The Popular Magazine/Volume 68/Number 1/The Halt and the Blind
The Halt and the Blind
By Edison Marshall
Author of “The Call of the Blood,” “The Isle of Retribution,” Etc.
(A Complete Novel)
Chapter I.
It has fallen upon me, at last, to set down in full the account of the affair at Roadturn—that strange case of love and hate that marked the only adventure in my long, gray, uneventful life. It has been said that every man has one moment of great drama; and this that I will tell would seem to prove that such is true; yet it might so easily have been that the thing that we call drama—excitement, the swift leap of the blood and the wild racing of the heart—had missed me altogether. Suppose old age had claimed me—as it claims so many men of less years than mine—a year, even a month before that queer still night when I knocked on Mr. Moody's door: then I would have no story to tell at all. The whole course of my life would have been as quiet and as commonplace as that old road that used to wind—and still does, though I can no longer see it from my pantry window—from Sir Stanley Barr's great country house down to Maidstone. But Sir Stanley Barr and Maidstone are far away now, and great seas wash between. I must keep them out of my thoughts and my pen from their names if I am to tell a clear, straightforward story of the Roadturn tragedy.
It will be no easy task. There will be times, doubtless, when my fancy will lead my pen astray; and my thought will carry me from the straight course of the narrative; and for this I must beg indulgence. When human eyes have seen the leaves fall in more than seventy autumns, when human hands have gathered flowers in seventy springs, both are likely to falter and make mistakes; and the mind wanders and the fancy escapes from the discipline of a strong intent. There will be times when I do not remember clearly and in exact detail, times when I am not exactly sure as to the order of events; and there may be even some small phases of the affair that I will not be wholly able to clear up. All I can do is to record what I myself saw and heard, the main events; and thus establish the truth as far as possible for the wondering public.
I think I can fairly begin with the day the employment man sent me out to Roadturn. This is the story of the affair at Roadturn more than it is my story, so there is no need to go back to Sir Stanley Barr, and all my old associations beyond the sea. Of my long year's service in Sir Stanley's journey across the sea—indeed, my emigration to America—there is no need to tell here. The account will be long enough if I begin in the employment office in a large Maryland city, and my application for the position of serving man.
I still remember a girl's smiling face as she looked at me as if she were amused at something I did not understand; and in a moment she had led me to the presence of the man who conducted the employment agency. Perhaps I should say “gentleman”—the word is widely used in this country—yet he wasn't exactly what Sir Stanley would have called a gentleman. He was a large man and he too seemed to be smiling; and I fancied that he and his office assistant must have just had some small wheeze—you call them?—together. I had taken off my hat and he looked me over with considerable interest from my gray head to my black walking boots.
“How do you do, uncle,” he said cheerily. “So you want a job as butler?”
Of course I was of no blood kin to him. This was just his cheery way of speaking—common among many men of America—and perhaps he referred in some degree to my advanced age. “Yes, sir,” I told him. “If there is a place open.” Truly I was surprised that he should know the character of the position I sought and I fancied at first that perhaps this office operated wholly to supply butlers, no other class of servants. But such did not prove to be the case.
“It just happens there is a place open—a vacancy that occurred just to-day. You've dropped in just the right time. But I'm a little afraid, uncle, that Mr. Moody will want a younger man.”
These were his words as clearly as I can remember. I ventured that I thought I could give satisfaction.
He sat rubbing his head. “I don't have to ask you if you've had experience,” he observed. “Sherlock Holmes will have to hand it to me; you've got all the earmarks.” He spoke just this way—I remembered it because it was so odd. “The place, uncle, is a good one, but they want a good servant. He must be unobtrusive, deft—a gentleman's butler in every sense. The house is in Old Town—practically in the country, now—the hours are irregular, and Mr. Moody is an invalid.”
He named the wage and it was nearly twice as much as I had ever received from Sir Stanley—and the latter was one of the most generous gentlemen in all of Kent.
“That will all be satisfactory,” I commented; and then I named some of the stately houses abroad where I had served.
He looked at me with increasing curiosity. “What's your name?”
“Small—Tubal Small.”
“Well, Tubal, I've just got a hunch that you can do it. I've just a hunch that if any one can buttle you are just that little boy. At least you can go out to see him.”
It was all very confusing but presently he gave me a card and I rode in a motor out to Roadturn. In truth the big house was practically out of the city. It was not, as I had hoped, an exclusive residence district. The employment man had spoken of it as being in “Old Town” and I guessed at once that this was at one time the seat of a village, but it had been eclipsed and swallowed up by the spreading outskirts of the adjacent city. Tradesmen and cotters had humble homes in the vicinity; there were green gardens near by and even some extensive tracts of heath. Farther distant I could see the shimmering green of a hardwood copse.
The house itself was built on a low hill and for a moment I was reminded of my own country. This was the first place I had seen that looked like Kent. Plainly it had been built with the noble idea of an enduring family house—the château, as the French say—and indeed I have often been glad to serve in houses not half so stately and splendid. It was an immense structure and perhaps it was what we call of Georgian architecture. Its many gables and dormer windows, its quaint roofs and its great, rambling floor plan showed that it was not a modern house, yet mostly it was well preserved. For all its unattractive neighborhood the house was maintained with pride; well-kept gardens and lawns, a recently painted motor shed at the end of a curving driveway. An old colored man was at work in the rose gardens as I drew near.
I passed through the gate, up the short walk, and knocked at last at the great oaken door. I may say here that at this moment the house seemed to me wholly cheery and attractive. There was no atmosphere of mystery, nothing to carry the fancy out of its usual grooves. It seemed to be simply the great, stately home of some gentleman of large means and elegant tastes—such a gentleman as I had served in my own country.
It might have been, though, that as I waited I had a queer feeling of uneasiness—a single instant in which I was dimly nervous and dismayed. Perhaps it was just anxiety that I would not be able to secure the position; but in the light of what followed I am almost convinced it was nothing less than premonition.
I waited a long time for some one to answer the knock. I rapped again and then I heard impatient steps in the corridor.
it did not surprise me that an old negress, rather than a serving man, should open the door. Unquestionably the house butler recently had been discharged; otherwise there would not have been a vacancy for me. I guessed at once that she was of the kitchen staff and she was very impatient at leaving her work. For an instant she stared at me with considerable suspicion, almost with animosity.
Rose—I was to learn her name later—might have been close to my own age but except for the deep lines of her black face, and perhaps a dimness about her coal-black eyes, I would have thought she was not past fifty. She was a tall, strong woman; altogether a new type to me. She had huge jaws, sullen eyes, great dark lips, strong big hands and long arms and she was very black.
“What yo' want?” she demanded.
I told her and she looked at me with growing interest. Then with hardly a word she took me down a long corridor to Mr. Moody's door.
The room occupied by the master of the house—if indeed the house could be said to have a master—was in the extreme rear of the structure. It seemed reasonable that he had chosen it because of the view—that opened through broad windows on to the fields. Perhaps it was the warmest room in the house, too, facing as it did south and west.
The negress halted outside the door and in the silence of the corridor I heard the distinct whisper of her troubled breathing. She knocked on the door.
“What is it?” some one answered from within. It was the first time I had heard Mr. Moody's voice; and surely I had right to feel encouraged. It was a soft voice—what could perhaps best be called a jolly voice—affable, even tender.
“Rose,” the blackamoor answered. “Here's a man here 'plyin' for de job.”
I give her singular accent the best I can. It was unfamiliar to me—I would have almost thought it another tongue than English. And at once, before I could prepare myself to meet the gentleman, the door came open.
There was no hand on the knob. The single occupant of the room—a large man well past middle age—was propped on a great four-poster bed of seeming great comfort and luxury and a book was open at his knees. He had a rather ingenious device arranged, a cord attached to the latch, whereby he could open the door from his bedside. Plainly he was a man who resented interruption; I guessed at once that the door was locked from within.
“Ah, faithful old Rose,” he began in his gentle, soothing, mellow voice, “you find me reading—the only way the old may properly pass the time.”
“Yo ain't old,” Rose commented bluntly. “Not as old as I is”
“Perhaps my affliction adds to my sense of age—but it is not for me to complain, surrounded as I am by loving relatives and faithful, willing attendants.” His voice deepened as if with emotion. “And whom have you brought to see me, Rose?”
“Dis 'ere am a man 'plying for de job,” Rose told him coolly.
“Oh, it is?” His large, soft blue eyes turned on me. “Ah, Rose—the harshness of the world. 'Long labor urged on aged breath' so it goes, so it goes. Rose, perhaps you'd better go and leave this gentleman with me.”
Some way the words did not put me at my ease. He had called me a gentleman—doubtless with the idea of pleasing me—but really it embarrassed me a little. I am a servant and have done good service; in my country a gentleman would know that I needed no other title.
It is hard to tell in just what way the gaze he bent upon me differed from that of other gentlemen I have served. Other gentlemen have been kind, indulgent, and once in his last sickness Sir Stanley took my hand in his and looked at me almost as one gentleman looks at another who has been his long, sincere friend. Yet even this look was not as familiar—perhaps I should say as intimate—as this from the stranger on the bed. It would seem that he had a great love for all mankind and especial affection for the aged. “How do you do,” he said, so very warmly, and he reached out his hand. I took it and perhaps I was not as composed as I should have been. I was somewhat confused and faltering; awkward, perhaps, as no experienced serving man should ever be. His grasp was warm and exceeding cordial and he shook my hand vigorously as he might have shaken the hand of an old friend.
“It pains me deeply to see men of your age hunting work when they should be sitting at ease, served by loving hands,” he told me in an earnest voice. “If it were in my power I'd have it that no man past sixty would be obliged to bend his tired back in toil, but should have a comfortable home—ideal surroundings. I would like to pension all men over sixty; and yet I admire to see, admire to see such men, forced into toil by adverse circumstances, going forth bravely, not whining over their cruel lot but standing up under the hardship like the nature's noblemen they are! It pains me deeply to be served by men older than I am, because my only impulse is to put them in this soft bed, in my place, and serve them instead; and yet, since that is impossible, I rejoice to give opportunity to such pathetic derelicts rather than to younger men who, though they. might give me better service, perhaps do not need the position so badly.”
I'm afraid I stood staring a little, not knowing just how to answer him. It was almost as if he were making a speech. He closed his large blue eyes at the close and his voice echoed and ceased and he sat an instant with folded hands. “The gentleman is very kind,” I told him. “I came to see if you could hire me—as serving man.”
He opened his eyes wide. “Not as a serving man—more as a companion,” he said. “I don't like to speak of the—assistants in our household as servants—I am a believer in absolute democracy! It is true that you would do the work that servants do in other houses, yet not as servants, if you catch my meaning. It is true we have an opening here for a high-class man, one whom, as it were, will not only give us service but companionship and affection as well. You and I, my good man, who have passed into the twilight of our lives, have learned how dear, how priceless real companionship is. We know that a mountain of gold cannot make up for it—that the love of one's fellow men is worth more than a kingdom. You said your name was”
“Tubal Small,” I replied. And I told him of my wide experience abroad.
He seemed quite interested in the fact that I had once been a servant to Sir Stanley Barr. Perhaps he was somewhat flattered that he could hire as his own servant one who had served such a great and famous gentleman. And now that I talked his eyes dropped down and I had a chance to study his face.
He was quite a heavy man, though not tall, with a large clean-shaven face, a long nose, and large, soft white hands. He smiled genially almost all the time. He had curly black hair, hardly touched with gray, and he scarcely looked the age I had felt him to be—well past sixty. I could not guess at present the nature of the malady that had confined him, to his bed; but his extremely pale face alone would have indicated ill health.
He wore pajamas and a thin dressing gown of black silk; and his smile and good nature indicated that he was taking his confinement with good grace. He had never been an active type of man—such a type as I have seen so many times in my master's house in Kent, sportsmen and explorers, hunters and soldiers—and with his books and papers, tobacco and whisky, he seemed to be wholly content. Crutches leaned beside the bed in easy reach; with these he evidently could move about the room.
“It gratifies me to be able to give you this position,” he said at last. “I am hoping that it can be permanent and thus assure you a comfortable livelihood from now on. The duties are simple—to answer the doorbell and telephone and to serve, to the best of your ability, Miss Moody and myself.
“As you have perhaps guessed, I am afflicted with paralysis. It is with the greatest difficulty that I can even move across this room with the crutches. I never even attempt to go farther than the threshold.” He smiled and closed his eyes. “Yet I can say that I carry this cross that Providence has seen fit to lay upon me with humbleness and not bitterness, and with great pity not for myself but for those more unfortunate than I! For instance, I forget my own woes in thinking about those of my poor, lovely niece, Miss Moody.
“You must be ready to serve Miss Moody at all times, but this will be a pleasure to you rather than a duty. She is indeed one of nature's purest noblewomen. She is suffering from some malady of the eyes and the specialist I have for her tells me—but I won't speak that thought! Perhaps by keeping it out of our minds and trusting piously we can keep it from coming true. A great part of the time she stays in a darkened room and when she does walk abroad she is obliged to go with bandaged eyes. You must help her back and forth from the dining room or wherever else she chooses to go. Of course you are to serve her meals in the dining room.
“I eat my meals here, of course. Perhaps soon—who knows?—I can be up and out again. Doctor Hardy is very encouraging. But if not, I hope I can continue to bear my cross as before. I have my dinner about six-thirty, so as to have the dishes cleared away in time for Doctor Hardy's visit, which is usually about eight. Doctor Hardy, you understand, is to have the run of the house. When he comes in the evening let him in without formality. Sometimes he calls on Miss Moody first, sometimes on myself. He will find his way to our rooms without guidance and he comes and goes when he likes. Considering his eminence, we feel very fortunate to be able to command so much of his time. He has absolutely retired but due to his friendship for me he has agreed to give my niece and myself the benefit of his great skill. Particularly we appreciate his willingness to come to treat us in the evening, in the hours that he could rightfully claim for recreation.
“He usually goes about nine, and I read an hour, then seek the blessed peace of sleep. I like to have you stop and knock outside my door about half past nine or ten and see if I want you to come in and straighten up my room for the night. It may be that I won't answer. I am a sound sleeper and if I do not reply to your first call please go away and do not disturb me. This is true at all times; in day or night if I do not open the door at the first call go away and leave me. We all have our little eccentricities, Tubal, and mine is that I resent being disturbed. If I do not care to see any one I will not reply no matter how much any one calls or knocks. You will pardon this childishness in an old man, I know. And when Doctor Hardy is with me I am not to be disturbed under any circumstances.”
Mr. Moody excused me then and by means of the rope device opened the door for me to pass through. A very curious gentleman, I thought. It won't hurt, now, to speak this opinion I had of him, considering all that has befallen since. Although he was my employer and his words showed him a gentle, pious man, I couldn't help but wonder at him a little and think him a little different from the gentlemen I had served before.
Old Rose, the blackamoor, was prowling around in the hall when I came out. She seemed like a black panther of which I have sometimes read in stirring tales of adventure. I walked near her and she turned with her dark, sullen eyes upon me.
“Did yo' get de job?” she asked. At least it sounded like that. I told her yes and her big lips curled in a queer smile. “Yo' won't keep it long.”
She spoke with such certainty, such assurance, that my curiosity was speedily wakened. “Why not, madam?” I asked her.
She seemed to smile a little, whether at my question or at the respectful way I had spoken I do not yet know. “Because—dis house am hanted,” she told me. She spoke without emphasis, quietly and calmly, and except for a flash of the whites of her eyes I might have thought she was attempting some droll wheeze. “Dey's a bad mouf been put on dis house. Black de hour it was ever built! Let me show you sompin dat”
Somewhat mystified and perhaps slightly curious I walked with her up the stairs. She led me to a little den or study in the rear of the house on the second floor; then stood pointing out the window.
“Look at dat!”
Beyond the gardens I saw a low hedge and beyond the hedge a long sweep of meadowland that ended in a wire fence, evidently the line of the Roadturn estates. Beyond this fence was a small grove of hardwood trees and in a rift between their wide tops we could see just the green top of a low hill. The thing she had brought me here to see stood on the hill.
It was so sharply outlined against the cold, white, autumn clouds that I did not for a minute mistake what it was. It was nearly a quarter of a mile distant but my time-dimmed eyes identified it at once. The trap was broken and dangling, and likely it was weather-beaten and decaying, yet it was unmistakably an old gallows such as I have seen on some of the hills of my native land.
Chapter II.
Quite an odd sight, I thought, for the twentieth century in the State of Maryland—just at the edge of a thriving modern city. The gallows tree itself, supported over the yawning hole in the platform beneath, was in perfect outline against the sky; very black and vivid it looked to me then. Presently I stopped looking at it to look at Rose. She had a queer expression that puzzled me not a little; her eyes were very large and protuberant and her mouth was open and round. The fingers of her big black hands were crossed, as if she were suffering from nervous complaint.
“Just an old gallows,” I told her. “Why doesn't some one tear it down?”
“Dar you go—what dey all say—why don't no one tear it down? Dat's what I say, too, but no, one year and anuder, and it ain't been torn down yet. Dey say it's a old landmark but it don't mark nothin' I cares about rememberin'. Der was an old jail der once and de gallows stood jes' behin'. Den de jail burned—one night nearly fifteen year ago—and was rebuilt in New Town. But dat gallows never burn up—not dat. Den somebody bought de land—some stranger what lived in New York or London or some sech foreign country and he ain't never had it torn down. He bought de land for speculation, so Miss Alice say, but de city ain't growed out to it yet. Dis is de only window in de house you can see it from and dat's a queer t'ing in itself.”
“Not very queer, considering there is a deep rift in the trees.”
“Why dem trees grow dat way, chile? It's all right to say dat ain't queer, but it's conjurin' queer to me. And right dar, on dat very gallows, was where James Crockitt was hung!”
The story she subsequently told me was grim and unpleasant but nothing to surprise those who habitually read the crime pages in the daily journals. I could fancy, however, that it might have a pronounced effect on such ghost-ridden people as the more unlettered blacks; and indeed her expression and voice showed that it had impressed her very deeply. No white man would guess, to listen to it, that he would ever give the tale a second thought, but who can guess the future?
I could not, if I tried, give the story in the woman's own words. About eighteen years before, it seemed, the house was owned by one George Moody, father of Miss Alice Moody, the present owner of the estate, and brother of Mr. Oswald Moody whom I had been hired to serve. She didn't mention George Moody's wife, Miss Alice's mother, and I judged she had died at the girl's birth. At the time of the crime the house was occupied by George Moody, his daughter Miss Alice, and Oswald Moody, who was then in good health and who made Roadturn his quarters between his engagements on the stage. George Moody was a man of great estate—Oswald's wealth, according to reports, consisted mostly of a kind, affectionate, idealistic nature. Although he had been a moderately successful actor he was luxury loving and had lived up most of his earnings. George Moody, however, was glad to have him as his guest between engagements, purely for the pleasure of his company. Among the small staff of servants—the Moodys had always lived quietly—was a stable hand, newly come from abroad—James Crockitt by name.
One night George Moody was murdered in his bed. It apparently was not a great mystery; local detectives were soon able to fasten the crime on young Crockitt. In his room, carefully hidden, was found his knife, stained with blood; and certain stained clothes that proved conclusively to them that Crockitt was the murderer. Oswald testified that it had been his dead brother's spoken intention to discharge the man; thus was found the motive for the crime. Although he protested innocence to the last Crockitt was arrested, tried by the local courts and hanged on the gallows on the near-by hill. No one had died on this gallows since, as the jail burned down soon after and it was abandoned.
It was a very commonplace story. Although it was not generally known that George Moody had written a will, a properly signed and witnessed document was produced from the safe of his personal attorney and his daughter, Miss Alice, then an infant, was made the heir of the great bulk of the estate. Every one was much surprised, the negress told me, that an uncle on her mother's side, Boggs by name, had been appointed executor and guardian instead of the affable, affectionate actor, Oswald Moody—no one less than Mr. Oswald himself. Some of the neighboring villagers, and especially the servants, resented this fact exceedingly for, while Boggs was a gruff, severe, cold man, Oswald was quite the contrary, and would have gone a long way, they thought, in affection and kindness, toward taking the place of the murdered father.
Oswald went back to the stage and Miss Moody had to admit that Boggs had made a fair enough guardian and executor. Indeed the girl became very much attached to him and mourned deeply at his death three months before. The girl was not yet of age and Oswald Moody was appointed by the courts to take his place. This opportunity, evidently, had come none too soon, for the actor had suffered a paralytic stroke in one leg and was in desperate circumstances.
Thus, that first day, I got acquainted with the ugly history of the old mansion and before the night had fallen I had met most of the actors in the drama that was to come. The first was Miss Alice, whom I encountered on the lower floor.
I came upon her rather suddenly and thus I explained the queer little frightened start she gave when she heard my step. Not only her eyes, I thought, but her nerves too were in need of a practitioner's skill; she flung back almost as if in fear of attack. Her eyes were heavily bandaged and she was progressing through the room by groping with her hands.
In my time I have waited on great ladies—beautiful women who were guests of Lady Barr—and perhaps, in my long years, I have learned to judge a lady from an imposture, a noblewoman from a peasant. I tell this so that I may be believed when I saw that Miss Alice Moody was to the manner born. There would be no feeling of descent in serving her nor was I guided in this judgment by the fact that she was my employer. The hands with which she groped through the room were slender and beautiful, like those I have seen on ancient, priceless canvases, and though her face was half masked by the bandage I could not mistake its childlike, pensive beauty. But the nearing darkness had written sorrow on that lovely countenance. No wonder Mr. Moody had spoken in sadness of her.
“It is just the new butler,” I told her.
“Oh!” She seemed to struggle for breath. “You have just come, of course—how stupid of me to be startled! I didn't know any one was in the house.”
“Your household is small,” I ventured, “Naturally you would be frightened at an unfamiliar step.”
“Of course. There is only myself, my uncle, and the two old colored people, neither of whom sleep in the house, and a few other colored people that come in for the day. Your step was unfamiliar—since I have been having this slight trouble with my eyes my hearing seems to have quickened wonderfully. If it wasn't for Doctor Hardy's comforting words I'm afraid I would think that a discouraging sign.”
She smiled childishly and I wondered if Doctor Hardy had tried to spare her a tragic truth. “I don't suppose you have been given a place to sleep yet, have you? You are a white man—I can tell that by your voice—and I'm going to let you have a nice room in the house, instead of going to the outhouses.”
She called Rose and the latter conducted me to the corner room immediately adjoining the study I had just entered. It was a very pleasant place with every comfort and the windows overlooked the large outbuilding where Rose and the old colored man had their lodgings.
This appointment of quarters was important only so far as it led to a rather surprising dispute between Miss Alice and her uncle, later in the day. Unaware of my conversation with Miss Alice, Mr. Moody summoned me to his room with the idea of appointing me a room.
“I forgot to tell you where you were to sleep,” he began, smiling brilliantly. “We always look out carefully for our attendants. There is a small room just back of the kitchen that will be ideal for your use. Tell one of the colored girls to put you up there.”
I begged his pardon and told him that Miss Alice had already designated me a room—the corner room on the second floor just south of the study, I told him. And then I experienced a very genuine surprise.
The gentleman's face suddenly changed expression. It was all smiles before but presently the smile changed to a leering grimace and the pale cheeks flushed with color. I was at a loss to know what unpleasant thought had come to him, but guessed that, although his niece was the real owner of the estate, he liked to have his own wishes prevail and greatly resented being crossed in even petty affairs. His niece was practically blind; perhaps he had come to believe himself the real head of the house.
“Move out your things and take the room I said,” he ordered. “Why, that other is one of the guest rooms!”
“I would hardly like to obey, sir, without Miss Moody's consent,” I ventured. “May I bring her here?”
He looked at me intently and instantly was smiling again. “Yes, bring her here,” he said evenly. “She respects her uncle's wishes much more than he deserves. I have no doubt but that she will authorize the change.”
In this, however, Mr. Moody was mistaken. I summoned his niece and from the corridor I could not help but overhear a little of their conversation, especially considering that the door was open and that Mr. Moody spoke in an unusually loud voice.
“You surely didn't mean him to take the room next to the study,” he began. “You have always been too gracious with the servants, Alice—it is part of your sweet nature—but you must not spoil this Tubal at once by treating him like a guest. Why shouldn't he take the room back of the kitchen or even sleep out with the other servants?”
“The races do not intermingle down here, uncle,” she answered sweetly. “The room back of the kitchen is small and dark and stuffy—not fit for any one. Besides, I do feel that the old man deserves a few extra comforts. He is a servant but I think we will find him a very good one.”
I repeat her words only because they are properly part of this narrative. But I cannot deny but that they gave me undiluted satisfaction.
“Alice, I command it!” her uncle cried, his voice rising. “You are not of age yet and”
I was immensely surprised when she cut him rather short. “Not yet of age, uncle, and usually willing to accede to your every wish—but surely I can manage my own servants. There is no need to talk about it any more. Tubal sleeps in the room next to the study!”
When the gentleman spoke again his voice was gentle and soft, no longer touched by impatience. “You are such a generous girl, Alice, bless your heart,” he told her fondly. “Forgive me for speaking brusquely. I was merely afraid you'd spoil a servant that otherwise promises you a great deal of comfort. But I do advise you to give him the room north of the study, instead of the corner room. The latter, as you know, is one of the choice rooms in the house and I fear that you'll give him an exaggerated idea of his own importance.”
“Let's talk of something else, uncle. I've decided and for once I am going to be stubborn.”
I passed out of the range of their voices; and I was not surprised that I was allowed to keep the room. Miss Alice Moody was a girl of some spirit; yet I could see her uncle's point of view. I have known good servants to be spoiled by less attention more than once.
The remainder of that first day was largely uneventful. As twilight fell I started to turn on the many light switches, only to be stopped by old Rose. “Only dem little lights on de wall,” she told me as casually as she could. “De boss don't allow no bright lights.”
I obeyed but there was not enough radiance from the small wall lights to dispel the deepening twilight. Indeed, and I can't tell exactly why, I found myself liking Roadturn less and less as the shadows of night dropped over it. This corridor, commonplace enough in the daylight, was long and shadowy and still in the gathering dusk and the faint gleam from the wall lights only seemed to accentuate its length, give queer shapes to its shadows, deepen its unmistakable air of sadness.
“But why?” I asked Rose. “What is there about Mr. Moody that he doesn't like bright lights?”
“Ain't him,” she answered with some contempt. “It's Miss Alice—de doctor's orders. De bright lights hurts her eyes, he says, even froo de cloth.”
Which was logical enough. I was ashamed that I had ever felt dismayed.
I served Miss Alice her dinner in the large, stately dining room and after the meal Doctor Hardy paid his usual nightly call. I let him in—he was the first caller—and I found him a large, rather stout, professional-looking man, with florid cheeks and heavy dark-brown mustache and beard, and brown hair. He seemed preoccupied with his professional cares and he hardly gave me a word as he passed through the corridor. He went straight to Mr. Moody's room; then later, when I was in my pantry, he treated Miss Moody's eyes.
The treatment seemed to incur considerable pain. I heard the girl moan softly as I was going to my room to read, but the doctor comforted her with a businesslike, even a gruff voice. He had been gone a half hour when, at nine-thirty, I went below again to straighten up Mr. Moody's room for the night. I did not dream but that this was my last office of the first day at Roadturn.
Chapter III.
I am a sound sleeper, for a man of my years, and at ten-thirty I went to my room with full expectation of a good night's rest. I undressed slowly, reading meanwhile in a book I had brought in my bag, bathed in the bathroom adjoining my sleeping quarters, and then, sitting up in bed, read until I felt the first sweet drifting of slumber upon me, And presently, half asleep, I found myself standing at my threshold in the open doorway.
I am not a sleepwalker. It was purely habit. In the old manor house where I served so many of my best years I had made it a custom to step to my door just before turning in, to see that the footman had taken care of the lights; and I had done the same here without thinking. The deep-grooved habit of old age—and perhaps it indicated also the absent-mindedness that is properly the trait of the old. Who was there to disturb lights in this almost deserted house? Smiling a little at myself I started to turn back to bed.
At that instant I was wholly wide awake. When I had gone up the narrow rear stairs down which I was now peering I had closed the doorway leading into the large downstairs room—at least I was almost certain that I had closed it. Now it stood ajar and a faint stream of subdued light poured through.
It looked as if some one had passed through the rooms since I had gone upstairs and either with the idea of going in silence or else through carelessness had not closed the hallway door. Yet who was there in this great house to make such an expedition at this hour? At present, as far as I knew, three human beings were domiciled in the structure itself—the invalid, the half-blind girl and myself.
Perhaps I will not be blamed for being vaguely startled. Miss Moody had told me, distinctly, that these three, plus the negroes, constituted the entire household. I remembered clearly hearing the subdued conversation of the old colored people, Rose and her husband, the gardener, as they had passed below my window on the way to their quarters; I had heard them laugh at my shadow on the window shade as I sat reading. The diseased eyes of Miss Alice, bandaged against all light, could not have guided her through the corridor in stealth and silence. Nor had I heard the tap of crutches such as would have indicated that Mr. Moody had passed through the rooms. Besides, from his own statement the gentleman never left his immediate bedroom.
I stood listening and looking and then I crept down the stairs. Roadturn was very hushed and queer at this late hour. The lights were dim, the shadows heavy and of evil shapes. I looked here and there in the corners and behind curtains.
Yet if a thief had crept in he could have found dozens of places in which to hide. The quaint old structure was cut up with closets, corridors and landings, and it would be a long task to search the building. I made the rounds through the downstairs rooms trying the windows and doors, but they all seemed to be securely locked. Then because of the growing certainty that I had shut the door when I came through—I did it with the idea of keeping the lower rooms as warm as possible—I stepped to Mr. Moody's door.
I called softly, but loud enough for him to hear if he were awake. But he did not answer and remembering his explicit instructions I turned back to my search.
Suddenly it occurred to me, with a slight start, that if some one had broken in, he was on the second floor rather than the lower floor. Whoever had passed through the door had come from the outer rooms into the rear hallway; at least this was more likely than that some one had lurked all day in the upper halls and had crept down when the house was still. I climbed up the stairs again, then halted a moment at my own brightly lighted doorway.
The upper corridor was almost black with the darkness of the night. A small light glowed in the main corridor that opened off of it but the wan beams scarcely penetrated to me. I looked about for light switches, found them with some difficulty and pressed the ivory buttons, but there was no burst of light. Evidently the sockets were not supplied with globes.
I think I would have gone back to my room then if I had not heard the faint sound of an opening door somewhere on the same floor with me. Some one had crossed a threshold very quietly and stealthily. I heard the sound of the latch and an almost imperceptible creak as the door moved on its hinges. It was one of those times in a man's life when he knows, not just thinks. There are many sounds in a big house at night and some of them sound like almost anything under the high skies, but this was not one of these. Some one on the same floor with me had opened a door and slipped through.
I hardly knew what to do. I was unarmed and I did not know that I wanted to chase down this midnight visitor and confront him in the half darkness of the corridor. I could not appeal to Mr. Moody, even if he could have been of aid; a good servant does not immediately forget such definite instructions as I had received from him. Miss Moody was a woman and half blind; and the negroes were fifty yards away in their quarters above the stables.
I had a queer feeling of helplessness and indecision. And presently as I waited I heard some one walking.
It was not a man on crutches. It was not a half-blind girl who gropes for her way. Whoever shared this second floor with me had his full powers. It was a very slow, cautious step, over boards that creaked faintly as weight was laid upon them. Indeed, the footfall itself made no noise—it was only the old, creaking boards beneath.
Step—step—step—at intervals of perhaps two seconds. I stood quite still and listened. Then, not because I was brave but simply because I was the servant I went down the corridor in pursuit.
I did not try to go silently. It did not seem the point of wisdom to try to encounter this stealthy intruder in the darkness. My hope was to frighten him away with my own loud step. Instantly the other sounds ceased. He was either lurking in the shadows or else had passed to some part of the corridor where he could walk in silence.
I ventured farther and farther down the shadowed hall, turning at last into the wide main corridor that opened off the passage where I had stood, Yet all the doors along it were closed. I mounted a half flight of stairs, followed a hallway and in imminent risk of losing my directions descended again to the main floor.
Sometimes I paused in the shadows, peering, and sometimes hurried swiftly from room to room, but the search came to nothing. At last I stood again at my own doorway.
Here I waited a long time but the only sounds were the small hushed noises of the night and perhaps the whisper of my own breathing. Whatever I had heard it was silent now. And perhaps it had all been unimportant after all—perhaps merely a strange echo from some distant step. I could not see how I could do good by appealing to Miss Alice or even to old Tom, the colored gardener. This work would hardly appeal to a man with African superstition in his veins.
I went into my room at last and lay a long time listening. I heard the usual night sounds that are never lacking in a large, almost deserted house; boards creaking as they cooled, the scratch of a rat in the walls, the gentle flapping of a curtain under the breeze. But I did not confuse these with that which I had heard before.
I think I had drifted to sleep when that grim business of the corridor began again. My first knowledge of it was a slight shock that seemed to carry through the floors and into the posts of my bed—as if some one had set something heavy on the floor. I was startled wide awake and for the space of a minute lay listening in absolute silence. I even tried not to breath.
Whoever had moved the heavy object was grimly silent for a moment thereafter, as if in fear he had wakened me. But presently, this fear removed, I heard a soft footfall as some one crept about a near-by room.
All this did not lend toward peace of mind. I suppose I have never been a very courageous man—perhaps this is true of all men physically small in size, no matter how bravely they try to hide it—and it was upsetting to hear that stranger go tiptoeing about in an adjoining room. If only I could think of some person whom it might reasonably be—some one who, besides myself, had the right to creep about the second floor in the still hours of night!
It was here that my fancy began to take an uncomfortable turn. I wondered if some one dwelt in this old house unknown to its owners—some one living a strange, furtive life among the corridors. For months and years, perhaps, no one had slept on this upper floor; perhaps I was the first to disturb his nightly occupations. I could not imagine what he might be doing.
It was no longer easy to believe that this was an ordinary sneak thief. Surely, after I had chased him through the corridors, a common burglar would not have been so bold as to recommence his operations within an hour. It was quite odd to lie still in bed, to know that I was wide awake and still to hear those creeping feet in some near-by room.
I thought it likely that the sounds came from the study, just north of my room, but I could not have sworn to it. Sometimes, indeed, they sounded in my own room and I would stiffen and strain into the darkness. The steps were intermittent now, as if some one was working at something, his work carrying him a few steps back and forth. And presently I began to hear, so dimly that I could scarce believe in its reality, a faint, queer sound that filled up the intermission between the steps.
Except for the oppressive silence of the night and for my sharp hearing that long years have never dimmed I would not have heard that sound at all. It sounded like something going round and round—a whirling sound I best had call it—and I heard it only at long intervals.
I considered getting up and searching through the rooms; but the more I thought about it the less inclined I was. It might be, after all, some one who had perfect right in the house. I had not yet learned all the history of the mansion; perhaps a moment's conversation with old Rose on the morrow would clear it up. Then again, I was unarmed and any intruder in those long shadows would have every advantage. I had locked my door when I came through; and now I decided not to disturb it again. Strange as it may seem I dropped asleep.
But the moment's conversation that I had anticipated with Rose did not clarify the situation. I found her and old Tom in the kitchen having breakfast; and I thought that both of them eyed me curiously when I came in. It was almost as if they expected me to have some sort of a story to tell.
“I want to get something straight, Rose,” I said when she poured my coffee, “How many people sleep in this house?”
Her eyes opened slightly and she spilled a small quantity of coffee on the cloth. “Jes' you and Miss Alice and Mistah Moody,” she said. “Dat is—dat's all dat does any sleepin'.”
I refused, at first, to let their superstitions get hold of me. “Does Doctor Hardy ever go to the upper floor?”
“No. Doctah Ha'dy leaves about half pas' nine, don't come back no mo'.”
“There is no colored help that goes upstairs from time to time?”
“No. Old Tom here and me is de only colo'd help dat sleeps on de place. Why—why you want to know all dese things?”
I got the idea that the question came hard—that she was deeply curious yet almost afraid to ask me. “There's no reason, in particular,” I told her as calmly as I could. “Some one was walking about the corridors last night and I was curious to know who it was.”
“Some one—some one walkin' around de halls?”
Her eyes rolled and the whites showed as she stared at me. Old Tom grunted and wheezed in his chair.
Then I told them of the night's adventure. It was nothing new to them, it seemed: my predecessor, who had slept on the second floor, had reported hearing almost the same sounds. Indeed, it was one of his reasons for leaving. The whirling sound I described was, however, an entirely new phase of the affair to them and they seemed to enjoy it keenly.
“To-night, Tom, I'm going to ask you to watch with me,” I said.
“What's dat?” the old fellow echoed, staring at me with open mouth. “Me?”
“You,” I told him as sternly as I could. “Why, Tom, you don't mean to say you'd be afraid—when there will be two of us, beth armed?”
“It ain't dat,” he replied somewhat abashed. “I jes' thought you'd want some white gen'l'man. 'Deed, if Rose wa'n't afraid to be lef' alone I'd be glad to catch that Jack-the-sneaker, but I's got to stay wif her.”
He looked at Rose, imploringly. But the latter shut her jaws tight. “Don't 'spect me to say I's afraid to be lef' alone,” she told her husband at last, “jes' to get you out of sumpin dat oughter been done two months back. No, Mistah Tubal, I is none too brave but I'll be glad to lend you old Tom for to-night.”
The old negro sat thinking and soon he came forward with what was really a very good idea. He would take his dog to watch with him and station the animal in the corridor. If any one came through Rover would of course bark, and better still follow him barking through the maze of corridors and thus enable us to run him down. It was a rather creepy business at best and I thought we would both appreciate the company of a courageous hound.
So it was arranged. When another long day had drawn to its close, when Doctor Hardy had come again and gone and I had straightened up Mr. Moody's room for the night, Tom and I climbed the stairs together. It was perhaps eleven then—much after Tom's usual bedtime hour—but excitement kept him wide awake. Rover, a big hound, was stationed outside my bedroom door; Tom and I sat in the darkness inside.
I thought it very doubtful that we would hear the steps that night. Usually, I have noticed, such phenomena occur only at unexpected times, rarely when any one deliberately listens for them. The mystery of Roadturn, however, followed no established rules. After sitting perhaps an hour, when our tobacco had burned out and we were both at the edge of slumber, Rover gave a sharp bark.
Both of us were wide awake at once and Tom reached for his heavy shotgun. By now the dog was making a frightful uproar, barking and leaping in the greatest excitement. But before I was able to reach the light switch and seize my own gun the noise had ceased as suddenly as it had begun.
In the silence that followed I thought I heard swiftly running steps but they were half obscured by the sounds we made in hurrying to the door. The corridor was deeply silent outside and heavy with shadows. We had to glance about some little time before we made out the form of the dog. He was lying against the wall, huddled and queer, and he was scarcely discernible in the shadows.
Old Tom breathed deeply, then bent to examine him. The black face looked gray in the light of my doorway when he stood erect again.
“Good Gawd!” he said, evidently greatly perturbed. “He's daid!”
It was true. Rover's skull had been smashed by a terrific blow.
Chapter IV.
It was all very queer and disconcerting. It was hard to determine what to do next. I do remember, vaguely, trying to encourage Tom—to brave him up for the search through the corridors. He had seemingly lost all spirit for the undertaking and when at last I was able to induce him to go with me, through the halls he seemed to hang back, not overly anxious to search the more deeply shadowed places where the intruder was most likely to be found.
There is no need to trace in detail that search we made through the old house. And although it brought us nowhere it by no means concluded the developments of the night. Certainly Roadturn was a house where things happened swiftly and unexpectedly.
We had decided to give up the search for that night and I had walked down the stairs with Tom, who was on his way to his quarters, when we both paused, bewildered, at a sudden, dim sound in the next room.
I think that Tom might have spoken aloud in dismay and surprise if I had not motioned silence. Then we waited while a long moment dragged away. I began to believe we had both been mistaken—that our nerves were playing tricks on us—and we had been startled by some small, natural sound of the night. But presently the sound came clearer and both of us identified it in an instant.
The first sound had been the subdued report of a window being started from the sill. Now we both heard the soft, sliding sound as it was being slowly raised.
Very softly—I had left my boots in the room above—I stole to the threshold and gazed into the darkened room. A faint stream of light sifted through from the doorway leading into the hall, and one glance showed that the room was empty. Whoever was raising the window stood on the lawn outside. And presently, peering closely I saw a streak of darkness widen where the window was leaving the sill.
The window had not been jimmied, as the police reports say; indeed, although I was almost certain I remembered locking it, it seemingly had been unfastened. Holding the gun ready I crept farther into the room. Then, taking my post, I waited. The window slowly opened. Now I could see the white gleam of hands under the casement. It was most disconcerting, waiting there in the darkness, not knowing who would come. The rifle trembled absurdly in my hands. And soon one leg and a man's head were thrust through,
The intruder had passed through the window into the room before he saw me waiting with pointed gun. “Put up your hands,” I told him as sternly as I could.
He was a young man, unmasked, and I had never seen him before to my knowledge. The light was too dim to tell more. Tom, however, seemed to recognize him at once. He uttered a long-drawn, half-whispered sound as if in indescribable relief.
“You ain't no ghos'!” he said as if to reassure himself. “You is Miss Alice's sweetheart!”
It was a very odd little session we had there in the darkened room. It was not at all as I had expected. The young man did not answer old Tom and before I could think of anything to say he had relaxed into a chair and was lighting a cigarette. The match flare showed a rather pleasant, youthful face and a powerful, agile body. He seemed hardly disturbed at all by this unusual situation.
“I wish you'd put down that gun,” he said to me. “You don't seem to be able to hold it still and I'm afraid it might go off and kill some one.”
“I'll put it down when I know what you are doing here,” I told him with some spirit. Tom, behind me, turned on one of the small wall lights so that we could all see one another better.
The young man looked at me keenly. “You are a new one on me,” he said. “Of course you are a butler. Your first name will be Henry, or James, or Abner, or something like that. But how do you come to be here?”
“I was hired by Mr. Moody,” I told him with some dignity. Then I caught myself, remembering it was my place to question him rather than to answer his inquiries. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” I demanded.
“Old Snowball there has already identified me, thanks—known as Paul Turner to my friends. It is a rather early-morning call, I will admit, but the night has been rather stormy—I couldn't get here before. I had hoped to see Miss Moody but I'll come back later.”
He got up, and turned toward the window. “If you start to go I'll fire,” I told him. “You haven't explained, as yet, your presence in the house at this hour. Tom, can you hold him here while I speak to Mr. Moody?”
The young man's smiling face instantly changed expression. “Please don't do that,” he told me earnestly. “It would only make trouble for Miss Moody. Mr. Moody is very much adverse to my coming here—because of the advice of the family doctor. You may tell the young lady, if you like—she is the head of the house—but please spare the feelings of the old gentleman.”
“And what, if I may ask, were you doing upstairs to-night—and why did you kill Tom's dog?”
“Upstairs?” He stared at me quite blankly. “Kill Tom's dog? I haven't stepped in this house until you saw me.”
It all seems like a dream, now, when I think back upon it—the sight of the house breaker in his rain-wet coat, the dim light, the great staring negro standing beside me, and then, the foolish argument that Turner and I had together. I tried to convince him that it was he who had crept through our hallway; he stoutly maintained that it was not. Heaven alone knows to what length of absurdity we would have gone had I not been called away by the sound of Mr. Moody's bell summoning me to his room.
I found the gentleman sitting up in bed, every light on; and he seemed deeply distressed and uneasy. “What are you doing downstairs at this hour?” he demanded. “Who were you talking to?”
I cannot fully explain why I did not tell him the whole truth. “I heard a sound downstairs and went to investigate,” I said. “I got old Tom up and we looked around together without any result. We were just going to bed.”
He accepted my explanation and excused me at once. When I returned to the living rooms Tom was looking with some bewilderment out the open window and the affable Paul Turner had taken his departure.
Chapter V.
What Tom told his mistress I do not know but when another day had passed I had concluded that it was my duty to tell Doctor Hardy, at least, of Turner's visit. I encountered him as he was passing through the hall and he was exceedingly kind and courteous as he listened to what I had to say.
“I feel you ought to know about it,” I said. “I understand it was your orders to keep the two apart and I realize that young people sometimes do not know what is best for them.”
“That's the case here,” he said. He looked rather thoughtful and troubled. “You see, Tubal, the girl is in a critical state. Her eye trouble seems to come from some unhealthy condition of her nerves—and at present it is our duty to keep her from any excitement of any kind—emotional or anything else. For these two people to get married now, their spoken wish, is out of the question. It would not only mean blindness but probable insanity for that nerve-wrought, delicate girl—and at my advice Mr. Moody has used his authority as guardian to prevent her from seeing him. I wish you would report to me if ever you find young Turner making any attempt to see her.”
This I promised to do. Fortunately for my peace of mind the next few days at Roadturn were singularly quiet. If there were intruders in the upper corridors at night I did not hear them; and I concluded that the visitor who had disturbed my sleep the first two nights in the old mansion was no other than Paul Turner, on some business connected with his secret courtship of Miss Moody. It wasn't easy to say why he had killed the dog. The point seemed to prove that he was a desperate, bloody man, ready to go any length to prevent being discovered in his stealthy enterprises. The fact that he had continued to try to see and meet the girl in the face of the practitioner's advice—when he had been told it might easily lead to her total blindness or worse—was enough to prejudice most decent people against him. All is fair in love, is an old saying; but even young, youthful sentiment does not ordinarily excuse this. It looked as if he were a strong-willed, reckless young blade who cared more for having his own way than he did for his sweetheart's health and future.
In the days that followed I did my best to fill the important place of butler in the Moody household; and I believe that I gave satisfaction. My days were fairly full, as I took it upon myself to oversee the work of the outside colored help; and I was always glad to go to my room after the dinner hour for my usual two or three hours of reading. Doctor Hardy was usually with Mr. Moody during these hours but he came and went as he pleased. I was never able to keep very good track of his movements.
I am a rather timid man but not a nervous one and I soon fell into my old habits of sound sleep. The tenth night in the old house, however, was an especially wakeful one. My dreams were troubled, I wakened frequently; and half the night hours were sped before I guessed the reason. It is curious how our subconscious minds keep watch over us, struggling to offset disaster brought about by the mistakes or the forgetfulness of the conscious mind. About midnight the truth came to me in a flash; that I had gone to bed without remembering to lock my door. While I had not consciously remembered this omission, my subconsciousness had been acutely aware of it and as a result had kept me from deep, restful sleep.
It occurred to me that I should rise and lock the door; but who likes to leave his bed on a chill autumn night? I felt that inner, secret monitors were urging me to do so—good fairies that never sleep—but the base sluggard of my conscious self kept me from obedience. I was reminded vaguely of certain nights in the long ago past when I have been wakened from sleep with an acute thirst for water—especially after Sir Stanley's dinners when I imbibed too freely of the wine left open upon the tables—and how to the injury of my physical self I would disregard this prompting and go back to sleep. Perhaps I should say here, however, that I am not a heavy drinker. Much of the testimony I have already given might be discredited if I were known as an inebriate. Soon I drifted to sleep again, leaving the door still unlocked.
I think it must have been the hours just before dawn that I was startled wide awake. I opened my eyes to find the room dimly alight from the moonbeams that streamed through my window. I could see my foot-board wanly and my clothes hanging on the chair. It was not just a dream that had called me to wakefulness now. After the first instant of startled wonder I knew the truth. Some one in the corridor was trying my door.
I felt quite a little dismayed. At such times even an old brain works nimbly and I thought of many things that gave me no great pleasure. At that instant it occurred to me that in all probability the being who haunted those shadowed corridors had paused at my door nightly to try the lock, that because of my assurance in its stout bolt I had slept soundly as his groping fingers worked at the latch; and that only my restlessness—induced by the realization that I had failed to throw the bolt—enabled me to hear it to-night. In the same instant I remembered a dog with a crushed skull—and a man who was slain in his bed, long ago.
The knob turned softly. I heard the faint sound of the mechanism of the latch. Then the door began to open.
It opened slowly. I could see the dim shadow of the door as it swung on its hinges and the widening gap where the more intense darkness of the corridor showed through. This was the one chance I had to leap from my bed and prepare to make a defense but seemingly before I could act at all the door had opened wide enough to let some one through.
It was not a reassuring thought to hear the door shut softly behind the intruder. The person who had entered was merely a tall blotch of darker gloom in the murk of the room; sex, identity, even substance I could not distinguish at all. And still I hovered between courses; one to spring up and try to oppose him, the other to feign sleep.
But it turned out that neither of these were in my power. The intruder moved swiftly, softly toward me—easily as a wisp of drifting cloud—and as he drew near I thought that his arm was raised. Remembering again a dog that had been killed just outside my door I sprang from my bed and toward him, intending to oppose him with all the might I had.
I saw the movement of his arm in the dusk. And when I wakened again morning pressed bright against the window, my head rocked with pain and there was a single red stain upon my pillow. My few possessions, however, had been entirely undisturbed.
Chapter VI.
If my own curiosity had not been wakened and if other positions had been open to me perhaps I would have resigned, that morning, my position as butler at Roadturn. As it was I decided to stay it through—to see the mystery solved. I did not carry news of the attack to the local police. I contented myself with confiding the whole matter to Doctor Hardy with whom—considering my station in life—I had become on quite intimate terms. He promised me his help in the matter and agreed to talk it over with Mr. Moody himself.
He gave Miss Moody her customary treatment: I went to my room. About ten—slightly past the usual time—I appeared on the lower floor to perform my last duty of the day, to straighten up Mr. Moody's room for the night. I hesitated, however, in the drawing-room; Doctor Hardy's medical kit still stood on the drawing-room table, indicating that he was still with his patient.
It was somewhat past his usual time. I waited perhaps fifteen minutes more and once during that time I thought I heard some one on the wide veranda just outside. It seemed to me that I heard stealthy steps; and considering all that had happened before, no wonder I was momentarily ill at ease. I resented, that moment, Doctor Hardy's order that all the lights at Roadturn be kept dim.
In imminent risk of being reprimanded I did turn on, for the moment, all the lights in the drawing-room, so that the radiance would pour through the window onto the porch. The veranda was deserted, however, and I convinced myself that I was mistaken.
I encountered Miss Moody in the dining room and as often before she was startled at my step. “I thought you had retired!” she exclaimed.
“Not yet. I haven't made up Mr. Moody's room. The doctor is still with him.”
The lower part of her face showed considerable wonder. “Surely not. It's after ten. He rarely stays this late.”
“But his kit is still on the library table.”
“Perhaps he left it. At least I would go see—knock and see if my uncle is not ready for you.”
It is not a servant's place to question, yet she was aware of my hesitation and her kind manner enabled me to explain my reluctance to carry out her instructions. “He gave me explicit orders not to disturb him when the doctor was with him,” I told her. “I don't like to risk his displeasure.”
At that moment there occurred a small interruption of our talk—an incident that was discussed in full during certain investigations to come and therefore must be included in the account of the mystery at Roadturn. We heard shuffling steps in the rear rooms, followed soon by the appearance of old Tom, the gardener.
He looked considerably upset. “It ain't nothin', Miss Alice,” he said in reply to Miss Moody's question, “yet I's perturbated about it jes' de same. Some one's gone and took my shovel.”
Miss Alice answered him with a laugh. “Who in the world would want your shovel, Tom?” she asked him kindly. “You have just misplaced it.”
“'Scuse me, Miss Alice,” he argued respectfully, “but I never did misplace it. I leaned it jes' outside my do', to remind me to dig up dem dahlia beds in the mornin'—and it ain't der now. Rose, she thought she hear some one outside and made me get up to look. I looked through de window and den I went outside to look and didn't see no one. But de shovel is gone.”
Miss Moody's curling lips indicated that she was smiling. “How long after you heard the sound did you go outside to look?” she asked.
Tom looked down. “Wasn't more 'an a minute or two.” He shuffled his feet uneasily. “'Deed, Miss Alice, I couldn't go out into dis cold weder wiv jes' my night gahments on. I bad to stop and dress, and talking wiv dat old Rose, and back and forth, maybe ten minutes or so. Wasn't a half hour in all.”
“Of course you'd expect to find some one, after a half hour's wait. They could have run away with the whole tool house in that time. Go to bed, Tom, and remember the dahlias in the morning.”
He went away grumbling and Miss Moody's silver laugh rang through the room. Of course I did not join her—such is not my place—yet it all seemed very companionable in her, as if she thought me a little more than an ordinary servant. And her talk with Tom had been quite diverting. And now Miss Alice and I were left alone again, confronted with the curious fact that we had not yet heard Doctor Hardy take his bag and go.
“He is staying late to-night,” the girl commented. “I suppose he and my uncle are having quite a talk. Perhaps he has simply forgotten his bag—since we are his only patients, I don't see why he carries it back and forth every evening anyway. Tubal, what do you think of Doctor Hardy?”
“He has been very courteous to me,” I observed.
“He is very dignified and courteous—I grant him that. But I can't say he is helping my eyes a great deal. In fact they have grown steadily worse—no matter how much he tries to encourage me to the contrary. They were never good eyes, but my uncle was so sure that Doctor Hardy would be able to overcome all their defects.”
“Mr. Moody must have a great deal of confidence in him,” I ventured, “or he would not have recommended him so highly. Sometimes, however, a man is swayed by a long friendship for another and thus gives him more credit than he really deserves. Doctor Hardy is of course a general practitioner?”
“On the contrary he is an eye specialist, and my uncle says he is a wonder. Of course he is a doctor of medicine as well; and my uncle tells me he is accomplishing wonders with his paralytic leg. I confess I never heard of him until he began to call here regularly to see my uncle. To-morrow I think I'll call in another oculist—it won't hurt to have added help. My uncle says that doctors are very sensitive about such matters, but for once we'll have to risk Doctor Hardy's feelings. I think you had better go now, Tubal, and see if my uncle needs you.”
We walked together to the gentleman's door but there was no response to my knock. It was nothing to cause surprise—once before Mr. Moody had dropped to sleep before I could straighten his room and thus did not answer my knock—yet Miss Moody acted as if it were quite a novel situation.
“Nothing to do but wait till morning, Tubal,” she told me. And she stood waiting—as if she had business in the library—while I climbed the stairs.
I slept unusually sound that night and waked at my usual time, about six-thirty. Night still lay over the city; I could see the twinkle of its lights through the gloom. I had breakfast in the kitchen and shortly after seven I had prepared Mr. Moody's breakfast tray. Morning had just dawned—a cloudy day, threatening storm.
I knocked at Mr. Moody's door but it did not fly open as usual when I brought breakfast. I started to knock again, so that if the gentleman was sleeping soundly he would surely hear me, but I paused when I remembered his instructions—under no circumstances to disturb him if he did not answer my knock at once.
I did, however, see fit to report the incident to Miss Alice. Considering the gentleman's strange silence of the night before I thought it the only proper course. “He doesn't answer!” she echoed. Her face and hands showed that she was really and deeply startled. “He always answers for breakfast.”
She took my arm and we made our way to the silent rooms again. Miss Alice tapped, still without receiving any response. Then with mounting excitement she put her lips close to the latch and called:
“Uncle—wake up! Uncle—here's your breakfast.” Then in a louder key: “Uncle!”
She paused in doubt as to her course. Likely before now the gentleman had refused to answer her call—he was rather eccentric that way, if I may say so—but now she seemed to find difficulty in ascribing his silence merely to his odd humor. The fact that he had not answered us the preceding night began to have a sinister significance for us both.
“Uncle, if you don't answer we are going to break down the door!” she said distinctly. But we waited in vain for a voice beyond the threshold.
The girl turned to me. “Perhaps he has had another stroke,” she told me hurriedly. “We must get through that door, Tubal. Get an ax—there isn't a key that will fit that lock in the house. Doctor Hardy has a pass-key for it, if we could only find him.”
Though perhaps I was somewhat excited too I was able to think of something that Miss Moody had forgotten. “We can break through his rear door more easily—the one opening on the little porch. It's a simple lock.”
We hurried around the house. I remember now that cool, dark morning; white winter clouds, the bare limbs of great trees swaying and waving in the brisk wind, the day just waking into fullness. Tom brought the ax from the tool shed.
I could not see through the rear windows. The shades had been drawn and the windows themselves were locked. “My uncle certainly does not like to be disturbed,” I heard Miss Alice say, rather petulantly I thought. Then at her command Tom smashed the pane with his ax and reaching through a dark hand unlocked the window.
He stepped back then and allowed me to throw the window wide. A touch of the cord threw the dark shade up with a clatter. I peered through into the shadowed room.
It took quite a little while for my eyes to become adjusted to the deep twilight of the room. I alone must make the report; Miss Alice, blindfolded, could not see at all, and old Tom stood back as if he intended to have no part in the investigations. And as I waited the room seemed oddly quiet and haunted with emptiness.
“Well?” Miss Moody inquired anxiously.
“I can't see very plain,” I told her. “I can only see part of the bed from here and there doesn't seem to be anybody in it. It looks as if your uncle is gone.”
“Gone! How could he be gone? The man can't walk. Go in there, you men, and find out what's the matter!”
But it came about that I went in alone. Tom pretended to be busy with the door, searching for imaginary keys through his old clothes; and Miss Alice did not press him further. I crawled through the window and then to see better I threw wide the opposite blind.
I looked on the bed first and then under the bed and then about the room and in the closet. The gentleman had gone.
“He's not here,” I called out through the window.
The room seemed rather strange and still as I waited for her to call back to me; and after its long occupancy its great emptiness seemed all the more astonishing. My voice rang very curiously as I called.
“Not there!” Miss Alice cried at last, impatiently. “Tubal, are you going blind too? He must be there.”
“Come in and see for yourself, Miss Moody,” was the only thing I could think of to say.
The key of the rear door was missing from the lock but old Tom guided her around the house and to the door, whereupon I pulled the gentleman's latch string and let her in. She could not see, but she groped over the bed with her hands, and Tom, who stood at the threshold, verified the report I had made.
We stood a long time in bewilderment and I heard Miss Moody's deep breathing. There was nothing further to say and it was not immediately evident just what we should do. It was all most extraordinary, if I may say so; particularly now that the morning was advancing swiftly and the light grew in the room. We saw the gentleman's tobacco jars, his books and his bottles of spirits, even some of the medicines Doctor Hardy had left, but the man himself, lying supine in luxury on the big bed, had simply and assuredly vanished. No wonder Miss Moody looked confused and likely enough I stared blankly too.
I do not know how long we had stood there when we heard that very extraordinary sound from upstairs. I do not know how much longer we would have stood there, looking from one to another and trying to decide what to do, if it had not been for that amazing interruption. We suddenly heard some one cry out as if in great distress, in an upstairs room.
We were all considerably shocked. It had been a trying morning so far and our nerves were already somewhat on edge. The sound was exceedingly loud, nothing less than a scream uttered by a powerful pair of lungs. It seemed to leap down the stairway and ring from every wall at once.
None of them knew exactly from what room it had come. Before we had time to think we heard a second scream, more guttural now, a sound more of terror than astonishment, followed by a third and a fourth in quick succession. Some one was running, screaming, down the upper hall and almost before we could turn we heard the same sounds on the stairs. It was all very confusing and alarming and no wonder old Tom's face looked gray as I rushed past him.
It was not the vanished Mr. Moody who had screamed. It was old Rose and I met her at the foot of the stairs. “Look out de window, look out de window,” she was saying. Seeing me, she turned back upstairs and led me into the small, upper study that I remembered well from my first day at Roadturn. Then still yelling in the greatest excitement she pointed frantically out the window.
At first I could not see because of her own bulk. When I did see I was not greatly surprised that she had screamed, considering that she was a colored woman, ghost ridden to start with. If I had come on that sight without warning I probably would not have shouted, and might indeed have come tiptoeing down the stairs; but the shock to the nervous system might have been equally great.
I saw the hedge as usual and the meadow beyond crossed by the fence. I saw the rift in the trees and through it the green top of the low hill. The gallows stood in vivid profile against the white, morning clouds, but they no longer seemed broken and abandoned. They had come back into service. From the gallows arm hung the dark line of a rope, and from it dangled something black, the nature of which, even at the distance of a quarter of a mile, could not well be mistaken.
Chapter VII.
I think it was my idea to summon the local police to accompany us on that first investigation. In the first place I would otherwise have had to go alone as far as other eyewitnesses were concerned; Miss Alice was nearly blind and Tom, I felt sure, could not be induced to leave the immediate grounds. Besides, it might save complications later to have official witnesses at that first inspection of the body.
I called the police myself. My voice trembled somewhat, I fancy; at least I had some difficulty in making myself heard. “What's that, what's that?” some officer said. “A man doing what?”
“There is a body hanging on the old gallows out near Roadturn,” I repeated distinctly. And then at his question as to who was calling: “Tubal Small, butler out at Roadturn.”
“Tubal Small, eh?” He repeated the name in a rather odd tone as if in spite of the urgency of my call it rather amused him. “Well, we'll come out right away.”
I ventured out in the meadowland, clear to the wire fence, and Tom, considerably emboldened now that the police were on the way, came out and joined me. In a few minutes two constables came driving along the road and when they caught sight of us stopped their car and climbed the fence to join us. They were huge men, in uniform, and did not seem in the least excited.
The gallows were not in sight from this point, or in fact from any point along the road, due to the heavy copse between. But we climbed the fence, penetrated the wood, and came to an old foundation from which, no doubt, flame had swept the structure that had once been used as the country jail. Then we looked up at something black against the sky.
“Picturesque way for a man to do himself in,” one of the constables observed. He turned to me and his face showed that he was somewhat impressed in spite of himself. “Do you know who this is?”
I did not have to look twice to answer his question. The victim of that grim, abandoned engine of death was my late master, Mr. Moody. He wore his black dressing gown over his night garments just as when I had brought him his dinner.
“Mr. Oswald Moody,” I told him. “I was his servant—he was an uncle of Miss Moody, mistress of Roadturn.”
The policeman eyed me with great curiosity. “You mean one of that family that lived in the castle? Good gosh, McCabe”—he glanced toward his companion—“we've got quite a story for the reporters here, after all. You know that old thing should have been torn down, by the order of the county, years ago. It simply invites suicide.” He turned to me and evidently 1 was a type that interested him, possibly even amused him a little. “What made Mr. Moody kill himself, Tubal?” he asked me. “As his servant you must have been pretty close to him.”
I looked him in the face. “He didn't commit suicide.”
The man's eyes widened slowly. “Didn't?” he exploded. “Nonsense! You don't mean to stand there and try to tell me it's a murder? Who is going to take the trouble to hang a man when there's a thousand ways easier”
“It wasn't suicide,” I repeated. “You'll believe me when I tell you that Mr. Moody was an invalid”
“All the more reason to kill himself.”
“An invalid who couldn't leave his room! He was paralyzed, and he couldn't walk. Some one must have carried him here!”
I will never forget the bewildered look that overspread the faces of these two officers of the law. They looked at me, then at the body, then at each other. “Perhaps the old man's mind is off,” I heard McCabe whisper to the other. “The old mummy has been a butler so long he's begun to see things.”
At that moment I received unexpected corroboration. Jenkins, a cotter who lived near by, had seen the constables cross the field and curious as to their business he came over and joined us. “I knew there was somethin' wrong,” he began. “I knew it. I says to the old woman”
McCabe turned to him sternly. “We don't care what you says to your old woman,” he began, impatiently, I thought. Perhaps the curious case had begun to trouble him. “What do you know about this?”
“I was goin' to tell you,” Jenkins began reproachfully. “If you're so durn impatient I'll save it for the reporters—they'll be gathering around soon. Last night, just as I was going to sleep, I heard some one cry for help. 'Help! Help!' he cried, the most agonizin' scream I ever heard, and my wife, she says to me”
“Why didn't you run and give help?” McCabe demanded.
“I did get up and look around but I couldn't tell exactly where the sound was comin' from. Last night was cloudy and it was pitch dark and when I didn't hear no more sounds I went to bed.”
Both the two officers had begun to look deeply troubled. It was a very strange little session, there in the shadow of the gallows and of that black-robed form. “Just the same I'm not going to give up my theory of suicide without further investigation,” McCabe told his companion. “Anything else don't make good sense. Perhaps he crawled out here—who knows?”
“How about the scream?” his companion asked.
“That means nothing. Perhaps he lost his nerve the last minute.”
“You'll have to do better than that, McCabe. A man can't scream after he's hanged himself. It's over all in a minute. If he had lost his nerve before he simply would have climbed down; certainly he wouldn't have sat up there and deliberately yelled for help.”
“Oh, I admit it's evidence. But you know, every case brings out schools of people who saw loiterers and heard shots and screams. At every reported burglary there is always some one who heard the window open—the next morning.”
But by now we had advanced until we were just under the dead man; then stood peering upward. The black dressing gown flapped a little in the wind, otherwise the man hung like the pendulum of a great clock, stopped in the middle of the hour. It was at this point that Muldoon, the second constable, made a remark of far-reaching significance; though at the instant it was only grimly humorous. “He certainly made a businesslike job of it,” said he.
McCabe peered intently, then he seemed startled, and I heard the breath surge deeply into his lungs. “My God, Muldoon!” he cried. “They're right, after all.”
“What do you mean?”
“It's murder—not suicide; the most fiendish crime I ever was called to. Look at those hands—those feet! Look at that blindfold. A man couldn't truss his hands and feet that way. And he's hanged with the hangman's knot—his neck broken like a match.”
Chapter VIII.
Muldoon stayed on guard to keep away the curious and McCabe and I walked back to the house. “I'm going to send for Blachford right away,” he told me. “He's the lieutenant of our secret service, as keen a detective as most of the big boys from Washington. He'll have head and tail of this mess in no time.”
Blachford arrived at the house twenty minutes later; a man about thirty-five, clean-cut, straightforward, likely of German ancestry. We three stood together a moment on the big veranda.
“A case just to your liking,” McCabe told him. “Because he's a prominent man the newspaper fellows will make a great deal of it—and it's the kind of a case that makes detectives' reputations.” The officer was quite a little excited by now; I could see his eyes gleam under his shaggy brows. Meanwhile he had forgotten me until Blachford questioned.
I have read many detective stories, in my lonely nights, and if I had been one of those ferret-eyed minions of the law I might have thought by this that McCabe was a gentleman who had been disinherited and had thus taken to the force. It is customary for gentlemen, always surrounded by servants, to quite forget the presence of their servitors and take no notice of them whatever during conversation with other gentlemen; but surely I was a man among men here. Perhaps if I had been a younger man and youthful vanity had still been upon me I would have resented being thus ignored. I thought that I would at least be questioned at once and investigated, considering I had been a member of the household if only as a servant, but apparently in McCabe's eyes I was only part of the landscape.
Blachford, however, was a detective of parts and he jerked his thumb at me. “Who's this?” he asked. “A servant?”
“This is Tubal Small,” McCabe said, “the servant of the dead man. He was the man who discovered the body. Investigate him carefully, Blachford. Tell him all about it, Tubal.”
“It was this morning, about seven-thirty, sir,” I began. “The cook, old Rose”
But Blachford cut me short with a question to McCabe. “Has anybody been bungling around to track up and destroy clews?”
“No, sir,” McCabe answered. “Best case that way you ever had. Everything ought to be straight.”
“An invalid, you say—couldn't walk—and carried a quarter of a mile to be hanged on that old gallows. How do you know it wasn't suicide?”
“How did he get there? Granting he could crawl, how could he tie himself up that way?”
“The famous case of Oregon vs. Brumfield had a counterpart for that. If you remember, he hanged himself in his cell—and his hands were tied.”
“But this man's feet were tied, he was blindfolded and he had a perfect hangman's knot. But you'll have to see for yourself.”
Blachford started immediately for the scene of the crime and McCabe followed. They had not asked me to go but because of my deep interest in the case I felt I had a right to accompany them. So we tracked once more across the field, climbed the fence, entered the covert and stood at the feet of the dead.
Presently Blachford began a rigid investigation. The rope was cut and the body lowered carefully to the ground. The neck had been broken, just as McCabe had guessed, and minute investigation disposed definitely of any suicide theory—unless, of course, he had received help. The manner in which the hands and feet were bound showed the skillful work of a second person. A great crowd had gathered by now but Muldoon kept them at a distance.
Blachford's next operations were on the platform through which the body had fallen; doubtless he was searching for clews. The rope was removed and put in McCabe's hands. His activities thereafter I did not see, because I went back to the house to be what service I could to Miss Alice. She was deeply shocked, of course, but she seemed much distressed and frightened rather than grief-stricken.
“A murder?” she cried. “How could it be a murder? The door of his room was locked?”
“If some one had opened the front door with a skeleton key it would have locked again automatically when he closed it on going out,” I reminded her. “For that matter, he could have gone out the rear door and taken the key with him—locking the door, of course, from outside, to prevent the crime being discovered.”
“But he was an invalid,” she went on. “It would have taken two strong men to have carried him all the way.”
The reporters came soon after and she sent me to talk to them. This was the second time in my life I had ever had dealings with such people—the first time was when Sir Stanley fell grievously from his horse that day at the Willowby Hunt—and these men were quite as adept in securing information as the journalists of my own land. I had determined to tell them very little but by clever questioning they managed to learn a great deal. I was quite a little surprised at the personal questions they asked me and the amusement they seemed to get out of my serious answers. “So you are the butler here,” one man said. “I was ready to bet that you were the ice man.”
“I have never handled ice at all,” I assured him. “Besides, they have no regular ice man here—the ice is procured from a man who comes daily, in a wagon.”
They had peculiar strained expressions on their faces when I told them this. “Don't let them kid you, uncle,” one of them said drolly. I was glad when they went away.
Shortly after this the detectives came and made a minute search of Mr. Moody's room. Busy with my household duties I lost track of their operations for a short time thereafter but had reason to remember them suddenly when a young man, evidently a constable, summoned me from my work for an informal hearing in the library.
I met old Rose, her eyes very wide and her dark mouth perfectly round, as she was coming through the door. In the room I found Mr. Blachford, Mr. McCabe and another gentleman who seemed to be taking notes, in addition to the young man who had summoned me.
Blachford was smiling a little as I sat down. “You are not charged with any crime, Tubal—as far as I know—but we want to question you a little,” he began. “I'm not going to give you an oath but you will find it to your interest to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
His voice was very quiet and pleasant and except for the man with the pencil I might have been perfectly at ease. “Yes, sir,” I told him. “I'll be glad to tell you all I had to do with the crime.”
I thought that his eyes looked very bright and clear. “So you had something to do with the crime, Tubal?” he asked.
“Oh, no, I didn't mean that.” I remember grasping the arms of my chair. “I meant—I meant all that I had to do with the case.”
I don't know why the men looked amused. “We are not very prone to believe you were one of the principals, Tubal—it would take several such men as you to carry that two hundred pounds to the gallows, truss him and hang him; but you must understand everybody in this household is guilty until he is proved innocent. What is your full name?”
“Tubal Small.”
“Born where?”
“At Maidstone, in Kent, England.”
“I suppose you left there early to seek adventure?”
“No, sir.” I was somewhat amazed at this question and his expression as he asked it. “I'm afraid I am not of a very adventurous disposition, sir. I stayed there or near there until a very short time ago.”
“How did you come to leave?”
“Sir Stanley Barr—I was his man, sir—died; and I thought I would like to seek my fortune in America. I understood servants were very high paid.”
“Particularly good servants.” Blachford smiled kindly. “Men born with the tradition of service—but we don't see many of them, over here. Tubal, where did you spend the time between eight and nine-forty-five last night?”
“I was reading, sir, in my room.”
“May I ask what you were reading?”
“A very diverting book, sir, called 'The Three-fingered Hand.'”
“I shall try to get hold of it. Who was with Mr. Moody when you went upstairs?”
“I don't know that any one was, sir, but I think Doctor Hardy was. He had come to treat both Mr. Moody and his niece and it was his custom to spend some time sociably with Mr. Moody.”
“Did you see anything suspicious—hear any suspicious sounds?”
I told them of the steps I thought I had heard on the front veranda and McCabe and Blachford exchanged glances.
“In your weeks here have you seen much of one Paul Turner?”
“Not very much, sir.” I tried to keep my voice at the same even pitch but I must not have succeeded very well because both Blachford and McCabe leaned forward. “I met him once, I think.”
“Under what circumstances. I understood that he was forbidden to enter the house.”
“He called one night, sir.” And then, because they forced it out of me, I told of Paul Turner's visit. I could do nothing else. It was always my father's teaching—laid away long ago near Charing, poor man—that a man's first duty is to his king and his country, which means to the law. These were the ambassadors of the law.
They questioned me about this visit in every detail. They asked if I had ever heard that Turner had visited Mr. Moody in his room; and whether, on the night of the crime, I had heard a motor car on the road back of the mansion. To both of these questions I answered no.
They told me I could go then; and as I stood up Blachford shook my hand quite as one gentleman to another. “I think I ought to tell you, Tubal,” he said dryly, “that I don't believe you will have very much embarrassment about this crime. I wouldn't worry and let it spoil my sleep, if I were you.”
“But I was in the house,” I told him earnestly. “A servant was suspected of a terrible murder in this very house once before.”
“But you have an alibi, Tubal, only you don't know it.” He smiled rather broadly. “The coroner—Mr. Prim—and one or two physicians have established definitely that Mr. Moody died between eight and ten last night. The condition of the body would indicate that, even if we have not Miss Moody's testimony that at ten you were unable to make him answer when you called to him and the testimony of several witnesses who heard the death screams. And between the hours of eight and ten you were reading in your room.”
Seemingly they had only my own word for this and why should they believe me so unreservedly? But in an instant Mr. Blachford explained.
“Old Rose and Tom have testified for you, Tubal,” he said. “It isn't good business to tell testimony before the inquest but I guess it won't do any harm in this case. They saw your shadow against the window shade as they were going to bed.”
It was no wonder that my heart was light as I passed out the room. Every member of the household had of course been under suspicion, I among them, but from now on I could take an untroubled interest in the unraveling of the mystery.
Chapter IX.
At the inquest that was held the next day all important witnesses were present except Doctor Hardy. We knew the latter only as a retired physician treating Mr. Moody and his niece because of an old friendship for the former; but his name was not to be found either in the city or telephone directory. “He's probably living at one of the smaller family hotels,” McCabe said, “and I haven't time yet to make all the rounds. Old Rose saw him leave the house about eight, so his testimony probably is of no importance anyway, so far as the immediate crime is concerned. He might, however, know Mr. Moody's past life sufficiently well to throw some light upon the crime.”
Paul Turner, however, was present and the only change I could see in him was a straight line between his brows. As he moved across the room I was more and more impressed with the gentleman's physical powers; although he looked slender he was muscled like a tiger. Old Rose and Tom were present, not so badly frightened but that they rather enjoyed the excitement and prominence; and Miss Moody made a lovely picture—in spite of her black blindfold, like a domino mask—at the opposite side of the room. In addition the men who had heard the death screams and two or three other individuals whom I had never seen before were present as minor witnesses.
Paul Turner was the first witness examined—if a witness he could be called, for he had nothing of value to testify whatsoever. The attorney, assisted by Prim the coroner and by Blachford, the detective, did the questioning, asking him his name, age, birthplace and so on; and the youth seemed to resent even these simple questions—or else he resented something he saw in the detective's face to which I was blind.
“Do you know anything about this case?” the attorney inquired.
“Nothing that is not known to every one here,” was the quiet answer.
“You were a frequent visitor to the Moody home at one time, I understand. Did you ever see or hear anything that led you to believe Mr. Moody had enemies.”
“Nothing whatever.”
“Among the colored people, for instance—nothing that looked like prejudice or hatred?”
A queer expression passed over his youthful face. “I can remember nothing of the kind,” he answered after a pause.
“Miss Moody—how did she and her uncle get along?”
“Very well, it seemed,” He smiled dimly. “They disagreed, perhaps, over small matters that do not concern this court. Mr. Moody was very zealous for his niece's health.”
“What were some of those small matters? The only way this court can arrive at the truth, Mr. Turner, is to go to the bottom of everything.”
The young gentleman's face clouded. “I answer the question under protest. I can't see that it concerns this court in the least. Miss Moody was anxious to get married. Her uncle opposed—on the advice of the girl's physician.”
“I believe, Mr. Turner, you were forbidden some weeks ago to come to the Moody house.”
Before he could assent, Mr, Prim, the coroner, interrupted. “In my opinion, it is a doubtful matter whether you are entitled to ask that question, Mr. Fogarty,” he said politely. “Mr. Turner, as you know, is under oath to answer your questions, but you have no right to ask what might incriminate the person being questioned.”
“I am perfectly aware of that, Mr. Prim, but this question was not meant to incriminate Mr. Turner,” was the attorney's reply. “He is acting as a witness only—to tell what he saw and heard—and at present I am investigating the relations between Mr. Moody and his niece. Mr. Turner was a frequent visitor at the house at one time, and if it is true that he was later forbidden to come we might be able to trace down some resentment or prejudice that might give us a motive for the crime. I don't mean that I suspect Miss Moody—I am simply trying to run down the facts.”
“Nevertheless, I don't believe Mr. Turner will be obliged to answer that question unless he cares to.”
“I don't mind answering him,” Turner said, rather contemptuously, I thought. “Every one knows it—other witnesses will tell of it if I don't. It is true; I was forbidden to enter the house.”
At Blachford's question he testified that he had not heard or seen anything the preceding night either of interest to the court or that would be of aid in tracking down the murderer. “Not when you were in the house—about nine?” the detective queried suddenly.
Turner made no movement in his place; yet his face showed that he was deeply startled. “I will not” he began. Here Mr. Prim, the coroner, saw fit to interrupt again, “This is not a grand jury investigation, Mr. Blachford,” he said. “This is a coroner's inquest. That question does not go.”
The detective asked. “Can't we ask him where he was between eight and ten? I'm anxious to hear what he says.”
“No. You ought to know such a question would not be permitted.”
Mr. Turner was excused and I was the next witness called. I told of serving Mr. Moody his dinner, of going upstairs to read, and later of trying to gain admittance to the gentleman's room. I told of the steps I had heard on the porch and of our search of the gentleman's room the morning after the crime. Even if I had had any reason to do otherwise I would have been careful to tell just what £ told Mr. Blachford the preceding afternoon; I saw that he kept yesterday's notes ready for reference. He asked me to repeat for the benefit of the jury the account of the stealthy midnight visit of Paul Turner some nights before.
The room grew quite still as I told this. I did not glance at Mr. Turner himself, but once my eyes fell upon Miss Moody's face; and this made my duty all the more hard. For the first time since the tragedy she looked drawn, deeply distressed, seemingly almost at the verge of collapse. There was quite a little buzz of conversation and a look of heightened interest in the faces of the newspaper men when I had finished.
Rose was called next and she made a heroic figure as she stood up to be sworn. She was born in Virginia, she said and she had been in the service of the Moodys for at least twenty-five years. Of exact dates, either as to her birth or anything else, she was not very positive.
“You were at the Moody home night before last?” Mr. Forgarty asked.
“'Deed I was,” she replied with some spirit.
Mr. Fogarty smiled slightly. “Who besides you was in the house at that time?”
“What time you mean? I done went to bed about nine—don't know nothing after dat.”
“Just before nine, then?”
“Well—Miss Alice, she was in her room. Mr. Moody—he ought to been in his room at dat time, but don't know nuffin about him. He never wanted me pesterin' around and 'cept to sweep out at ten in the mornin' I never came near him. Doctah Hardy had been there but had gone—I saw him go out de front hall. I was in the kitchen, cleanin' up, and Tom—he's my husband—was settin' back of de stove smokin' his pipe. Mr. Small was there but he was in the room a-readin'.”
Blachford smiled at me kindly and wholly to please me—to impress the fact upon the jury and the journalists for my benefit—he asked the question I had been hoping he would ask. “How do you know that, Rose?”
“'Cause we seen him on de shade when Tom and me went out to de stable where we sleeps.”
“I believe that accounts for every one. Rose, was there any one hanging around the house—or outside it—that had no business there?”
Rose's tone dropped lower. “Yas, 'r.”
“Tell the jury about it, then.”
“About eight o'clock I was in the kitchen workin' and I went outdo's to put sumpin in the gahbage. While I was out der de moon was peepin' froo de clouds and I seen Clara eatin' sumpin dat looked a whole lot like a bird”
“Perhaps you had better explain to the court,” Fogarty interrupted dryly, “just who Clara is.”
“She's my gray cat. I walked close to her and she scattered and I mus' followed her fifty or a hunerd yahds. Den I saw a big auto'bile settin' in dat old road dat comes up from Mr. Owens' place.”
Her voice sank lower and lower, It was plain to all of us she was giving testimony that she would have almost given her life to conceal; yet the court was too much for her. Informal though it was, limited in its power, it must have seemed a terrifying tribunal to this old, unlettered colored woman. She had simply been frightened into telling all she knew.
“Did you go near it?” Blachford asked.
“Yas, 'r.” She looked up sullenly. “I ain't goin' to tell no more. Dat's criminatin', just as it was with Mistah Turner.”
“But it isn't just the same here, Rose,” Fogarty explained very patiently. “You don't have to answer questions that incriminate yourself—only to tell what you saw and heard. You are obliged to answer those. Besides—why hesitate?—we have it all down in black and white from our talk with you yesterday. It saves time and trouble for you to tell these gentlemen about it now. Was there any one in the automobile?”
“No, sah.”
“Whose automobile, was it?”
“It looked like Mistah Turner's, sah, I ain't sayin' it was and I haven't said it was at no 'quiry. It jes' looked like it.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“No, sah.”
“I don't like to prompt you, Rose. You told us yesterday something you thought you saw.”
“Thought I seen somebody slippin' round de house. It was too dark to see plain. Pretty soon he waited behind a tree and den de moon went behind de clouds again and I didn't see him no mo'.”
“Who do you think the man was, Rose?”
“Don't know, sah.”
“You have no idea, then? Was it a tall man?”
“Yas. It was a tall man.”
“You think it was Mr. Turner?”
“Don't know, sah.”
She was excused then and Miss Alice was questioned. The detective probed deeply into her family history, doubtless trying to find some old enmity that might explain the crime. This seemed to be a false scent but interest quickened in the courtroom when the detective began to question her in regard to her relations with Mr. Turner. “You and Mr. Turner are engaged?” the detective asked.
“Yes. We were waiting until I am well enough to become his wife.”
“You met Mr. Turner rather regularly?”
“Not very regularly. Sometimes he brought notes to me. As you already know, he was forbidden to come to the house by the doctor's and my uncle's orders; yet I continued to meet him from time to time.”
“Did you meet him the night of the murder?”
“Yes.” She seemed a pathetic figure, blindfolded as she was; but she gave her testimony in a clear voice. We all understood at once that she decided it was to her sweetheart's best interests for her to tell the truth—that the truth could be established from other witnesses anyway.
“He came at what hour and how long did he stay?”
“He came about eight. He only stayed a few minutes.”
“Did he explain why he did not stay longer?”
“No, sir. He said he had several things to do. I met him in the dining room—he came through the French doors and left the same way.”
After this she told of the events the night of the crime, how she had stood at my side as I called through to Mr. Moody and the details of the crime the next morning. It was at this point of the inquiry that Mr. Fogarty's manner seemed to change. He became more pugnacious; he spoke more rapidly and sharply and he was evidently trying by bringing forth a flood of testimony to send home his own theory of the murder to the jurors. “By the way, Miss Moody, what kind of a car did your fiancé drive?” he asked.
She answered him—a powerful car of famous make. By questioning her and other witnesses he brought out the interesting fact that Turner habitually carried in his car, with other equipment, a towrope of a certain make, used exclusively in towing automobiles out of the mire. He did not make anything of the point at that moment, however, but called old Tom, the gardener, to the stand.
The latter told nothing new or of interest. Certain doctors and other witnesses testified as to the condition of the body, establishing, as clearly as possible, the time of night the strange crime was committed, as well as describing the peculiar, professional way in which the hands and feet were tied. The man had died of a broken neck, they said, brought on by hanging; and the knot had been the regular hangman's knot that few laymen know how to tie. Several of the neighbors testified that they had heard screams about nine o'clock the preceding night.
The last and most important witness called was McCabe, the officer. The attorney questioned him as to every point connected with the murder but the really interesting part of his testimony was in regard to the clews and the evidence already uncovered.
“Did you find any clews, Mr. McCabe, indicating that any strange or suspicious characters were loitering around the Moody home the night of the crime?” the attorney asked.
“Yes, sir. There was a strange automobile parked for a while in the old road back of the house.”
“Do you think you can identify the car?”
There was quite an air of excitement in the room as he waited for his answer. “I have already identified it to my own satisfaction, sir.”
“That is not the point. Opinions don't go here—we only want evidence. Did you find any evidence that pointed to it being any car in particular?”
“I found a distinct track of its tires.” Then he described all four tires, the kind, the tread, how much worn and so on. From thence he showed that Mr. Turner's car had tires exactly fitting this discription, even to an odd-shaped patch on one tire. The room grew very still and I noticed that Miss Moody was leaning forward listening with deepest interest, her little, pale hands clasped tightly in her lap.
“Was there anything to show how long the car had been standing there?” Fogarty asked.
“Yes, sir. There was quite a pool of oil beneath. After examining the oil leakage in Mr. Turner's car I would say that it stood at least an hour.”
“We have heard testimony to the effect that Mr. Turner's activities in the Moody house that night were of but a few minutes—while he talked with Miss Moody in the dining room. Could the oil pool have been formed in a few minutes, McCabe?”
“I don't think so, sir.”
“McCabe, here”—and he displayed a brown, serpentlike thing—“is the rope with which Mr. Moody was hanged. Have you been able to identify it?”
“I can see that it was originally cut for a towrope—in fact sold for a towrope.”
“Testimony has showed that Mr. Turner owned a rope of the same kind, of the same manufacture as this. Did you search his car carefully, after the murder, to see if he still had it?”
“Yes, sir, but there was no sign of a rope in his car when I searched it.”
The whole crowd was intensely excited. Sensing the suspense the attorney whipped directly to a very important bit of evidence. “One of the most important duties of a detective or an attorney, McCabe, in any murder, is to seek out a motive. Did you and Mr. Blachford find anything that pointed to a motive?”
“Yes, sir. We found a letter—an anonymous letter—among Mr. Moody's things.”
“A letter written by an ignorant person?”
“It would seem so—or else some one who pretended to be ignorant.”
“Is this it?” The attorney held a soiled piece of paper for him to see.
“It looks like it.” He glanced at the big, penciled letters, discernible even from where I sat. “That's it.”
“I'll read it, if I may. The spelling, gentlemen of the jury is very crude as you will see when you examine the paper.” And the attorney read aloud:
“Keep your hands off the Moody fortune. Let Alice and Paul get married.
K. K. K.
Chapter X.
Just before the jury began their deliberations the foreman, a sandy-haired man of about forty, stood up. “If it's right and proper,” said he, “I'd like to ask a question.”
The attorney looked at him keenly. “That's your duty and your privilege,” was the reply.
“Then I wants to know how you gentlemen think this murder was committed—that is, how the mechanical end of it was worked. I heard Mr. Moody was an invalid and a heavy man at that. I'd like to have the detectives review the case—not mentionin' any names, of course.”
“As far as I can figure out,” Blachford replied, “the murderers—it seems likely there were two in the party, at least, one of them probably a mere thug hired for the job—crept into the Moody house about eight o'clock night before last. One of them worked a skeleton key in the latch—easily done, particularly if it was some one familiar with the house who had had a chance to experiment—and these fellows either knocked out Mr. Moody with a blow on the head or else chloroformed him. I should think the latter; there was no wound revealed in the post-mortem examination. These murderers were not content with killing him where he lay and with insane rage or hatred they carried him out the back door, locking it behind them, and over to the gallows. Testimony shows there was no key in the door although it was locked; this indicates that the murderers took it with them. I'll confess it is one of the strangest crimes I have ever dealt with, but there must be some sense to it somewhere—and this is as near as I can come to it.”
His faltering, his lack of faith in himself expressed in the last sentence had something to do, I believe, with the indefinite report made by the jury. They came back and reported simply:
“We find that Mr. Oswald Moody came to his death at the hands of an unknown person or persons and we recommend that Paul Turner be held for further investigation.”
I was looking about the room as the jurymen finished their report and I noticed a very peculiar gentleman who had not caught my eye before. He was sitting rather close to the front, seemingly paying little attention to what was going on; he was leaning back, face lifted, and his lips looked as if he were whistling to himself. He was about my size and I thought possibly about my age, but he had bright, peering blue eyes that gave no sign of the march of the years, sandy hair shot with gray and a sharp face that reminded me of the faces of the ferrets that are used in the pursuit of hares and suchlike in Kent. As I watched him he yawned, stretched his small length almost out of the seat and then seemed suddenly to wake up. He looked about him as if startled and presently marched out with the rest of the crowd.
He was the first human being I saw when I got back to Roadturn. He was sitting clear at the edge of a chair in the big drawing-room and was pawing over Doctor Hardy's tools.
He reminded one of a mole digging earth; but he stopped his eager motions as Blachford and I came in. For a moment he peered at me intently and perhaps I felt somewhat embarrassed. Then he went to digging tools again.
At first I thought that Blachford was also a stranger to the little man with the bright blue eyes and the active hands. They didn't speak; Blachford stood looking, his arms at his sides. As I stole a look at him I saw that he was standing in the identical position that the dragoons and such military folk speak of as “'tention”—legs straight, heels touching, shoulders thrown back. I was to be convinced later that it was merely a coincidence or, which is far more likely, a reflex born of habit. But presently the little man began to speak and I hardly thought of Blachford any more.
“Tubal!” he demanded suddenly. “In Doctor Hardy's treatment of his patients did he ever have use for a hypodermic needle?”
I did not know of any past acquaintance or relationships to justify the use of my given name. “Not that I know of, sir.”
“Well, in this otherwise perfect kit—almost brand-new or else mighty well-kept tools—there is no hypodermic needle—and I supposed it was in every doctor's first-aid kit.” At this point he quit talking to me, I discovered, and began addressing Blachford, but he looked at neither of us and we had to learn this fact by the nature of his remarks. “A perfectly rotten inquest, perfectly rotten,” said he. “You caused a lot of hard feelings, wakened a lot of suspicion, scared that lovely little girl almost to death, and only succeeded in telling a lot of things that will have to be rehashed in the courts. The trouble with inquests to-day, Blachford, is that they think they are trials instead of inquests. An inquest should deliberate over the dead, not the living; find out if it was a murder and get all the details it can—not throw inuendoes at people. Oh, my, my, my! There was only one real clew brought forward and that was the letter—and probably that won't amount to a handful of straw!”
“Clews, man!” I could see Blachford bristling up like an angry mastiff. The angry color mounted in his face. “Don't you count those tracks on that old road a clew; the fact that this man Turner was loitering around”
“Good Lord, Blachford, haven't you any imagination?” the other cut in. “No romance, no fire? Deplorable, Blachford—that's where the French have it all over us—we Anglo-Saxons and you Germans. Have you forgotten that this boy and that girl are in love—that he was refused the run of the house? No wonder he came creeping around in the dead of night. But that doesn't make him a murderer. I'd do the same and I'm not a murderer, though I feel like it sometimes.”
Blachford's jaw began to stiffen. “I suppose you'll see through the whole confounded mess in no time. How about, that rope? Turner had just such a rope.”
“Yes, and a hundred thousand other automobilists as well. Did they all take this poor old man out and hang him up? That rope is a common article in the stock of every auto-supply house. He hasn't got the rope now, you'll say next. Don't ropes wear out and get thrown away and lost? Blachford, that isn't circumstantial evidence—it isn't anything. The trouble with modern detectives, Blachford, is that they have no imagination—most of them. By George, they can laugh at old Sherlock Holmes all they like but he could have done just what they say he did, with the brains and imagination he had—only with those talents he would have taken to a paying profession, not to crime detection.”
The gentleman seemed to talk almost incessantly, apparently caring very little whether any one was listening to him. Blachford had taken a chair now and was biting at the end of a cigar.
“We hear too much talk about hard-headed men in our profession,” he went on. “We don't want hard-headed men always—sometimes we want men who can dream a few dreams, think a few really profound thoughts, take a flight through the sky on wings of imagination. You can sit down and patiently trace, with a paint brush on canvas; every leaf and twig on a tree. An artist comes along and paints the whole with imagination and about six swipes of the brush. His work looks like a tree; yours looks like nothing. He used imagination; you were simply hard-headed.
“Every bit of great achievement ever accomplished was made possible by imagination. By Heaven, Blachford, the reason your country, Germany, failed was that you lacked in this same essential thing; you had plenty of sentiment but no fancy. The worst mistake we can make is to try to discourage imagination in the young—the reason France produces such bully generals is because their military system lends itself to imagination, rather than routine, and dullness and stupidity.
“This is a strange case, Blachford, and don't start grabbing for the first straw of circumstantial evidence you see in order to find a commonplace explanation for it. Let your imagination run riot a little while—don't laugh at things and disbelieve them because they are strange. There are stranger things in the world of fact than the most romantic writer ever thought of. If we are going to find out who took the trouble to carry that two-hundred-pound invalid for a quarter of a mile and hang him on an abandoned gallows we've got to let our imaginations soar a little. It wasn't a commonplace crime—quit looking for a commonplace criminal and commonplace behavior. I suppose there is no one subject so generally avoided by detectives, amateur and professional, as poetry—they wouldn't be caught reading poetry, except maybe 'Gunga Din,' 'Dan McGrew,' and 'Omar.' Yet poetry is just what they need in their business. If they've got imagination enough to see the poetry in a crime like this they'll soon see the criminal.
“Poetic justice—many men of our profession, Blachford, laugh at the expression. Yet if a man has imagination enough to see it when it does exist he can see to round out the whole story and chase down the murderer. Let me try to illustrate. Poetic justice—anything poetic, for that matter—is art and because it is art it is easy to piece out and trace down. Why? Because art follows known laws. One artist, looking at one half of another artist's canvas, knows instinctively what is on the other half—at least what ought to be on the other half if it is real art. If one writer reads another writer's story he knows how it ends before he is half through—if the work is real art and they are both artists. It is just like a circle—if you get one arc you can round the whole thing out. In a crime of poetic justice it is the same thing—granting that the criminal is an artist, an artist detective can start with one phase of the crime and round the whole thing out just as one writer guesses the end of another's story, one painter the other half of another's canvas—because it is art and therefore in a perfect circle. Blachford, the man who carted Mr. Moody out and hanged him had poetry in him—and if we had a real poet working with us we'd soon know the truth.
“The way to handle this case is to reason inductively. I'm inclined to think it is the only way to handle such cases as this. Begin at the beginning instead of the end—try to imagine a situation whereby a criminal would want to take a certain person out and hang him. This way, you may solve it; otherwise it is going to be one of the greatest mysteries in the criminal history of this country, never to be explained.”
He paused and Blachford dug his hands deep in his pockets. “Are you through for a minute, Teazle?” he asked.
“I guess so. Why?”
“Then perhaps you'll let me present Mr. Small. I wanted to a half hour back but couldn't get a word in edgewise. He ought to have the pleasure of meeting you after listening to your oration. Tubal, this is Silvester Teazle—one of America's half dozen most famous detectives. The government has got itself all excited about this sordid homicide and it has sent Teazle down to run the murderer to earth.”
Chapter XI.
We had no more words at the time with Silvester Teazle. He procured from the district attorney the anonymous letter—the one clew, in his opinion, that the officers had so far uncovered—and spreading it out on the library table examined it with the greatest care. He had talked like a chatterbox before but now he maintained the most unbroken silence.
I was anxious to watch him work—it was all new to me—and I kept my eyes upon him as intently as my position as servant could permit. He looked the paper over first with the naked eye, front and back; then he examined it with a microscope. Presently he turned it face down, lighted a cigarette, smoked it until it nearly burned his lips, then whipped the paper over suddenly—as if he thought a sudden look at it after his mind had rested would give him his inspiration. Presently he walked around the room, his hands behind him and playing with the paper in his fingers; and from time to time he put it before his eyes. Finally he stopped before Mr. Blachford.
In spite of Teazle's deprecating words I guessed at once that he had considerable esteem for Mr. Blachford. In fact, both men had quite a little in common; an intense interest in the world of crime besides the traits of keen intellect and sharpened sensibilities that made them successful in their chosen profession. No matter how much they would quarrel and pretend to scorn one another, in reality they had deep mutual respect.
“Blachford, old boy, there's something mighty queer about this letter. I just can't get it, somehow.”
“How's that?” Mr. Blachford responded. “I don't see anything queer. It's just a smart man trying to write like an ignorant one.”
“A smart man wouldn't make all his letters of such exact proportions that they look as if they were laid out with a rule! Don't you see—they're the queerest-looking lot of letters I ever saw. I've been preaching inductive reasoning—let's practice it. Let's say I was a smart man and wanted to write like an ignorant one. I would write something like this.”
He experimented on a sheet of paper and the finished letter showed a queer mixture of all kinds of letters, some of them capitals, some of them in script, and they wandered all over the page.
“This is what the letter would look like. It would look about the same if in reality an extremely ignorant man had written it. Yet, you see, it doesn't look at all like the original.
“A man who writes a great deal learns to form his letters just alike—that is, his a's always look about the same, and his b's, and so on. An ignorant man, writing only occasionally, has no such habits formed; and as a result his attempt at writing is a jumble. Blachford, it wasn't through ordinary ignorance or an attempt to be ordinarily ignorant that those letters were sketched so perfectly and yet with such imperfection. What have we left? Either a very astute criminal who has thus tried to bewilder us, or a person whose ignorance borders on absolute illiteracy, some one who would laboriously copy or trace the letters.” He paused; and winked solemnly at the script. “By George, Blachford, I've got it!”
“What?”
“Traced, by George. Perhaps by an astute criminal who is trying to fool an astute detective; more likely, since brains are so rare, by some person who has had the merest smattering of a primary education, who can sound out a few words—you remember the old system, the one both of us were taught, of learning to read and write phonetically—and who has almost forgotten the letters they did know. Next thing, from what did they trace the letters? Again we have need of imagination. Imagine yourself a child, just learning to read and write; or, if you like, an old person whose only associations with letters were those such as a child encounters in school. Good heavens, man, have you forgotten your A B C's? Every one of those letters is a perfectly traced A B C, such as I can remember from some little white cards that my first teacher held up for the students to sound out. All we have to find now are some A B C's, if you know what I mean. Blachford, Blachford, I'm not much of a detective!”
He sent me to summon Miss Alice and his blue eyes were twinkling with amusement when I returned with her.
“Miss Moody,” he began at once. “I'd like to go upstairs to the attic. Perhaps to your nursery, if you have one.”
She seemed somewhat astonished at the odd request. “Grown girls do not usually have nurseries,” she replied. “Of course I used to have one but now it is just a storing place for my old dolls and playthings.”
“Just where we want to go,” he said, hopping about in excitement. “Nothing very important, Miss Moody—not important at all—but interesting just the same. Can Tubal lead us to it?”
“I don't think he has ever been in it. It is on the third floor—a small room built into the attic.”
“Good. Good! We'll find it.”
He started off, not waiting for Blachford and me. But we hurried behind him the best we could and soon he led us into a shadowed, dusty room on the third floor. It was a haunted place; the silence was poignant with the ghost of children's laughter, with the echo of little dancing feet. Old toys lay abandoned in the corners; forsaken dolls stared blankly at us from dusty cradles. For a moment we all stood musing, dreaming of a childhood that was departed. Teazle seemed no longer eager and excited.
“It's a holy place,” said he. “Why disturb it? I already know who wrote that letter.”
“Paul Turner wrote it,' Blachford told him stubbornly.
“Nonsense. I see I'll have to prove it to you after all.” He began to search through the room and soon he picked up a small object from the floor. It was of wood, hardly larger than a large button, and I thought it was some queer kind of type. It bore the raised letter A.
Teazle laid out the script, then applied this letter to one of the letters on the paper. He smiled knowingly, then continued his search. In a dusty corner he found what seemed to be some sort of a small frame and by lifting an old box he uncovered what looked like several complete alphabets of the wooden type such as he had found at first.
He turned to us grinning broadly. “Do you see what this is?” he began, holding aloft the wooden frame. “It is one of those old-fashioned letter boards used by children to learn to spell. You've seen 'em—letters slide along in grooves and children can put them together and make words. Every letter on that anonymous message coincides in size with one of these letters—in other words, some one came up here, ripped the wooden type from that old toy and from this type traced the letters we find on this page.”
We saw in a moment that this was true. The letters had each been traced laboriously and coincided in size with the wooden type.
“What does that suggest to you, Blachford? It tells me plainly that whoever wrote this message was not merely ordinarily ignorant. He—or she—was practically illiterate. As I said, he could sound out a few words and knew the letters that represented the sounds—knew them well enough to recognize them when he saw them and studied them. He lacked confidence in himself to draw the letters legibly, so he made use of this children's toy.
“You see every word is spelled absolutely phonetically according to his dialect—and these letters fit. That tells me all I want to know. I can guess the rest. For your benefit however, Blachford, I'll go on. Look. carefully at this threatening letter.”
He spread out the message for us on a table and read it just as it had been written:
“Keep yur hands off de moody fortun let alice and paul git maried K. K. K.
“First look at the word 'de,'” Mr. Teazle continued. “I'll admit that when I first looked at that I thought as you did, Blachford, that some one had tried to write like an unlettered person and overdid it. Yet I'm convinced now that it is absolutely genuine. Do you know any race of people who habitually say 'de,' when they mean 'the?'”
“The colored people, meaning of course the illiterate colored people,” Blachford replied. “But the Scandinavian who has not completely mastered English says 'de' too, because he cannot pronounce th. Possibly even the German emigrant says it that way.”
“Quite right. The th sound is extremely difficult—not a natural ejaculation at all—and it takes time and practice. But here, we can go a little farther. 'Git' suggests something—used for 'get;' and there is some little significance in the fact that the letter m was traced, then erased and a written in its place, beginning the word Alice. If I am allowed to guess at all I would say that the writer started to write 'Miss Alice,' the name by which he was accustomed to speak of Miss Moody, and changed it because he feared it would bring suspicion upon him. Turner doesn't call his sweetheart Miss Alice.”
“He might, however, have started to write Miss Moody,” Blachford suggested.
“Good, good! This is making me dig! But at least you'll grant me that this extends the circle of suspicion to others beside Turner—to colored people who habitually call her by the familiar Southern title—Miss, using the given name. Suppose, Blachford, you are an ignorant man and you want to write an anonymous threatening letter to some one. How will you sign it?”
“I don't know. I suppose I'd sign it by the 'Black Hand.'”
“I think that very likely. But suppose you are an ignorant man living in the South—and likely you have never heard of the Black Hand. You have, however, heard of a certain secret society that in popular imagination is supposed to deal secret and terrible justice to wrongdoers. Suppose you are a colored person, brought up on stories of a certain secret order that is more terrible, in your imagination, than the Erlking to the little German boy. Such a society, to the colored people, is the Ku Klux Klan. Don't you think you'd be inclined to sign your anonymous letters with the mysterious and scary letters, K. K. K.?”
“Yes. I very likely would.”
“The Ku Klux Klan usually does not scare white people, but considering how it had scared him, the writer thought it would surely put the fear of God into Oswald Moody. Paul Turner wouldn't have searched through this attic for letters to trace, Blachford. This letter I have here was surely written by a colored person—some one who habitually frequents the house and who in all probability adores her Miss Alice. You go downstairs, Tubal, and tell old Rose to come up here.”
I was very sorry for the old blackamoor as I guided her, quaking and ashen, into the detective's presence. Was the crime to be fastened on her—this faithful old servant with the great jaws and the sullen black eyes?
When we came into the room we found Teazle in the act of writing a message in the same rude way he had described—tracing each letter laboriously from the wooden type. He pretended to take no notice of us at first. Old Rose gasped when she saw him, then stood sullenly waiting for him to speak.
Mr. Teazle looked up casually. “Why did you write such a letter to Miss Alice's uncle, Rose?” he asked in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Didn't write no letter,” she answered.
“Come, come.” He traced out another letter laboriously, looked at it critically, then turned and faced the old blackamoor. “You don't mean to say you've got the brass to stand up here and deny you wrote that letter?”
“Never wrote no letter!”
“Rose, you are getting yourself in a worse fix every minute. It is bad enough to write and send such a note. It might very easily land you in jail. It is considerably worse to deny it to the officers of the law. But to write that second letter—telling him the exact hour he was to be hanged and exactly how you were going to do it”
She interrupted him with such a wail of terror and despair that both Mr. Blachford and myself were considerably taken aback. “I didn't, I didn't,” she told him, sobbing. Then she knelt, her big hands folded to him, her eyes rolling, her dark face inscribed with unmistakable horror and dread. “I did write dat first note! I wrote it so he'd quit persecutin' my lil' Alice! But I never wrote no second note.”
Mr. Teazle looked very sober. “Get up, Rose,” he told her rather gently. “Quit yelling and get up. I'll take your word you didn't write the second note, but you mustn't tell any more lies. Come, Tubal—Blachford. We've got some other things to look into now.”
As we were filing down the stairs I could not restrain my curiosity and although it was not a servant's place I asked a question of the gentleman. “How do you know she was telling the truth—that she didn't write the second note?” I inquired.
He turned to me, grinning slyly. “There wasn't any second note, Tubal,” he replied.
Chapter XII.
Silvester Teazle was not like any detective I had ever read of in a book. He seemed to do most of his detecting sitting in an easy chair in the library and talking companionably with Blachford. Occasionally he even addressed a few words to me; yet it did not seem undue familiarity as is always embarrassing to a servant who knows and respects his place. Perhaps the tone he used toward me put me at my ease; it was cheery, perhaps even slightly sportive. Perhaps English servants were a new type to him and like all new things amused him in some slight degree. But it was not for me to question the gentleman and all in all I enjoyed the hours with him very much.
It might be said it was hardly a servant's place to stay near when the gentlemen were talking, but evidently they expected me to do so—to run errands and suchlike. Except for an occasional question I could not restrain I simply stood back waiting for them to speak to me.
“I suppose you've picked on that old colored woman for the murderer?” Mr. Blachford asked Mr. Teazle when he had returned to the library.
“There can be quite a case developed against old Rose, Blachford,” Mr. Teazle answered thoughtfully. “That woman frightens me more than any desperate criminal that I have ever had to handle.”
This was very interesting to both Mr. Blachford and myself but I hope I did not give sign that I was listening too keenly.
“You astonish me!” Blachford said.
“I wouldn't if you had the least trace of imagination. Good heavens, look at her—that mighty Amazonian frame, those cruel, big hands, that huge, determined, cruel mouth and bloodhound lips—jaws to smash a rock like a stamp mill. Look at those eyes, sullen and smoldering.
“You know the famous poem about the female—how she is deadlier than the male. Now old Tom—he couldn't be guilty of a crime like this in a hundred years. He simply hasn't it in him; but I don't know about old Rose. Did you notice, by the way, how frightened the old colored man is of her?”
“Not particularly.”
“The other day at the inquest he looked up at her before he answered any question. Now a court, to a colored man, is a pretty scary thing itself, yet he didn't for a moment forget the terror he had of that big black panther.
“There is something deadly literal about women, Blachford,” he said musingly. “Suppose a man hated Moody, detested him with a fervor such as you and I—associated as we have been with all kinds of people, good and bad—could never conceive of. Suppose he came to the secret conclusion that Moody should be hanged. Still he wouldn't likely go to the tremendous effort of hanging him, even if there was a gallows within a quarter of a mile. He would be content to stick a knife into him or shoot him or hit him in the head with an ax. Likely he wouldn't even take the trouble to warn him first—that is, to gloat over him to give him a few minutes' terror and a few minutes' screaming, to make him understand what was going to happen to him, why he deserved it and who was his murderer—but would simply hurl him into infinity by a shot from ambush. Such is a mighty slipshod way of taking vengeance, Blachford—to strike a man down, killing him instantly without pain and thus never letting him know that his crimes had found him out and done him in at last. I hope you see what I mean. How do we know that death isn't a blessing instead of a disaster? All accepted philosophies teach that it is, and your sentimental murderer—only a sentimental man will do murder, as a rule—will tell you and swear to you that he believes it thoroughly, yet he goes ahead and deliberately gives his enemy this great blessing. I tell you the only vengeance that a man can be sure of getting is what he gets upon this earth, and where's the fun in killing a man when he doesn't know that he's being killed? Is that plain?”
“All very plain,” Blachford remarked, rather sarcastically I thought. “But you started to tell the difference between the methods of a man and a woman.”
“Of course. I was getting to it. A man might likely dispose of his enemy in this slipshod fashion—shooting him from ambush or some equally silly thing. Women are more conscientious—possibly more dramatic and sentimental, both dangerous traits, by the way—but at least more conscientious, going to a greater effort to see that things are done right. A man might conclude that his enemy ought to be hanged, but he'd be content to shoot him. If a woman concluded her enemy ought to be hanged—for instance some man who had hurt her babe—she'd hang him if there was the least possible chance to pull it off. She wouldn't stop till she did it and she'd do it right.
“Merciful heavens, man! Imagine lying in bed, an invalid—and seeing the door come slowly open and trying to yell, but no one to hear you—and then seeing that great black she-devil come creeping into your room. There would be no mercy from her. Her eyes would roll but her bloodhound mouth would be set. Then to carry you in those awful, strong arms and put the ropes around you, and hang you, deliberately and carefully, with all the fixings—do you wonder I'm terrified at the sight of her?
“There's something about hanging different from any other death. It grips the imagination—probably because of the fact that hanging, for countless centuries, has been the form of death administered to evildoers. Every man dies—death can't be a very terrible fate, of itself—but there is something damned and awful about being hanged. It looks like a woman's crime or else the crime of a fanatic, a zealot. Blachford, Africa is written all over that dark deed of two nights ago. It seems to me I can smell the jungle in it—see a ring of savages dancing about a caldron—hear a tomtom beating in the distance. We said a few minutes ago that the letter was written either by a very astute, masterly criminal or by some one practically illiterate. I say now that the crime of two nights ago was committed either by the wildest savage or else by a highly sophisticated gentleman. There is no middle ground. I can't help but hope, though, for the good of my immortal soul, that it was done by a savage—it would make me feel more at ease.
“With Rose we can easily find a motive—even for such a cruel, deliberate crime as this. Rose would only have to believe that the old man was conspiring against his niece; she would not wait for proof. Rose was Miss Moody's old mammy and not one of us three here, likely, can even conceive of the love that old, savage heart pours out upon the girl. I know of only one counterpart; the love a noble dog bears his master. A noble dog would have been no less cruel, no more inexorable in revenging an injury to his master than old Rose in avenging Alice.
“Her letter shows that she thought the old man had his eye on the Moody fortune—that he was keeping the two lovers apart. So one night she pretended to go to sleep, then got up and procured a stout rope. Perhaps she took the towrope out of Paul Turner's car—she had likely seen it there at some previous time—perhaps. some other towrope that happened to fall into her possession. She stole into the house, called at Mr. Moody's door on some pretext and was admitted; and then as she pretended to work about the old man's bed suddenly thrust a sheet into his mouth.
“She is a strong woman, strong enough to lick you, Blachford, in a fair fight. She could twist Tubal and me together around her fingers. Look at those shoulders, those arms. Great physical strength is the first requisite in such a murder as this and old Rose has it. Never doubt that for a minute.”
“Why couldn't there be two? It looks more reasonable to me.”
“There might be, of course—a principal and a hired cutthroat. There could not be two principals, for the simple reason that it is utterly beyond the bounds of credibility that two such criminal minds would unite upon the same enterprise with the same passion and relentlessness. Blachford, if I am not mistaken this is the deed of a lone wolf—whether a she-wolf or not I won't say. Two men could not share the zeal and determination, the fire and the hatred that found expression in that dangling body under the gallows. In looking for a suspect we've got to find some one who is physically capable of not only gagging and binding Moody—that might be easy, since he was an invalid—but of carrying him nearly a quarter of a mile. He was a large man, rather short but weighing around two hundred pounds. It would be simply beyond the physical limitations of a small man or woman to handle him. Not so with that great African. She has carried great weights all her life and the zeal that prompted the deed would not stop for a mere matter of a quarter-of-a-mile haul.
“It must have been a terrible sight; worse than any you or I have ever seen. Doubtless she carried him through the front door of his room, through the stately room we sit in now and out into the night; her great figure splendid in her strength; her black skin gleaming in the subdued light like polished ebony; her eyes cold as the eyes of a reptile; and in her arms Moody, bound so that he could not struggle, gagged so he could not cry out.”
Blachford's eyes were shining. “But he did cry out!”
“Yes. Probably she took off his gag when she had got him up on the platform. She wanted to put it about his eyes; it would be more professional. Perhaps it slipped off; anyway his screaming did not help him. He shrieked a few times but he was too near dead from sheer terror to succeed in bringing help. And presently she left him dangling in the dark.”
He looked into Blachford's face. The latter's face was pale with excitement, his eyes shone under his brows. “Good Lord, I never thought of her!” he exclaimed. “So you think this is the explanation!”
“No.” Silvester Teazle grinned and shook his head. “I don't think so for a minute.”
Chapter XIII.
Teazle stopped talking as abruptly as he had begun and the remainder of the day was given over to his investigations. He questioned me closely in regard to everything that had happened since I came to Roadturn and he questioned every one else in the establishment about everything they knew. He made a careful and detailed study of the region immediately about the gallows and looking from my pantry window I saw him following down the line of fence between the house and the woods, examining every barb on the top wire. He seemed to uncover something of importance, because I saw him call Blachford to his side, and together they examined, with a pocket microscope, some small object that he held in his hands.
I was talking to old Tom when I saw them again. They came suddenly around the house and the look on their faces would have indicated that they were on a hot scent. They paused, however, watching the old colored man at his work.
The latter seemed greatly ill at ease. Evidently this famous detective from the North was an awful and sinister figure to him and though he pretended great interest in his flower beds I saw the sweat drops at the edge of his snowy wool.
“I see you've found your shovel,” Blachford said easily.
“Yas, 'r.” The old colored man looked up, quaking. “Dat was mighty queer about dis 'ere shovel. I lef' it leanin' agin' de building and when I foun' it to-day”
If he finished his sentence I didn't hear him, because Teazle had turned with deep interest to Blachford. “Do you mean to say that there was a mystery about a shovel—that you didn't let me in on?” he demanded.
Old Tom stared with open mouth but Mr. Blachford turned in annoyance. “Mystery, nothing!” he said somewhat irritated perhaps by the gentleman's tone. “It wasn't worth telling. What has a shovel to do with this case?”
“Who knows? I've often preached, Blachford, the value of the little things. The whole truth might hang on a vanished shovel.”
“Nonsense. This old man forgot where he left it.”
“No, sah!” Tom exclaimed with great emphasis. “'Deed I didn't forget whar I put it. I lef it der beside de buildin' because I was goin' to do some diggin' early next mornin' and I says to myself I'll leave dis shovel right heah”
“And where and when did you find it, Tom?” Mr. Teazle asked.
“Didn't find it till dis mornin'—and der it was layin' out in de wea'der in de dahlia bed clean on de oder side of de house. And Ah says”
“And Ah says,” Teazle interrupted—making some little sport of Tom, I fancy—“this may be the most important clew we've found yet. Why does any one take a shovel? To dig. Why would a murderer want to dig? To hide evidence, of course—I don't think he carried this ghastly crime to the ghastly length of digging a grave, although it would be just like him. Tom, have you seen where anybody has been digging about the grounds?”
“No, sah.”
“Then, Blachford, let's get busy.”
Duties called me away but for an hour the detectives searched through the grounds and the gardens; and at last their efforts were rewarded with success. Tom told me later that in one of the dahlia beds—near the place Tom had found the shovel—they saw traces of recently disturbed earth, and digging they unearthed certain material that Tom thought to be part of a man's wardrobe. Just what this meant to them I was not to know for some time.
I served their dinner about seven; but they did not tell me the result of the day's research. I could see, however, that both gentlemen were somewhat excited. Although it is not my practice to attempt to overhear the conversations of a guest I did hear a single scrap of conversation that has its place in this narrative. “So the old negress sent it because she hated and feared Moody, eh?” Blachford said.
“Yes. She liked neither him nor his friend, the doctor—she thought that they had designs on her beloved mistress.”
I went to my room early and too tired to read retired to bed shortly after nine. The day's excitement had worn me out and it seemed scarcely a moment before I was asleep. Just what wakened me, two hours later, I was never fully to know. I believe it was simply one of those half wakenings common to men in their latter years—a moment's semiconsciousness wherein the body seeks a new position. But presently I found my consciousness quickening and my eyes fastened on the long streak of moonlight on the floor, poured in through the narrow rift between the shade and the casement.
A slow wakening is always fearful. Things take shape slowly; the mind turns through weird and eerie fancies before it emerges into everyday consciousness. I found myself staring here and there about the room.
The preceding night I had slept fairly well, the sleep of deep fatigue, but I found my nerves on edge to-night. And presently I heard a very subdued, metallic sound in the region of my door.
“It is my latch,” I thought. Yet I did not want to believe that it was; that the ghost of the corridor was abroad again. It was a great relief to me that the door was securely locked. Surely, I thought, my imagination had tricked me; and I listened, straining, for further sounds.
I was not disappointed. No one, looking for mystery at Roadturn, ever seemed to be disappointed. Presently I heard rather quiet steps as some one walked down the corridor and entered the room immediately adjoining mine.
I was not asleep and dreaming; this much was sure. I listened, straining, and some one moved heavy objects about and laid them with almost imperceptible sounds of concussion on the floor. Something dropped with a loud report—it sounded like a heavy book—but somewhat to my surprise there ensued no long period of silence thereafter. Evidently this intruder was indifferent as to whether I heard him or not.
But it was not the footsteps, back and forth across the room, or the sounds of falling, sliding, heavy things that: stirred and dismayed me the most. It was an odd whirling sound, someway metallic—exactly the same dim sound as I had heard that unforgetable night, my first night at Roadturn.
Was this intruder the same that I had followed through the halls, that had slain old Tom's dog at my threshold and had attacked me in my room? The steps were bolder, not so furtive as before, but that queer, humming whirl, so hushed and soft that a man might confuse it with the whirl of his own thoughts in his brain was not possible to mistake. For a long moment I lay motionless, hardly breathing, in the big bed—and I tried to decide what my course should be.
It was a queer moment; an uneasy, creepy moment. Soon I knew there was no safety in lying here in the darkness. No room in the house was sacred to that night prowler. I got up softly, and turned on the light—rather hoping, I am afraid, that he would see the beam under the door and go away. But I still heard him fumbling about in the next room.
I moved across the room and secured a heavy water pitcher; a woman's weapon, perhaps, yet not to be scorned in the arms of a man. I did not try to walk silently now, and I felt sure that the man in the next room would hear my steps. Yet he continued his mysterious activities. Presently I started to open the door.
Surely, I thought, he would hear and heed the turn of the latch. And now, as I stood on my threshold, I saw that the door of the study adjacent to my room was open wide and the light was streaming through. I stepped to the doorway and peered in,
Then I felt embarrassment at my own fear. Surrounded by books that he had taken from their shelves and strewn about on the floor stood the great detective, Mr. Teazle, and he was working with the dial of a small wall safe that had been concealed by a row of tomes.
“Hello, there, Tubal,” he greeted me. “Sorry I woke you up. Would you mind going down to see if Miss Alice has the combination to this safe?”
No wonder I stared at him. He spoke as casually as if he were asking for bread at dinner. The lateness of the hour, the unusual nature of his activities and the sight of me in my night garments seemed to affect him not one way or another.
“Surely, sir,” I told him when I had caught my breath. “But I believe it doubtful, sir, that she knows the safe is there.”
“Extremely so—but it won't hurt to try. Bring Blachford too. And say, Tubal”—he looked up at me with a brilliant smile as I turned to go—“the man who concealed this safe was a crackajack.”
I thought at first that he meant a safe cracker but soon [ realized that this was just his droll way of speaking of a very shrewd and astute gentleman. “Topping, was he?” I suggested.
“Very, very topping, if I may say so. Ripping, in fact. He put that safe behind a panel and that panel behind a massive row of books labeled 'Selections from the World's Best Literature.' And he could rest assured they would never be disturbed.”
Chapter XIV.
Į could hardly dress for nervousness and my voice shook with excitement for all my effort to speak casually when I called through the door to Miss Moody. “The detective has found a wall safe in the study upstairs that he thinks has some connection with the crime,” I told her. “Do you know the combination of it?”
“I didn't even know the existence of it,” she replied when she understood my question. Her sweet voice ceased and the deep silence that dropped down indicated that some portentous thought had come to her. “Tubal, I don't know the combination but I believe I know where we can find it. I remember noticing a safe combination in one of father's old notebooks but supposed it was one of his office safes. I have all his papers—it might prove to be just what you want.”
She groped through a drawer of old records and papers that she kept in her room. Fortune was with us to-night and in a very short time she found the entry that she sought. Then she rang for Rose and we all accompanied Blachford up to the study, and even I, merely a servant in the house, felt some degree of excitement as to what that hidden stronghold might contain. I did not feel that I was intruding; Miss Moody, unable to see herself, was anxious for both Rose and myself to go, perhaps to protect her interests when the safe was searched. We found Teazle almost hopping about the room in excitement.
“There's one chance in six, I suppose, of this being the right combination—but we'll give it a try,” he said. “If it isn't we'll simply have to wait for to-morrow and a professional safe cracker. Blachford, why weren't you ever a burglar? If I were going to train myself for a detective again I'd first take a few lessons in crime.”
He talked as he moved the dial back and forth. It made a very curious humming sound and I recognized it unmistakably as the sound heard those first, mysterious nights at Roadturn. “Six,” he said, “back to four, forward to eighteen—and now we've either failed or”
But the mechanism creaked and the safe came open beneath his hand.
I saw his intent face in the room light as he peered within. Though the door was small, the safe itself was quite large. Swiftly he drew its contents into the light.
There was no gold or jewels, no securities or valuable papers. At first even Mr. Teazle looked bewildered at the strange, gruesome assortment of things that he had brought forth. There was what looked to be a man's linen shirt, almost covered with great, dark stains; a long murderous-looking kitchen knife, tarnished and stained, and one torn and spotted glove.
Teazle laid the things on a small table and his eyes shone in his sharp, wizened face. We all stood silent, staring. Then as some great truth shot home Teazle glanced around at us with a dim smile.
“This almost completes our case,” said he.
“Against whom?” Blachford asked him sharply. “Against Doctor Hardy?”
“Partly. But particularly against the most wicked, terrible, depraved criminal that I have ever had to deal with—Oswald Moody.”
“But Oswald Moody was the victim rather than the criminal in this case.”
“If you wish to call him that. Blachford—Miss Moody—I am a believer in the law and the courts, never in mob rule or in personal vengeance.” He was speaking very soberly. “There was a crime a few nights ago—likely a sordid, vengeful crime—and its full details have not yet been fully cleared up. I am an imaginative man—to that I owe my success—and I don't want to appear too sensational; yet I feel that Fate took a hand in that game on the hilltop. Somehow beyond my knowledge this crime of a few nights ago became the very agent of Fate, a grim, immutable, poetically just Fate; and Oswald Moody simply paid the penalty for his wickedness—as all men of his stamp must pay—on the gallows!”
When we were gathered in the library Teazle told us the story of the crime as near as he could work it out. It was a story, he said, of poetic justice—of where a desperate criminal's vengeful deed worked into the hands of a just, retributive fate. He was quite a little moved and stirred, I thought; he spoke quietly, almost casually, but his eyes flashed and the color grew and paled in his shrewd, eager face.
This was what he loved—the unfolding of a great mystery to a circle of eager hearers. The case was not yet, however, an open book; he confessed in the beginning that some details of the story still evaded him. “I've gone as far as I can,” he said, “but it is not yet a perfect fabric. Some things I can only guess at; of the two men that could straighten me out, one, the victim, is dead; the other, the murderer, still at large. When the latter is captured, as he certainly soon will be, probably the points in doubt will be cleared up.
“We must begin nearly twenty years ago—with the last deed of violence that was committed in this old manor house. Most of you know that story; how George Moody was murdered, and James Crockitt, a young Englishman who worked as gardener or stable hand on the estate, was hanged for the crime. Crockitt was convicted, you remember, on circumstantial evidence—a stained knife and certain garments of his, also stained, were found in his possession. Oswald Moody furnished the court with the motive for the murder when he testified that his brother had spoken of his intention of discharging the young man.
“Not often, my friends, has there been such a miscarriage of justice in the courts of this country. Crockitt did not murder George Moody. The true murderer was his wicked, depraved, avaricious brother, the actor Oswald Moody, who died on the gallows two nights ago.
“The murderer made his plan with the deliberate intention of fastening the crime upon the young stable hand. He procured a knife belonging to him, as well as some of his garments, stained them with blood either from a small cut in his own body or from some fowl or rabbit blood, and secreted them among the young man's things. These things, uncovered by the detectives after a diligent search, convicted young Crockitt of the crime.
“Yet there was some genuine evidence, after the crime, that Oswald had to destroy to protect himself. There was the knife used in the crime and certain garments that—as almost always happens in a knife murder—became stained. Unquestionably Oswald had plans made to destroy these immediately; possibly in the furnace, perhaps some other way. Those plans must have gone wrong. For some reason I can't be sure of—perhaps a knock on the door or some other interruption—Oswald was obliged to conceal the things temporarily, with the idea of returning at the first opportunity and destroying them utterly.
“Oswald's first great mistake was not using young Crockitt's knife and wearing his clothes when he actually committed the crime. The reason he didn't, of course relying instead on substitution, was that he feared he would have no opportunity to conceal them among Crockitt's things in the interval between the murder and the time of its discovery. His second mistake—if indeed it was not an unavoidable circumstance—was to hide his own evidence instead of immediately destroying it.
“I have quite a little story worked out how this hiding occurred—whether or not it is wholly true no man alive to-day can say. We can feel sure that the motive for this cold-blooded murder was Oswald's greed for his brother's estate. Oswald was a more or less successful actor but he was luxury loving to a great degree, and this, combined with an absolute lack of morals—his unredeemed wickedness, if you will—was a dangerous trait. He never doubted for a moment but that the courts would appoint him executor of the estate and the guardian of George Moody's infant daughter, Alice; and unquestionably he would have been so appointed had it not been that George made other arrangements in his will. As guardian and executor he soon could have obtained the estate, either through fraud or, which would be simpler, the murder of the child.
“It seems hard to believe that he would descend to this. It is getting to be a common belief among sentimental people that all bad men have much good in them, and all good men some bad—and perhaps that is true—in books. If Oswald Moody had any good in him I do not know where it was concealed. If capability of deliberate cold-blooded murder is complete condemnation for a man there are all too many thoroughly wicked men in the world—this is not alone my belief but simply a matter of record of our courts. Oswald Moody unquestionably had every intention of destroying his infant ward.
“But his brother left a will! Undoubtedly he had not altogether trusted his brother Oswald and much to every one's surprise he had drawn up a perfectly legal document making his dead wife's brother his daughter's guardian and executor of the estate. It may have been that Oswald suspected the existence of the will and it was part of his plan to destroy it; otherwise I cannot explain his presence at the wall safe immediately after the crime.
“I can picture him, friends. In one hand he held his brother's notebook, likely taken from his body—containing the combination of the wall safe. In the other arm he had certain gruesome evidence of the murder—a stained linen shirt, a glove, a reddened knife. He sped running to the wall safe—why, unless he was seeking his brother's will, I cannot guess—and from thence he intended to carry out his plan of destroying the grisly evidence. As the safe lay open before him there came the interruption—the unlooked-for, unanticipated incident!
“Remember, this is only a guess on my part. Clews that would prove it are lost in the mist of the past. But I do know that instead of destroying the guilty things he was forced to cram them into the wall safe and lock the door!
“To-night I found them. The laundry mark, unchanged in the years, prove them definitely as the property of Oswald Moody.
“He didn't get a chance, at once, to regain his property. Certainly he lost the notebook—probably left it among his brother's things for fear it might be found on his person—and either forgot or lost the combination. Those must have been days of terror for him; he knew that if those objects were found he would in all probability be convicted of the murder. The presence of detectives as well as Boggs, the new guardian and executor, kept him from blowing the safe or from making any other effort to regain the evidence. He feared the safe was fireproof so he dared not set fire to the house. Likely it was not until some days had passed and he began to realize that he alone knew of the existence of the wall safe that he began to feel somewhat more secure. Of course he could never feel absolutely secure as long as those guilty objects were upon the face of the earth.
“The new executor was an alert man and Moody soon despaired of either getting his hands on the estate or regaining his hidden property. He went back to the stage and in the years that followed he fell in with another desperate criminal. What they had in common, what dread adventures they had had together I cannot tell you—I may be able to tell you in a few days more. The time came at last that Oswald fell into troubled, evil days—he was stricken with paralysis, he could no longer get engagements, and we can feel sure that his appointment as executor and Miss Moody's guardian—at Boggs' death—came as a great relief.
“He came here and he brought his friend with him. This friend called himself Doctor Hardy—it was Oswald's plan to use him in getting hold of the estate. Introducing him as a retired specialist Oswald was able to make him free of the house so that he could run his master's errands, keep him company and carry out his evil plans. There is no doubt, now, that it was this depraved man's evil intention to permanently blind his niece. Her eyes grew steadily worse under Hardy's treatment; the evil work has been stopped none too soon. The specialist that called this afternoon and examined the girl's eyes was not able to tell with what drug or acid this fake doctor had been treating her; but he did say that had the 'treatments' continued a few more weeks she would undoubtedly have been permanently blinded; and as it is weeks and months of care and treatment will be necessary before her eyes are strong as ever.
“Wicked and desperate scheme that it was it would have worked perfectly into his plans. You see, Miss Moody was practically of age, soon to begin to manage her own affairs; but he would be able to continue as her guardian and trustee if she were blind. It meant nothing less than veritable ownership of the estate. He thought also that blindness would prevent her marriage—that either she would not allow herself to become a burden to Turner or that Turner himself would refuse to go through with the match. He feared Turner—marriage would take the girl out of his reach. It was because of this that he got Doctor Hardy to order that the girl and Turner be kept apart.
“Doctor Hardy was used further in an attempt to regain the evidence Oswald had hidden in the wall safe—evidence that still disturbed his dreams at night. Undoubtedly he would have succeeded in time—he would have worked out the combination or taken some more desperate means, such as blowing with dynamite. It was Doctor Hardy, Tubal, whom you heard in the corridors, who killed your dog and who twirled the dial of the safe in the room adjoining yours. He had an idea at one time that he might reach the safe from the rear, that there might be some sliding panel that would let him in to the interior, and that is why he came into your room that night, knocking you unconscious so that he could make his search. For the same reason Oswald Moody opposed your having that room. It is possible, also, that you heard Turner downstairs, making surreptitious visits to his sweetheart.
“It did not take me long to run down that wall safe, after you had put me on the trail. You heard some one searching and while it is true that I supposed they were looking for treasure—gold or jewels or securities—I thought it worth while to investigate. Room measurements showed too thick a wall between the two rooms. The rest was easy.
“And now comes the strangest part of this strange story. It is the further part that Doctor Hardy played in it—a part that was not written in the play. We don't as yet know much about Doctor Hardy. Personally I am convinced that he is a famous crook known to the police as 'Frisco' Hunt—a man whose specialty was posing as a doctor. And for some reason that I hope soon to know Doctor Hardy hated his employer like a poisonous snake.
“I'm afraid this will take a psychologist, rather than a detective, to trace down. The story likely had its beginnings long ago—perhaps some unforgotten injury, some obscure crime in which Hardy thought that Moody had played him false. It is a strange thing to contemplate, this deathly hatred running through the years, all the time that they were so closely and intimately associated. It might be that Doctor Hardy was half mad—that there was some queer twist to his criminal mind that only a great alienist could explain—and his particular obsession was the gallows. Possibly the gallows had cast its shadow over his own life, till he lived in terror of them and hanging was thus the natural fate that his fancy prescribed for his enemies.
“This is, of course, mostly conjecture. In all probability we can clear it up when Doctor Hardy is caught. Let me say here, to prevent misjudgment of an able detective, that Blachford made every effort from the first to arrest him. Although he wasn't entirely convinced of his guilt the fact that Hardy had been present here the night of the murder was enough to arouse suspicion; and all the machinery of the law was instantly set in motion. When it was discovered that he had no telephone or mail address it made his guilt all the more likely. Blachford, hoping to facilitate his capture, was careful to keep him from knowing he was under suspicion—keeping his name from all newspaper accounts of the murder and not emphasizing it at the inquest. Mr. Blachford, I will say, has more than lived up to his reputation as a thorough and able secret-service man.”
Blachford beamed in spite of himself. Undoubtedly this praise was beyond the value of gold and silver to him. Good work done and a word of appreciation; what does life hold more than this?
“We've got a pretty clear case against Doctor Hardy right now,” Mr. Teazle went on. “We do not believe he had associates. He was a powerful man and he played a lone-wolf game all the way through—rendering his victim unconscious with a hypodermic of drugs, carrying him in his strong arms to the gallows, binding and blindfolding him in the manner used in the penitentiary death chambers, thrusting him up on the platform and pushing him through the broken trap. It looks like the work of a madman—the thoroughness of it all—or else some idealist whose relentlessness, whose immutable purpose and iron resolve, resemble madness. Perhaps they are the same. Surely only a madman's strength could have lifted that two-hundred-pound man up onto that unstable platform and dropped him to his death. As soon as he completed the execution he came back here, took his professional-appearing clothes and buried them, and then donned such other garments as he had prepared for his flight—probably the garb of a laborer. He won't be easy to trace; he probably has shaved off his beard or it was false in the beginning; and no one seems to have a very clear idea of his face, probably because no one saw him except in the darkened halls. However, we have high hopes of running him down.
“We found his clothes where he had buried them—we have identified them beyond doubt. In their pocket we found Doctor Hardy's hypodermic needle with which he administered the drugs. I have found a few threads from his suit where he climbed the barbed-wire fence leading to the gallows, unquestionably with his unconscious victim in his arms. There is no evidence whatever against the other two suspects, Rose and Paul Turner. One was a zealous colored mammy, trying to frighten with an anonymous letter a man whom she instinctively feared; the other a romantic lover to whom even the threat of his sweetheart's blindness was not a barrier.”
Thus he finished his story. We went at last to our rooms and the days resumed their tranquil course. The wall safe was empty now so I no longer wakened out of a deep sleep to hear the mysterious footfall in the corridor or that queer, dim whirl of the dial. The time neared when Mr. Turner and Miss Moody should marry and go on their long honeymoon, bringing my service at Roadturn to an end; and now it would seem they would have to leave, before all the last, doubtful points of the mystery were cleared up. Although the police of many cities looked zealously and long, Doctor Hardy had not yet been brought to justice.
And this brings me to the epilogue.
The reason that the old gallows was never destroyed, after the jail burned, was because a man who lived in a foreign country thought that some time he might have need of it. The ground on which it stood was bought that that gallows might be preserved—for purposes of justice.
The reason why Doctor Hardy was never found was because he never existed. Oswald Moody was Doctor Hardy—they were one and the same. Moody only pretended paralysis the better to carry out his criminal purposes without suspicion; and to a man of his nature it did not come hard to lie in a great bed, surrounded by every luxury, and be waited upon—particularly since he could roam where he wished when the house was still at night. He would simply don his physician's garb, go out his back door, lock it and come in through the front. He had insured himself by his string latch and pretense of eccentricity that he would never be caught. He was an actor and this impersonation naturally appealed to him.
The murderer did not have to carry his great weight to the gallows. He led him there on the pretense of overseeing the secret meeting of Mr. Turner and Miss Moody, and he got him to climb up on the platform of the gallows to overlook the field beneath. Then he drugged him temporarily with an injection in his arm, bound him, blindfolded him like the guilty murderer he was, stripped from him the guise of the doctor that had been penetrated almost from the first, tied the hangman's noose about his head and then waited for him to waken. When the victim had come fully to consciousness and had full time to realize that he had met his rightful fate at last, his slayer cast him down.
This is more than an account of the crime; it is a confession. I am adding this postscript as I lie in my last sickness, not to be read until I am beyond the accusation of mortal tongue. The shadow that the old negress saw against my window shade the hour of the crime, and which established my alibi, was but that of a dummy, a manikin of old clothes with a book propped in front. The slayer of that cruel and wicked criminal, Oswald Moody, was the author of this confession, the man who for long years has been known as Tubal Small.
James Crockitt, unjustly hanged, was my son.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1967, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 57 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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