The Note
No clues! Land’s alive! The place was positively cluttered with clues;
and most of them about as useful, in the end, as clutter generally is.
I am not saying that none of them were of value. I am saying that a
person, out in a grove of aspen trees, all bending and bowing to a
high wind, would be sort of simple to go hunting a straw to find which
way the wind was blowing. That was about how sensible I was, when I
asked Sam, after he had got shed of Clarence, about the contents of
Gaby’s beaded bag.
“It is all on the table in her room,” he said, “where I put it for the
coroner’s jury. You can go and see. But, first, read this. It was
tucked inside her dress. The undertaker found it, and gave it to me. I
dread giving it to Danny.”
He handed me a folded sheet of paper. I opened it, and read:
“Danny dear: If you ever read this, I shall be dead—murdered. Don’t
have me buried here in this God-forsaken country. Take me to San
Francisco and have my body cremated. I love a flame. I hate the cold
earth.
“You have had much trouble on my account, old dear. Don’t blame me for
having kept the fear and the dread of this thing, which I felt certain
was going to happen, from you. You, nor no living person, but one,
could have saved me.
“Remember, Dan, that in spite of all the distress I have caused you,
and may still be causing you, I have always, in my own way, loved you.
Gaby.”
“Sam,” I said, “I knew she was afraid, yesterday. Oh, why didn’t she
tell us? Of course you men could have saved her. Why did she go out
alone to meet that fiend?”
Sam’s only answer was a slow shaking of his bowed head, and a deep
sigh.
“Mary,” he said, then, “will you give this note to Danny, and explain
to her how it is?”
“How what is?”
“I mean—— Well, she can’t leave the Desert Moon, now, to take the body
to ’Frisco. Until we find out who murdered that girl, not a man-jack
of us is going to leave this place, for any reason.”
“Sam Stanley!” I gasped. “You can’t refuse. That’s all. Own twin
sisters! And Danny as innocent as a new born babe——”
“Don’t talk like a book, Mary. Danny may be as innocent as she seems
to be, and—she may not. She, nor anyone else, can leave this place
until we have gotten to the very bottom of this thing. That goes.”
“To think you paid attention to that fool reporter!”
“Don’t be a fool yourself,” Sam urged. “This note, in Gaby’s
handwriting, clears Danny of the crime, if all the other evidence
didn’t, which it does. We know that she did not kill her sister. But,
of all the people in this house, she is in the best position to know
who did do it. Of course, if she is involved in this she is involved
innocently. If she put the key in your pocket, while we were out in
the car, she did it with no idea of what she was doing. Just the same,
I want her right here on the Desert Moon, for a while. Mary, you take
the note to her, and explain, in your nice way——”
“I’ll give her the note, Sam,” I said. “But you’ll have to do the
explaining yourself. I’ll tell you why. It isn’t right for you to try
to protect anyone, not even Martha, to the extent of refusing to allow
one sister to carry out the dying request of another sister.”
Sam dropped his pipe. As I saw the tobacco and the ashes scatter, I
was more certain than ever that I was acting as a decent women should.
The door opened, and Danny came in. She was so pale that her cheeks
had sort of a greenish tinge to them. Great dark circles spread far
down under her eyes that were red and swollen from crying.
I hurried to her, and put my arms around her. She clung to me, and hid
her head on my shoulder, and said my name over and over. Sam turned
away, as if he could not bear to look at us.
I took her into the living-room, and sat down in a big chair and held
her in my lap.
“If only,” she kept saying, “if only she could have left us in her
beauty. She was so beautiful, Mary. And now——”
Remembering what I had seen the night before, I knew that I must get
her mind into other channels if her reason was to be saved. I thanked
my stars, when I remembered the note.
After she had read it, she cried harder than ever; but I knew that it
was crying of a saner sort.
“Will you go with me, Mary?” she questioned, when she had quieted
some. “To San Francisco?”
“We’ll have to talk to Sam about that, dear,” I said. It was the habit
of helping him, not any kindly impulse, that made me continue. “I am
afraid that Sam wants us all to stay here, for a while. There, there,
dear. You see how it is, don’t you? Sam thinks that the duty of each
one of us, right now, is to stay here and help try to find the guilty
person.”
“Does Uncle Sam think we will find him here?” she questioned.
I tried to tell myself that I had been mistaken; that she had not
emphasized Sam’s name in a hard, pointed way, as she had seemed to do.
“There isn’t anywhere else to try to find him,” I said. “Did you know
about the key in my pocket?”
She nodded. “I knew about that,” she said.
“What else did you know about?” I asked, a mite sharply, for there was
no mistaking her emphasis this time.
“Nothing,” she said, hurriedly. “Nothing. But, Mary, doesn’t it seem
possible to you that someone, clear from the outside, did it? And gave
the key to Chad, and asked him to put it in your pocket? And that, for
some reason we probably never shall discover, Chad could not, dared
not, tell on the person who gave it to him? And that that is why he
shot himself?”
“And we hadn’t thought of that!” I gasped. “I do believe it. It is as
clear as day.”
Her sudden, definite silence talked as plainly as any words she could
have spoken.
“Danny,” I questioned, “you thought of that, but in your heart you
don’t believe it. Do you?”
“I—I want to believe it,” she evaded.
“But you don’t?” I persisted.
She was silent.
“Danny,” I pleaded, “tell me about it. Just tell me, dear. I’ll never
breathe it to a soul, if you say for me not to. What is it that you
know, or think that you know?”
She waited so long before answering me that I thought surely she was
finding the words with which to take me into her confidence. I was so
disappointed I could have cried with her, when she hid her face on my
shoulder, again, and moaned, “Mary—I can’t. I dare not tell. I tell
you—I dare not.”
She jumped up out of my lap, and ran upstairs as if wicked, dangerous
things were running after her.