk, and my companion began to do his talking.
“Five hundred sovereigns would be useful to you these days—eh, Mr. Henderson?”
There was a smile all over his fat face as he said the words, and he chuckled softly to himself with a sound like water coming out of a bottle. It seemed an offer of life to me—a promise of everything the lack of which makes each day a torment to the man who has known clean comfort.
“Is it murder?” I asked him.
“Oh, my dear sir, you surprise me!” he cried, lifting his flabby hands. “What a horrible suggestion! Allow me to explain at once. Have you ever heard of Julius Craig?”
“The company promoter, who organized the Spanish mine swindle? Of course I have.”
“Did you know him by sight?”
“He used to come racing. A tall, thin, melancholy-looking fellow with a black beard—wasn't he?”
“Yes, that is Julius Craig. He is now in the Princetown Prison with six more years to run. The climate of Dartmoor is not suited to his health. He is anxious to change his residence; nor do I blame him, Mr. Henderson, for it is the most desolate spot in all England. I am in a position to offer you the sum I have mentioned if you will arrange his escape. Do you agree?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“Ah, that is most satisfactory. To-morrow I will send you half the money with some little suggestions of my own as to your plan of campaign. The second half you will receive when Mr. Craig is free. By the way, there are some curious relics of the Stone Age on the moors. Perhaps you might read up the subject and appear at Princetown as a student; yes, Mr. Henderson, that will suit you well—a student of prehistoric man.”
He chuckled until the carriage shook. It was like driving with a good-tempered blancmange.
“I shall be glad of any advice you can give me,” I said.
He pulled a cord, and when the carriage stopped I got out and stood waiting.
“Good night and good luck to you,” he said, his great white face shining upon me from the window as he shook my hand. “I have your address. Drive on, Williams.”
I might have been an old and trusted friend from the warmth of his manner. Yet as the carriage rolled away I noticed that he raised the little flap at the back to see that I didn't try to follow him.
The packet arrived next morning. The notes I stowed away in an inside pocket. The typewritten instructions were unsigned and undated.
According to them Craig was a member of gang “D,” employed on the convict farm, in draining and inclosing a portion of moor by a stream known as the Black brook. Above the stream rose a small hill on which was an ancient cairn and stone circle that in my character as a student would offer an excuse for my presence.
Though communication with Craig could not be regularly established, he knew that an attempt was in preparation. The sight of a man in a white waterproof loitering on the cairn bill would be his signal that all was ready. Sudden fogs were frequent upon the moor, and when they came while the convicts were at work in the fields, the chance of escape was excellent; for the authorities did not chain their men, and the warders rarely used their rifles. They trusted to the huge moors upon which men who escaped were easily retaken, half dead from fatigue and starvation.
Craig would make a rush for the cairn hill. From thence it was my duty to convey him to Torquay thirty miles away on the coast. Once there, he would know where to go, and my responsibility ended. A letter to the Torquay Post Office, under the name of W. Slade, would be forwarded to the writer if I required further assistance or had any questions of real importance.
That was all; but it was enough for me. Here was a scheme into which I could put my heart. There was no low-down swindling, no dirty work about it. I felt as gay as a schoolboy off for a holiday.
And so in three days' time that ragged rascal Jack Henderson disappeared from London, and the well dressed Mr. Abel Kingsley, vaguely described in the visitors' book of the Princetown Arms as of Memphis University, U.S.A., was sitting on the cairn hill above the great prison that held Julius Craig.
To the far horizon there stretched the melancholy moors, deserted wastes of rushy marshes and stunted heather, broken here and there by outcrops of granite, that crowned the rolling ground like the ruins of a hundred feudal castles. For Dartmoor is a huge granite tableland, and on its barren surface no corn will grow nor tree flourish.
Beneath the rampart of its containing hills lies the garden of Devon, a land of orchards and pleasant woods, of cornfields and pasture farms; but the moors have defied the farmer and remain the same sad wilderness that prehistoric man inhabited four thousand years ago. You can see where he built his hut circles, and set up his great stone avenues to the honour of dead chieftains.
It was an uncanny sort of place altogether, and I shivered as I sat in that lonely cemetery of the forgotten dead.
The huge prison was built on the opposite slope of the shallow valley, and the farm which the convicts had won field by field stretched down from its walls to a brook at the foot of the cairn hill where I was. On the further edge of the brook a gang was at work inclosing some new ground, and through my glasses I soon made out the man I was after. The last time I had seen him was on his own coach at Ascot, with the girls buzzing round him like wasps after sugar, and there he was digging trenches with a spade. It's a funny world!
About twenty men were in the gang. On the outer side a couple of warders strolled up and down with rifles under their arms. There was nothing but a low hedge to stop the convicts if they knocked down the guards with their spades and make a run for it. But when I looked back across the wastes of the moor I understood. In a city a man may vanish in a crowd, but on Dartmoor he must tramp a dozen miles before he can find even a bush to hide him. In clear weather the mounted warders of the pursuit would ride him down in half an hour.
The Princetown Arms, a grey, weather-beaten square of granite, was a pleasant country inn standing near the centre of the village. It was too early in the year for tourists. Indeed, as I discovered, there was only one man beside myself staying in the house, a Mr. Thomas Hearne, whose address in the visitors' book was briefly London. When I came down to dinner that night I found him already seated at a little table with my knife and fork laid opposite. I wasn't anxious to make new acquaintances, but I couldn't very well ask them to lay another table for my benefit. So I took my chair, and wished him good evening as politely as possible.
He was a small, grey-bearded man of over sixty, as I reckoned, and he seemed as disinclined for conversation as ever I was. For that I thanked my luck, and worked through the dinner with my brain busy with one plan after another. It was just as coffee was served that he asked the question which startled me.
“The landlord tells me you are studying the stone remains on the moor,” he said. “Is it your opinion that they're Neolithic or Druidical?”
I cursed the landlord under my breath. I had told him my story, but I had forgotten he might pass it on to others.
“The latter, undoubtedly,” I said; though, if the truth be told, I had no opinion whatever.
“I cannot agree with you. They were here before ever the Druids came over the sea. May I ask what arguments you adduce in support of your theory?”
Everything I had read about those confounded stones slipped out of my mind in an instant. There was no good trying to bluff him, for he probably had the subject at his fingers' ends. So I nodded my head wisely, and suggested it was a bit too big a subject to start after dinner.
“I saw you by the cairn and circle above the Black brook this afternoon,” he went on. “Is that to be the scene of your first investigations?”
“I have no definite plan at present,” I said with a snap.
He took a long look at me and stopped his questions. I left the table as soon as I could do so decently, routed out the landlord, and engaged a private room. I had had enough of taking meals with a neolithic expert.
It was blowing hard next day, a fierce northwester that cleaned the clouds out of the sky like a sponge washes a slate.
Just after eleven I started out to make a further examination of the position. I wasn't such a fool as to march up to the cairn with old Hearne and a warder or two, as it might be, spying on me from another hillock, so I went down the high-road that lay as white and clear across the grey moor as a streak of paint, until I had left the place some distance behind me. No one, so far as I could see, was in sight, and presently I turned off the road along a disused cart track that seemed to lead in the direction I wanted. Its ancient ruts were filled with sprouting heather, and the short moor turf had covered up the hoof-marks with a velvet surface.
I had walked a good quarter of a mile, when, rounding a curve of the hill, I found the old road explained in the ruins of a small farm, one of those melancholy memorials of a time when frozen meat was unknown, and it paid a man to breed cattle and sheep and cultivate a wheatfield or two, even on Dartmoor. The roof had fallen in, and the woodwork had been carried away, but the stone walls of the house and outbuildings still remained undefeated by a hundred years of storm. A weather-beaten cherry tree was pushing out its spring leafage before the door.
Leaving the farm, I began to climb the cairn hill, as I must call it for want of a better name, which sheltered the farm from the north and west.
It was rough walking, for the heather was set thick with granite boulders. At last I reached the top, skirted the mound set about with stones where the prehistoric chief lay sleeping—and very nearly stepped upon the body of that confounded old fellow, Thomas Hearne.
Luckily for me he never turned his head. The wind on the face of the hill was blowing in great gusts like the firing of a cannon, and my footsteps had been drowned in its thunder. I crept back behind a heap of tumbled rooks and dropped on my hands and knees, watching him through a convenient crevice. He lay flat on his chest, while he covered the gang at work in the new ground below with a small telescope.
It might be curiosity, of course, for many men regard a convict as something abnormal, something that is as pleasant to stare at as if he were the cannibal king at a fair. And yet that seemed a weak explanation. Was he in with the police? Had they got news that an attempt at rescue was to be made? If so, I stood the best chance in the world of finding myself in the county gaol within the week.
There was nothing to be gained by imagining bad luck. I walked back to the inn, and sat down to a study of the district with maps I had brought with me. There was only one railroad within many miles, and that was the single track that ran up from Plymouth to Princetown village. At the first signal that a convict had escaped the station would be full of warders; so that outlet was barred. South of the moor, fifteen miles away, ran another branch lino ending at Ashburton. But I was determined to leave the railroad alone. The stations would be the first places to be watched by the police. Torquay, some thirty miles away, might easily be reached by a good horse and trap within the day. I could hire one for a month through the landlord, with the excuse that I wanted it for my exploring expeditions amongst the stone remains. It would surprise no one if it were seen off the roads with a luncheon-basket prominently displayed. So I decided, and welcomed dinner with enthusiasm.
I questioned the girl who brought the meal to my sitting-room as to old Hearne, but she could give me little information. He had arrived at the inn a couple of days before I appeared, and had spent most of his time in long walks on the moors. She thought he had a friend amongst the prison officials, for she had twice seen him coming out of the great gates down the street. That was all—and it left me more anxious about him than before. It was becoming very plain that before I took any decided step towards the escape, I must make sure of this man's business on the moors.
After dinner I walked into the inn bar to buy a smoke, and found Hearne with his back to the fire, talking to the landlord. As I entered, they both dropped into an uneasy silence. I was certain they had been discussing me, but I didn't want to let them know it, and so began to talk big about the scenery. I stayed down for about half an hour, and then allowed that I would get back to some writing I had to do.
“I'm glad you admire the moor, Mr. Kingsley,” said the landlord, holding back the door for me. “Nothing quite like it in the States, I should think.”
Upon my soul, I was as near as may be to owning I had never been there. But I remembered that I was Abel Kingsley, of Memphis, just in time.
“No,” I said, “it's something quite unique.”
“It's a wild place, sir,” he went on. “Very wild and desolate. You should take a walk one night when the moon is full, as it is now. Then you would understand how the stories of ghost hounds and headless riders and devils in the mires first started. Mr. Hearne here is going to take my advice.”
“To-night?” I asked, turning to the old fellow.
“No, Mr. Kingsley, I am too tired to think of it to-night,” he said. “To-morrow or the next day, perhaps.”
I wished them a good evening and tramped up the stairs to my sitting-room, which looked over the moors at the back of the inn. It was certainly a splendid night, with a great searchlight of a moon drawing the strange tors—as they call the granite caps of the hills—in black silhouette upon the luminous sky-line. I lit a pipe and sat there in the shadows, thinking, thinking. It was pleasant to be a decent man again, to wear clean linen and boots with real soles; to wash and shave and brush myself daily. I was back in my Eden days before the fall, when six hunters were in my stable, and men and women were glad to know Jack Henderson of Lowood Hall in the best of counties; yes, I was away from Princetown village in the midst of happy memories when I came to my senses with the sound of a soft tap-tapping under the window. There were tip-toe skulking footsteps on the gravel of the yard; Heaven knows but my ear had been well trained to such steps as those.
I crept softly to my window and peered out. The man was almost across the yard, moving in the shadow of the pig-sties. As he stopped at the wicket-gate that opened on to the moor, he turned his head to the moon. It was Hearne again.
I decided on that instant. I slipped on my boots and ran down the stairs. The landlord was locking up for the night as I came to the front door.
“I'm going to take your advice,” I said with a laugh.
“Very good, sir; I will sit up for you.”
“No, no, give me the key. Has Mr. Hearne gone to bed?”
“Yes, sir, about ten minutes ago.”
“His room is on the first floor, isn't it?”
“No, sir, he chose one on the ground floor. He preferred it.”
The wiser man, thought I. He needed no door when he had but to open his window and step out.
When I got to the back of the inn Hearne was a good four hundred yards away, climbing a low ridge. As he disappeared over its edge I set off running at top speed, for I saw that in so broken and rugged a place I should have to keep close to his heels or I should lose him altogether. It was well I did so, for when I reached the crest of the rise he had vanished.
Presently, however, I caught sight of him again, walking very fast down a hollow at right angles to the line he first took. It led in the direction of the cairn hill.
It was hard work, that two miles' stalk across the moor. Sometimes I ran, sometimes crawled, sometimes lay flat on my chest with my head buried in the heather like an ostrich. Once I tried to cut a corner across what seemed a plot of level turf and struggled back, panting, from the grasp of the bog with the black slime almost to my waist. But I took great credit for my performance since the old man tramped steadily forward showing no sign of having seen me.
He did not climb the cairn hill as I had half expected, but skirted along the base until he came to the track which led to the ruined farm. Down this he walked quickly and passed through the doorway of the main building. I remained upon the slope of the hill, waiting for him to reappear. Five, ten minutes went by, and then my curiosity got the better of prudence. I determined to go down and see what he was about.
The place was sheltered from the gale, but I could hear it yelping and humming in the rocks above, while now and again a gust came curling up the valley, setting the heather whispering around me. I crept forward over the soft turf of the cart track, reached the gap where the door had been, hesitated, listened, and then stuck in my head.
I had been a boxer in my time, or that would have been the end of me. As I ducked, the heavy stick flicked off my cap and crashed into the wall with a nasty thud. I jumped back, and he came storming out through the doorway like a madman. I never saw more beastly fury in a man's eyes. I side-stepped, and he missed me again—it was a knife this time. Then I woke up, and let him have it with my right under the ear. He staggered, dropping his knife. As he stooped to pick it up, I jumped for him, and in ten seconds more was sitting on his chest, pegging out his arms on the turf. He tried a struggle or two; but he soon saw that I was far the stronger man, and so lay panting, with a hopeless despair in his face that, in a man of his age was shocking to witness. He had tried to kill me, but, on my honour, I felt sorry for him.
“Well, Mr. Hearne,” I said, “and what does this mean?”
“Too old,” he gasped. “Twenty years ago—different. How did you suspect? It was justice—nothing but bare justice, by Heaven!”
“Now, what in the world do you think I am?” I asked him, in great surprise.
“A detective. You couldn't deceive me.”
I got to my feet with a curse at the muddle I had made of it, and he sat up, staring at me as if he thought I had gone clean crazy of a sudden.
“I'm no detective,” I said angrily, “though I was fool enough to believe you were one.”
“Then why did you follow me to-night?” he asked, with a quick suspicion.
“Why did you try to kill me?” I said. “The truth is, Mr. Hearne, you and I are playing a risky game. Is it to be cards on the table, or are we to separate and say no more about it?”
He sat watching me for a time with a puzzled look. Plainly he was in great uncertainty of mind.
“Perhaps I have nothing to tell,” he said at last.
“A man does not attempt to murder detectives unless he has a crime to conceal.”
“That is true,” he said, nodding his head; “very just and true.”
There was nothing to be gained by a long bargaining of secrets with him. Whatever his business he could speedily discover mine if he chose. If I were honest with him he might return the confidence.
“I am arranging for the escape of Julius Craig, now doing his time in the prison yonder,” I told him.
“Julius Craig!” he echoed, with wild eyes. “The escape of Julius Craig?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
He burst into a scream of hysterical laughter, swaying his body to and fro, and pressing his hands to his sides as if trying to crush the uncanny merriment out of him; and then, before I guessed what he was about, the old fellow was upon me, with his arms about my neck in a mad embrace.
“Welcome, comrade,” he cried. “I too have come to find a way out of Princetown Gaol for Julius Craig.”
It took a good five minutes and a pull out of a flask to get him back to hard sense. Then he told me his story sitting on a fallen stone under the old cherry tree.
Craig was dearer to him than any brother, he said, with a burst of open sincerity. There was that between them that he could never forget while life remained to him. He had heard how the man was pining under prison discipline, and had come to help him escape if that were humanly possible. Of me or my London employers he knew nothing whatever.
He had been shown over the prison, having obtained a pass from an influential friend, and while there had learnt the place where Craig was daily employed. Yesterday from the cairn hill he had satisfied himself that the convict was working in the gang.
He had crept out this evening to examine the stream and hedge which divided the new enclosure from the moor. When he saw me on his track, his suspicions as to my business were confirmed. Either he must give up his project or my mouth must be stopped. So he tempted me into the ruined farm. The rest I knew.
He spoke in an easy, pleasant voice, with a perfect frankness and good humour. It never seemed to occur to him that he had done anything unreasonable, anything to which a level-headed man could object. I stared at him in a growing amazement.
There seemed, indeed, only one solution before me—that he had become partially insane.
“You must understand my position, Mr. Kingsley,” he concluded. “I am not a lunatic; but I have made up my mind in this matter of Julius Craig. Any one who is foolish enough to come between us must stand aside or take the consequences. Towards yourself, for example, I had no ill will In fact, I rather liked you. But you must admit that, as a detective, your presence was excessively inconvenient. Now that I know the truth, I welcome you as a most valuable ally. I am prepared to trust you absolutely. Come, what are your plans?”
I told him as we walked back to the inn. He expressed himself an admirer of their simplicity as we parted for the night. Mad or not I had found an assistant who would be of great help to me. So I let it stay at that and slept like a rock till nine next morning.
Matters moved quickly with us. I hired a stout horse and a two-wheeled cart for a month from the landlord to whom I talked neolithic man of an evening, impressing him with a learning, acquired from the reports of that worthy society the Devonshire Association. I preferred to drive myself, declining the boy offered for that purpose. There were no other preparations to make; and so, on the day following, that earnest student, Mr. Abel Kingsley, might have been seen smoking his pipe on the cairn hill in a new white mackintosh, for was there not a threat of rain in the air? while Mr. Thomas Hearne lay hid amongst the stories watching the effect of the signal through his pocket telescope. He reported all well; Julius Craig had undoubtedly noticed the white waterproof and understood that we were waiting for him.
I could talk to you for an hour of our doings in the next three weeks. We lived on the edge of a powder-barrel in which we had set the fuse. Never a morning but we were up with the sun, staring to windward for signs of the weather. Would it be to-day, to-morrow—not at all? A nervous man would never have stood that strain; but we were not a neurotic couple, the old chap and I.
As hard and keen and clever as a lad of twenty-one was Thomas Hearne. It was he who spent the day in Plymouth, returning with a wig and long overcoat that might temporarily conceal the convict's identity until he could change his yellow prison uniform for the clothes I had already bought; it was he who gathered to himself all the weather lore of the village until he had become a better prophet than the wisest veteran of the moors. Two fogs we had, but during the first the convicts were kept within the walls; while before the other caught them the warders had time to rush the gangs back to their cells. Yet Hearne never lost temper at these delays, cheering me back into patience with the strength of his own certainty.
“Don't you worry, Kingsley,” he would say; “what is fated to happen cannot be prevented, and Providence will see to it that Julius Craig comes to us soon.”
His affection for the convict seemed to fill his life. No risk, no labour was too heavy; no storm would drive him from his post. Often when I was smoking by the inn fire, he was crouching patiently amongst the rocks on the cairn hill, as if it were his only son for whom he waited. There was something inhuman in his merciless self-sacrifice; but I had no reason to complain, for it lightened the burden on my shoulders.
It was at three o'clock on Tuesday, May 9th, that Julius Craig escaped. Poor devil! if he had but known!
Hearne and I had quarrelled that morning over the fog question. Perhaps both our tempers were wearing thin, but that was no excuse for his dropping from argument to insults. I dare say he thought my language just as bad; but that didn't make the trouble any lighter. There was fog in the air, he said, though even the landlord laughed at the idea when I put the question to him. Finally, the old man walked off in a huff, though I had so far given way as to promise that I would bring the cart to the ruins by lunch-time.
I sulked about the inn until the papers came from Plymouth. When I had finished reading them it was nigh one o'clock. A leg of lamb was cooking in the kitchen. Just because Hearne preferred cold ham sandwiches on a draughty hill there was no reason why I should not have my meal in comfort. I would lunch before I started, and he could wait for his sandwiches.
It was a selfish thing to do, but he had irritated me that morning more than I now can understand. I was finishing off with cheese when the landlord thrust his head through the door of my sitting-room.
“I gave fool's wisdom this morning, sir,” he said. “The fog be blowing up proper from the eastward. I'm feared that Mr. Hearne”
He got no farther, for I was past him like a flash and out into the open.
The moors had gone; utterly vanished away. In their place there lay a blanket of billowy white that sent wild streamers upwards to the flying veil of clouds. Only a quarter mile of the main road was visible, and up it the first wave of the misty inundation was marching like a lofty wall. I ran towards the stable, cursing myself in my mad disappointment.
I galloped for two hundred yards, and then the fog gathered me to itself, and I had just enough sense to pull the horse to a slow trot.
I could still see the road for a dozen paces, but all sense of proportion and distance had gone from me. The fog was not stationary, but curled in broad confusing wreaths, or poured sideways upon me in avalanches of denser mist. Sometimes the cart was on the road, sometimes off it. Twice I nearly capsized. In the end I climbed down and went to the horse's head, leading it forward at the run. I made better progress after that.
Yet I was not more than half way to the cairn hill when from the whirling shadows to my left there came a sound that set my heart leaping in my breast. It was the muffled hud of a rifle.
I stopped, listening and staring into the mist. A second shot followed. And then, as if raised by these echoes, there clanged a distant bell, a deep voice of loud alarm from the prison tower, telling the moor that a convict had escaped, that Julius Craig was free, and that I—I, miserable fool that I was, had failed in the trust which had been placed, upon me.
I tried not to think, but ran stubbornly on beside the horse with that infernal bell rioting in my ears. My life on the moors had put me in sound condition, and I never slackened my pace till I had trotted up the rise to where the track to the ruined farm began. I checked the horse and walked slowly forward studying the edge of the moor beside the highway for the mark of the grass-grown ruts I knew so well.
I heard the footsteps long before I saw him, a quick patter upon the hard surface behind me. As he came out of the fog he shouted, bringing his rifle to his hip with an easy swing. He was a stoutly built man in the neat dark uniform that marks the prison warder.
“Be careful with that gun,” I said; for he still had me covered.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he panted; “but we were close to him, and”
“Close to whom?”
“There's a convict escaped,” he explained. “You haven't seen him?”
“No, nor likely to in this weather.”
He had got his breath by this time and stood leaning on his rifle, looking vaguely about him.
“You're right, sir. We stand a far better chance of losing ourselves than of finding him in a fog like this. But one thing is equally certain—he can't get far either.”
It was while he spoke that I heard it—the clink of a boot striking a stone, and that not a score of yards away.
“I'm afraid you are only wasting time,” I said, as carelessly as I was able. “A needle in a haystack is easy compared to a convict in a fog.”
“I think I must take your advice, sir,” he laughed.
We wished each other good afternoon, and he melted away as a man might slide behind a curtain. His footsteps died out down the road by which he had come as moved forward.
“That was a near thing, Kingsley,” said a voice in the shadows, and I humbly thanked my luck as old Hearne stepped out upon the road.
“I've no excuse,” I began. “It was all my fault, and”
“Hush! keep quiet.”
He stood for a moment listening like a dog at a door.
“If that fool of a warder had not gone back we were done,” he whispered. “The guards chased us right into the ruins. While they searched them we slipped down the track. Come along, Craig, all's well.”
The convict rose from the heather, where he had lain, and stumbled towards us. He was shaking like a man with the ague, and the sweat was running off his forehead and down his cheeks in narrow streaks.
“Am I safe,” he stuttered, grabbing my arm. “I've money, man, money. You shall have it, I swear you shall have it all I But I won't go back there—not alive!”
“Come, pull yourself together,” said Hearne, with a hand on his shoulder. “We have no time to waste, remember.”
We wrapped the long coat over his yellow clothes, stuck the wig over his cropped head, and helped him to the front seat. I took my place beside him, Hearne clambered up behind, and our journey began.
The horse was of the old moor breed. He could have bowled us along at a good ten miles an hour if the fog had allowed it; but as it was we rarely exceeded half that speed. It was a miserable time. Craig sat huddled by my side, now cursing me for the delay, now peering back along the road, while he implored us to tell him if it were galloping hoofs that he heard. He was an evil-tempered, petulant man, and I did not waste either politeness or sympathy upon him. It was not until we had passed over some miles of rolling uplands and dropped down a steep descent to a moss-grown bridge, that the fog showed signs of breaking. As we strained up the opposing hill it began to tear away in flying wisps like the smoke of great guns, giving us glimpses of a narrow slope of turf ending in a cliff, at the foot of which an unseen river moaned and chuckled.
“I helped you loyally—you have no complaint against me?” asked old Hearne, tapping me suddenly on the shoulder.
“I could never wish a better comrade,” I told him.
“That is how I hope you will always think of me.”
He was not a kind of man to talk sentiment, and I glanced back in surprise. There was an expression of peace upon him, such as I have never seen in a human countenance either before or since. He smiled, and, reaching over, gave my hand a squeeze.
“You have the making of a good fellow in you,” he said. “May the fates forget your follies.”
We drove on in silence for a while, and then the old man rose, kneeling upon the cushions of the back seat.
“Here comes the sun, Julius Craig,” he said. “The mists are scattering, and the world comes peeping through to welcome you back to freedom. Women and wine and cards—does the old spirit stir within you?”
“And who the devil may you be?” asked the convict, turning upon him.
“Have five years changed me so much? Perhaps my beard is whiter than it was the night you fled with her to the yacht in Cadiz Bay.”
The convict gave a miserable cry, like a beast in pain, shrinking back, with his face one grey mask of fear.
“Not Mortimer?” he whispered. “It can't be Mortimer. He died.”
“You are quite mistaken,” said Hearne, politely.
It all happened very swiftly—in one long breath or so, it seemed to me. Craig sprang from his seat and ran wildly down the slope; but the old man was not five yards behind him. I believe that the convict had the pace of him, but the cliff turned Craig to the right, and the next moment they had closed, and hung, swaying, upon the edge.
The flicker of a knife, a shrill, piping cry, and they were gone.
I was alone in a great silence save for the faint murmurs of the stream as it fought the rocks below.
It took me ten minutes and more to reach them, for I had to skirt the cliff until a slide of granite boulders gave me a path to the bottom. Craig was dead, the knife had done its work; but the old man was alive, though his grave blue eyes were glazing fast. He recognized me, and smiled very, very faintly. I raised his head upon my arm, and wiped his wrinkled face with my handkerchief.
“Is he dead?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“I was—manager of a mine—in Spain,” he whispered. “My daughter—he took her to his yacht—scoundrel was married already—she died in London.”
There was no vengeance in his face new; he faltered on as simply as a little child.
“Long search—found he was in prison—came to kill him. I met you—to help him escape seemed a better way. Then he would know why he had to die—if I had shot him over hedge he would—never have understood—sorry for you—had to do my duty—by him.”
His head fell back with a long sigh, so that I thought all was over; but presently he rallied again, in the last blind effort at life which even a man with a broken back will make.
“Not a sin, Mary dear,” he called. “How can they tell you it was murder when they know”
He finished his explanation in another world.
That is about all I need tell you. I found the horse grazing by the roadside and drove to Ashburton with no great care whether they caught me or not. Yet I was back in London before they found the bodies.
••••••
So ended the story of John Henderson as Inspector Peace told it to me.
“And you?” I asked.
“I suspected that 'Kingsley' had helped in the escape, but I never identified him with Jack Henderson. Who Thomas Hearne might be or why he killed the convict I could never find out. So I failed, but I don't know that I am ashamed of it, all things considered.”
“Did Henderson die in hospital?”
“No; they pulled him round. Some old friends found him a place in some racing stables. He is there now.”
“He had broken several sorts of laws,” I suggested. “When he recovered didn't you”}}
“No, I didn't,” said the inspector, firmly. “I let him go free—and without straining my conscience either.”