Suicide
The next thing that I knew I was lying on my back listening to someone
screaming, above the voices of Sam and Mrs. Ricker. I realized that
those awful sounds were coming from my own throat. I tried to stop
them; but I could not. I put my hands to my throat to make it stop the
noise. Sam’s voice came, clear and strong then—real, like a light in
the dark.
I sat straight up. The screams ceased. “What,” I managed, “is the
matter?”
“Everything on God’s earth, that could be,” Sam answered. “But here,
Mary. Drink this. Get some sleep. Nothing to be done, now. We’ll need
you, to-morrow. Some water, Mrs. Ricker——”
He shook a powder into my mouth. Mrs. Ricker held a glass of water to
my lips.
When I opened my eyes again, it was gray dawn. I saw that I was in
Mrs. Ricker’s room. She was sitting by the window tatting. Yes,
tatting; darting the shuttle back and forth, back and forth, with her
long, white fingers. I watched her for a full minute before memory
seized me, and I cried out with the pain of it.
“Sh-h-h,” she warned me, in a whisper. “You’ll wake Martha. She is
asleep here on the couch.”
I got out of bed, shook my skirts down and fastened my corsets under
my dress. I felt in my pocket. The ball of handkerchief was still
there. I went into the hall bathroom, washed my face and hands, and
drained the last crumb of tobacco down with the water out of the
wash-bowl. I washed the handkerchief, scoured the bowl, and went back
to Mrs. Ricker’s room.
As I opened the door, she again warned me against waking Martha.
“Was the shock too much for her?” I asked, going and standing beside
Mrs. Ricker so that we might talk in whispers. She stopped to pick a
knot out of her thread before she answered me.
“I didn’t allow her to go upstairs. She followed Chad out of the house
and saw him shoot himself. He died within ten minutes. It was terrible
for Martha. I had to hold her, while Sam gave her the narcotic——”
“No, no,” I protested. “What—what are you saying? Not Chad? What was
it you said about Chad——”
“He walked out and shot himself, through the head.” She pulled the
thread looser on her shuttle.
I rushed out of the room, away from her. I staggered down the stairs
into the kitchen.
Sam, Hubert Hand, and John all jumped up from their chairs and started
toward me. John reached me first, and put an arm around me.
“Chad——” I began, but I couldn’t get any further.
“There, there, Mary. Pour her some coffee, dad. Quick! Here, sit here.
Turn on that fan, Hand. Get some water——”
“No, no. Tell me. Mrs. Ricker said—— It isn’t true. It—it can’t be
true. Not our Chad——”
Sam answered, gruffly, to keep the choke out of his voice. “It is a
damn shame, Mary; but, it is true. The boy shot himself, not fifteen
minutes after we found her. Wait,” he went on quickly, “before you
think _anything_. I want to tell you what I have told the others. It
is God’s truth. That poor boy is as innocent of any connection with
the murder as I am.”
“Sam!” I managed, and hid my ugly, twisted old face down in my arms.
I will say that the men did pretty well, just sitting quiet, and
leaving me alone, and letting me have my cry out. It seemed to me I
never was going to be able to stop; but they didn’t bother me with
comforting, they let me get clear through to the sniffling and
swallowing stage. I was the first one to speak.
“What,” I said, “are we going to _do_?”
“We are going to do a lot, Mary,” Sam said. “We are going to keep
Chad’s name clean. Sure,” in answer to my protest, “we all know. But,
just the same, I’m mighty thankful that I have his alibis for him,
myself. A suicide looks bad, you know. That is, it would until we find
Canneziano. This is his work——”
“But, Sam,” I said, “if he wasn’t let out of San Quentin until
yesterday morning, he couldn’t possibly have got ’way up here that
same evening.”
“We’ve told Sam that, a thousand times,” Hubert Hand said.
“All right, all right,” Sam said. “But if I ever get that long
distance call through, you’ll find that Canneziano was released a day
or two early. She met him yesterday——”
“How’d he get up here, Sam?” I questioned. “You remember there were no
tracks on the road except the sedan tracks——”
Hubert Hand snapped me short. “Did you have a passenger up from
Rattail, yesterday, John?”
Sam spoke, before John could answer. “Son,” he said, “did you, by any
chance, as a favor to one of the girls, bring that skunk here
yesterday?”
“I did not, dad.”
“He got here, then, as I’ve said all along. Horseback, across the
deserts. And he murdered the girl. By God, he’ll hang for it, if it
takes my last dollar. He killed Chad, too, as much as if he’d shot him
down. We aren’t overlooking a couple of murders, not here on the
Desert Moon. Not right yet. She went out to meet him yesterday, I tell
you. She brought him into the house, for some purpose; through the
back way and up into the attic.”
“Without anybody seeing or hearing them?” Hubert Hand questioned.
“Nobody was looking nor listening, as I remember. You know damn well
that, with the doors shut, nothing can be heard from room to room in
this house—let alone upstairs to downstairs. I tell you, he killed her
there on the stairs, and he made his get-away——”
“If you think that,” I said. “Why aren’t you out hunting him?”
“Hell!” Sam exploded. “Why ain’t I out hunting last night’s lightning?
The girl had been dead anyway two or three hours—more likely longer,
when we found her. He had that head start on us. And he could ride.
God, how that skunk could ride; no mercy for a horse! He’s gone. He
went straight across the deserts, hell bent for Sunday. He’ll need
food. He’ll need water, worse. I’ve telegraphed to every town within
two hundred miles of here. They are watching. I’ve ’phoned every
ranch. I’ve kept that ’phone hot for six solid hours. I’ve got posses
at every water-hole——”
“Listen, Sam,” I said. “You shouldn’t have doped me up with that
sleeping powder. Because, unless after he murdered her, he walked
downstairs, with none of us seeing or hearing him, and into the
living-room or the kitchen, and put the key in my pocket, Canneziano
is not the guilty man.”
Sam’s pipe fell out of his mouth. I shivered. During all of his talk,
I had clear forgotten about those pipe ashes, dropped all over the
beaded bag.
It was Hubert Hand who put the question to me about the key. He made
me feel guilty. My explanation to them that the key had been in the
pocket of my dress, the dress I had been wearing since morning,
yesterday, had the feeling of a confession.
“Still,” Hubert Hand said, when I had finished, “that does not,
necessarily, disprove Sam’s theory. If Canneziano was let out of
prison in time to get here yesterday, he could have murdered her, as
Sam insists, and he could have given the key to some one of us to put
in your pocket. Chad, for instance, or——”
“No!” Sam thundered. “That boy, I tell you, is as innocent as I am.”
The telephone bell rang.
Hubert Hand and John followed Sam into the living-room. I stayed where
I was. I had to have a minute to think. The ashes on the bag? The key
in my pocket? Sam?
“Mary Magin,” I told myself, “for twenty-five years, ever since Sam
Stanley took you, a snivelling, pride-broken, deserted bride, into his
house, and gave you a chance to make a life for yourself, you have
never seen him do a mean trick to man, woman, child, or beast. You
never even heard of a questionable nor an unkind action of his. And
you never will, for the simple reason that the ingredients for
anything but honor and decency aren’t in him. If they were, he would
not be Sam Stanley, any more than bean soup would be bean soup if it
was made out of gooseberries and ginger. That being the one certainty
you have, at this minute, you had better hang on to it tight; stop
thinking and guessing; keep your mouth shut; and you won’t go far
wrong. Good resolutions are easy to make. So is lemon meringue. Both
are almost impossible to keep.”
I went right on thinking. If Sam, I thought, had found it necessary to
murder Gabrielle Canneziano, he had probably done it to keep something
worse from happening. Sickened at myself, for that thought, I found
another way of thinking, not much better.
It did seem to me, remembering the pipe ashes on top of the bag, that
Sam must have been there on the stairs at some time after she had been
murdered and before I had found her. He must, then, be keeping some
secret concerning the murder. It did look as if, considering his talk,
he must be shielding the murderer, with every ounce of his horse-sense
and ingenuity, both of which he had in plenty. But who would he shield
to that extent? Chad, alive or dead? No. Martha? Yes. But Martha could
not have done it. John? Not unless there was something to it than one
of us dreamed of. Hubert Hand, or Mrs. Ricker? No. Danny? I thought
not. Myself? I couldn’t be sure.
The men came back into the kitchen. Sam looked ten years older than he
had looked ten minutes before.
“It was San Quentin,” he said to me. “Canneziano was positively not
released from there until nine o’clock yesterday morning.”
“That,” I said, “lets him out.”
“And,” Hubert Hand said, “lets every man-jack of us here on the place,
in.”
Habit was too strong for Sam. “‘Well in,’” he quoted, with a groan.