“You must see her.”
“No. No.”
“She’s a most unhappy woman. Husband and child both taken from her in a
moment; and now, all means of living as well, unless some happy
thought of yours--some inspiration of your genius--shows us a way of
re-establishing her claims to the policy voided by this cry of suicide.”
But the small wise head of Violet Strange continued its slow shake of
decided refusal.
“I’m sorry,” she protested, “but it’s quite out of my province. I’m too
young to meddle with so serious a matter.”
“Not when you can save a bereaved woman the only possible compensation
left her by untoward fate?”
“Let the police try their hand at that.”
“They have had no success with the case.”
“Or you?”
“Nor I either.”
“And you expect--”
“Yes, Miss Strange. I expect you to find the missing bullet which will
settle the fact that murder and not suicide ended George Hammond’s life.
If you cannot, then a long litigation awaits this poor widow, ending, as
such litigation usually does, in favour of the stronger party. There’s
the alternative. If you once saw her--”
“But that’s what I’m not willing to do. If I once saw her I should yield
to her importunities and attempt the seemingly impossible. My instincts
bid me say no. Give me something easier.”
“Easier things are not so remunerative. There’s money in this affair, if
the insurance company is forced to pay up. I can offer you--”
“What?”
There was eagerness in the tone despite her effort at nonchalance. The
other smiled imperceptibly, and briefly named the sum.
It was larger than she had expected. This her visitor saw by the way her
eyelids fell and the peculiar stillness which, for an instant, held her
vivacity in check.
“And you think I can earn that?”
Her eyes were fixed on his in an eagerness as honest as it was
unrestrained.
He could hardly conceal his amazement, her desire was so evident and the
cause of it so difficult to understand. He knew she wanted money--that
was her avowed reason for entering into this uncongenial work. But to
want it so much! He glanced at her person; it was simply clad but very
expensively--how expensively it was his business to know. Then he took
in the room in which they sat. Simplicity again, but the simplicity of
high art--the drawing-room of one rich enough to indulge in the final
luxury of a highly cultivated taste, viz.: unostentatious elegance and
the subjection of each carefully chosen ornament to the general effect.
What did this favoured child of fortune lack that she could be reached
by such a plea, when her whole being revolted from the nature of the
task he offered her? It was a question not new to him; but one he had
never heard answered and was not likely to hear answered now. But the
fact remained that the consent he had thought dependent upon sympathetic
interest could be reached much more readily by the promise of large
emolument,--and he owned to a feeling of secret disappointment even
while he recognized the value of the discovery.
But his satisfaction in the latter, if satisfaction it were, was of
very short duration. Almost immediately he observed a change in her. The
sparkle which had shone in the eye whose depths he had never been able
to penetrate, had dissipated itself in something like a tear and she
spoke up in that vigorous tone no one but himself had ever heard, as she
said:
“No. The sum is a good one and I could use it; but I will not waste my
energy on a case I do not believe in. The man shot himself. He was a
speculator, and probably had good reason for his act. Even his wife
acknowledges that he has lately had more losses than gains.”
“See her. She has something to tell you which never got into the
papers.”
“You say that? You know that?”
“On my honour, Miss Strange.”
Violet pondered; then suddenly succumbed.
“Let her come, then. Prompt to the hour. I will receive her at three.
Later I have a tea and two party calls to make.”
Her visitor rose to leave. He had been able to subdue all evidence of
his extreme gratification, and now took on a formal air. In dismissing a
guest, Miss Strange was invariably the society belle and that only. This
he had come to recognize.
The case (well known at the time) was, in the fewest possible words, as
follows:
On a sultry night in September, a young couple living in one of the
large apartment houses in the extreme upper portion of Manhattan were so
annoyed by the incessant crying of a child in the adjoining suite, that
they got up, he to smoke, and she to sit in the window for a possible
breath of cool air. They were congratulating themselves upon the wisdom
they had shown in thus giving up all thought of sleep--for the child’s
crying had not ceased--when (it may have been two o’clock and it may
have been a little later) there came from somewhere near, the sharp and
somewhat peculiar detonation of a pistol-shot.
He thought it came from above; she, from the rear, and they were staring
at each other in the helpless wonder of the moment, when they were
struck by the silence. The baby had ceased to cry. All was as still
in the adjoining apartment as in their own--too still--much too still.
Their mutual stare turned to one of horror. “It came from there!”
whispered the wife. “Some accident has occurred to Mr. or Mrs.
Hammond--we ought to go--”
Her words--very tremulous ones--were broken by a shout from below. They
were standing in their window and had evidently been seen by a passing
policeman. “Anything wrong up there?” they heard him cry. Mr. Saunders
immediately looked out. “Nothing wrong here,” he called down. (They were
but two stories from the pavement.) “But I’m not so sure about the
rear apartment. We thought we heard a shot. Hadn’t you better come up,
officer? My wife is nervous about it. I’ll meet you at the stair-head
and show you the way.”
The officer nodded and stepped in. The young couple hastily donned some
wraps, and, by the time he appeared on their floor, they were ready to
accompany him.
Meanwhile, no disturbance was apparent anywhere else in the house, until
the policeman rang the bell of the Hammond apartment. Then, voices began
to be heard, and doors to open above and below, but not the one before
which the policeman stood.
Another ring, and this time an insistent one;--and still no response.
The officer’s hand was rising for the third time when there came a sound
of fluttering from behind the panels against which he had laid his ear,
and finally a choked voice uttering unintelligible words. Then a hand
began to struggle with the lock, and the door, slowly opening, disclosed
a woman clad in a hastily donned wrapper and giving every evidence of
extreme fright.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, seeing only the compassionate faces of her
neighbours. “You heard it, too! a pistol-shot from there--there--my
husband’s room. I have not dared to go--I--I--O, have mercy and see if
anything is wrong! It is so still--so still, and only a moment ago the
baby was crying. Mrs. Saunders, Mrs. Saunders, why is it so still?”
She had fallen into her neighbour’s arms. The hand with which she had
pointed out a certain door had sunk to her side and she appeared to be
on the verge of collapse.
The officer eyed her sternly, while noting her appearance, which was
that of a woman hastily risen from bed.
“Where were you?” he asked. “Not with your husband and child, or you
would know what had happened there.”
“I was sleeping down the hall,” she managed to gasp out. “I’m not
well--I--Oh, why do you all stand still and do nothing? My baby’s in
there. Go! go!” and, with sudden energy, she sprang upright, her eyes
wide open and burning, her small well featured face white as the linen
she sought to hide.
The officer demurred no longer. In another instant he was trying the
door at which she was again pointing.
It was locked.
Glancing back at the woman, now cowering almost to the floor, he pounded
at the door and asked the man inside to open.
No answer came back.
With a sharp turn he glanced again at the wife.
“You say that your husband is in this room?”
She nodded, gasping faintly, “And the child!”
He turned back, listened, then beckoned to Mr. Saunders. “We shall have
to break our way in,” said he. “Put your shoulder well to the door.
Now!”
The hinges of the door creaked; the lock gave way (this special officer
weighed two hundred and seventy-five, as he found out, next day), and a
prolonged and sweeping crash told the rest.
Mrs. Hammond gave a low cry; and, straining forward from where she
crouched in terror on the floor, searched the faces of the two men for
some hint of what they saw in the dimly-lighted space beyond. Something
dreadful, something which made Mr. Saunders come rushing back with a
shout:
“Take her away! Take her to our apartment, Jennie. She must not see--”
Not see! He realized the futility of his words as his gaze fell on the
young woman who had risen up at his approach and now stood gazing at
him without speech, without movement, but with a glare of terror in her
eyes, which gave him his first realization of human misery.
His own glance fell before it. If he had followed his instinct he would
have fled the house rather than answer the question of her look and the
attitude of her whole frozen body.
Perhaps in mercy to his speechless terror, perhaps in mercy to herself,
she was the one who at last found the word which voiced their mutual
anguish.
“Dead?”
No answer. None was needed.
“And my baby?”
O, that cry! It curdled the hearts of all who heard it. It shook the
souls of men and women both inside and outside the apartment; then all
was forgotten in the wild rush she made. The wife and mother had
flung herself upon the scene, and, side by side with the not unmoved
policeman, stood looking down upon the desolation made in one fatal
instant in her home and heart.
They lay there together, both past help, both quite dead. The child
had simply been strangled by the weight of his father’s arm which lay
directly across the upturned little throat. But the father was a victim
of the shot they had heard. There was blood on his breast, and a pistol
in his hand.
Suicide! The horrible truth was patent. No wonder they wanted to hold
the young widow back. Her neighbour, Mrs. Saunders, crept in on tiptoe
and put her arms about the swaying, fainting woman; but there was
nothing to say--absolutely nothing.
At least, they thought not. But when they saw her throw herself down,
not by her husband, but by the child, and drag it out from under that
strangling arm and hug and kiss it and call out wildly for a doctor, the
officer endeavoured to interfere and yet could not find the heart to do
so, though he knew the child was dead and should not, according to
all the rules of the coroner’s office, be moved before that official
arrived. Yet because no mother could be convinced of a fact like this,
he let her sit with it on the floor and try all her little arts to
revive it, while he gave orders to the janitor and waited himself for
the arrival of doctor and coroner.
She was still sitting there in wide-eyed misery, alternately fondling
the little body and drawing back to consult its small set features for
some sign of life, when the doctor came, and, after one look at the
child, drew it softly from her arms and laid it quietly in the crib from
which its father had evidently lifted it but a short time before. Then
he turned back to her, and found her on her feet, upheld by her two
friends. She had understood his action, and without a groan had accepted
her fate. Indeed, she seemed incapable of any further speech or action.
She was staring down at her husband’s body, which she, for the first
time, seemed fully to see. Was her look one of grief or of resentment
for the part he had played so unintentionally in her child’s death? It
was hard to tell; and when, with slowly rising finger, she pointed to
the pistol so tightly clutched in the other outstretched hand, no one
there--and by this time the room was full--could foretell what her words
would be when her tongue regained its usage and she could speak.
What she did say was this:
“Is there a bullet gone? Did he fire off that pistol?” A question so
manifestly one of delirium that no one answered it, which seemed to
surprise her, though she said nothing till her glance had passed
all around the walls of the room to where a window stood open to the
night,--its lower sash being entirely raised. “There! look there!” she
cried, with a commanding accent, and, throwing up her hands, sank a dead
weight into the arms of those supporting her.
No one understood; but naturally more than one rushed to the window. An
open space was before them. Here lay the fields not yet parcelled out
into lots and built upon; but it was not upon these they looked, but
upon the strong trellis which they found there, which, if it supported
no vine, formed a veritable ladder between this window and the ground.
Could she have meant to call attention to this fact; and were her words
expressive of another idea than the obvious one of suicide?
If so, to what lengths a woman’s imagination can go! Or so their
combined looks seemed to proclaim, when to their utter astonishment they
saw the officer, who had presented a calm appearance up till now, shift
his position and with a surprised grunt direct their eyes to a portion
of the wall just visible beyond the half-drawn curtains of the bed. The
mirror hanging there showed a star-shaped breakage, such as follows the
sharp impact of a bullet or a fiercely projected stone.
“He fired two shots. One went wild; the other straight home.”
It was the officer delivering his opinion.
Mr. Saunders, returning from the distant room where he had assisted in
carrying Mrs. Hammond, cast a look at the shattered glass, and remarked
forcibly:
“I heard but one; and I was sitting up, disturbed by that poor infant.
Jennie, did you hear more than one shot?” he asked, turning toward his
wife.
“No,” she answered, but not with the readiness he had evidently
expected. “I heard only one, but that was not quite usual in its tone.
I’m used to guns,” she explained, turning to the officer. “My father
was an army man, and he taught me very early to load and fire a pistol.
There was a prolonged sound to this shot; something like an echo of
itself, following close upon the first ping. Didn’t you notice that,
Warren?”
“I remember something of the kind,” her husband allowed.
“He shot twice and quickly,” interposed the policeman, sententiously.
“We shall find a spent bullet back of that mirror.”
But when, upon the arrival of the coroner, an investigation was made of
the mirror and the wall behind, no bullet was found either there or any
where else in the room, save in the dead man’s breast. Nor had more than
one been shot from his pistol, as five full chambers testified. The case
which seemed so simple had its mysteries, but the assertion made by Mrs.
Saunders no longer carried weight, nor was the evidence offered by the
broken mirror considered as indubitably establishing the fact that a
second shot had been fired in the room.
Yet it was equally evident that the charge which had entered the dead
speculator’s breast had not been delivered at the close range of the
pistol found clutched in his hand. There were no powder-marks to be
discerned on his pajama-jacket, or on the flesh beneath. Thus anomaly
confronted anomaly, leaving open but one other theory: that the bullet
found in Mr. Hammond’s breast came from the window and the one he shot
went out of it. But this would necessitate his having shot his pistol
from a point far removed from where he was found; and his wound was such
as made it difficult to believe that he would stagger far, if at all,
after its infliction.
Yet, because the coroner was both conscientious and alert, he caused a
most rigorous search to be made of the ground overlooked by the above
mentioned window; a search in which the police joined, but which was
without any result save that of rousing the attention of people in the
neighbourhood and leading to a story being circulated of a man seen some
time the night before crossing the fields in a great hurry. But as no
further particulars were forthcoming, and not even a description of the
man to be had, no emphasis would have been laid upon this story had it
not transpired that the moment a report of it had come to Mrs. Hammond’s
ears (why is there always some one to carry these reports?) she
roused from the torpor into which she had fallen, and in wild fashion
exclaimed:
“I knew it! I expected it! He was shot through the window and by that
wretch. He never shot himself.” Violent declarations which trailed off
into the one continuous wail, “O, my baby! my poor baby!”
Such words, even though the fruit of delirium, merited some sort of
attention, or so this good coroner thought, and as soon as opportunity
offered and she was sufficiently sane and quiet to respond to his
questions, he asked her whom she had meant by that wretch, and what
reason she had, or thought she had, of attributing her husband’s death
to any other agency than his own disgust with life.
And then it was that his sympathies, although greatly roused in her
favour began to wane. She met the question with a cold stare followed by
a few ambiguous words out of which he could make nothing. Had she said
wretch? She did not remember. They must not be influenced by anything
she might have uttered in her first grief. She was well-nigh insane at
the time. But of one thing they might be sure: her husband had not shot
himself; he was too much afraid of death for such an act. Besides, he
was too happy. Whatever folks might say he was too fond of his family to
wish to leave it.
Nor did the coroner or any other official succeed in eliciting anything
further from her. Even when she was asked, with cruel insistence,
how she explained the fact that the baby was found lying on the floor
instead of in its crib, her only answer was: “His father was trying to
soothe it. The child was crying dreadfully, as you have heard from those
who were kept awake by him that night, and my husband was carrying him
about when the shot came which caused George to fall and overlay the
baby in his struggles.”
“Carrying a baby about with a loaded pistol in his hand?” came back in
stern retort.
She had no answer for this. She admitted when informed that the bullet
extracted from her husband’s body had been found to correspond exactly
with those remaining in the five chambers of the pistol taken from his
hand, that he was not only the owner of this pistol but was in the habit
of sleeping with it under his pillow; but, beyond that, nothing; and
this reticence, as well as her manner which was cold and repellent, told
against her.
A verdict of suicide was rendered by the coroner’s jury, and the
life-insurance company, in which Mr. Hammond had but lately insured
himself for a large sum, taking advantage of the suicide clause embodied
in the policy, announced its determination of not paying the same.
Such was the situation, as known to Violet Strange and the general
public, on the day she was asked to see Mrs. Hammond and learn what
might alter her opinion as to the justice of this verdict and the stand
taken by the Shuler Life Insurance Company.
The clock on the mantel in Miss Strange’s rose-coloured boudoir had
struck three, and Violet was gazing in some impatience at the door, when
there came a gentle knock upon it, and the maid (one of the elderly, not
youthful, kind) ushered in her expected visitor.
“You are Mrs. Hammond?” she asked, in natural awe of the too black
figure outlined so sharply against the deep pink of the sea-shell room.
The answer was a slow lifting of the veil which shadowed the features
she knew only from the cuts she had seen in newspapers.
“You are--Miss Strange?” stammered her visitor; “the young lady who--”
“I am,” chimed in a voice as ringing as it was sweet. “I am the person
you have come here to see. And this is my home. But that does not make
me less interested in the unhappy, or less desirous of serving them.
Certainly you have met with the two greatest losses which can come to a
woman--I know your story well enough to say that--; but what have you
to tell me in proof that you should not lose your anticipated income as
well? Something vital, I hope, else I cannot help you; something which
you should have told the coroner’s jury--and did not.”
The flush which was the sole answer these words called forth did not
take from the refinement of the young widow’s expression, but rather
added to it; Violet watched it in its ebb and flow and, seriously
affected by it (why, she did not know, for Mrs. Hammond had made no
other appeal either by look or gesture), pushed forward a chair and
begged her visitor to be seated.
“We can converse in perfect safety here,” she said. “When you feel quite
equal to it, let me hear what you have to communicate. It will never go
any further. I could not do the work I do if I felt it necessary to have
a confidant.”
“But you are so young and so--so--”
“So inexperienced you would say and so evidently a member of what New
Yorkers call ‘society.’ Do not let that trouble you. My inexperience is
not likely to last long and my social pleasures are more apt to add to
my efficiency than to detract from it.”
With this Violet’s face broke into a smile. It was not the brilliant
one so often seen upon her lips, but there was something in its quality
which carried encouragement to the widow and led her to say with obvious
eagerness:
“You know the facts?”
“I have read all the papers.”
“I was not believed on the stand.”
“It was your manner--”
“I could not help my manner. I was keeping something back, and, being
unused to deceit, I could not act quite naturally.”
“Why did you keep something back? When you saw the unfavourable
impression made by your reticence, why did you not speak up and frankly
tell your story?”
“Because I was ashamed. Because I thought it would hurt me more to speak
than to keep silent. I do not think so now; but I did then--and so
made my great mistake. You must remember not only the awful shock of my
double loss, but the sense of guilt accompanying it; for my husband and
I had quarreled that night, quarreled bitterly--that was why I had run
away into another room and not because I was feeling ill and impatient
of the baby’s fretful cries.”
“So people have thought.” In saying this, Miss Strange was perhaps
cruelly emphatic. “You wish to explain that quarrel? You think it will
be doing any good to your cause to go into that matter with me now?”
“I cannot say; but I must first clear my conscience and then try to
convince you that quarrel or no quarrel, he never took his own life. He
was not that kind. He had an abnormal fear of death. I do not like to
say it but he was a physical coward. I have seen him turn pale at the
least hint of danger. He could no more have turned that muzzle upon his
own breast than he could have turned it upon his baby. Some other hand
shot him, Miss Strange. Remember the open window, the shattered mirror;
and I think I know that hand.”
Her head had fallen forward on her breast. The emotion she showed was
not so eloquent of grief as of deep personal shame.
“You think you know the man?” In saying this, Violet’s voice sunk to a
whisper. It was an accusation of murder she had just heard.
“To my great distress, yes. When Mr. Hammond and I were married,” the
widow now proceeded in a more determined tone, “there was another man--a
very violent one--who vowed even at the church door that George and I
should never live out two full years together. We have not. Our second
anniversary would have been in November.”
“But--”
“Let me say this: the quarrel of which I speak was not serious enough to
occasion any such act of despair on his part. A man would be mad to
end his life on account of so slight a disagreement. It was not even on
account of the person of whom I’ve just spoken, though that person had
been mentioned between us earlier in the evening, Mr. Hammond having
come across him face to face that very afternoon in the subway. Up to
this time neither of us had seen or heard of him since our wedding-day.”
“And you think this person whom you barely mentioned, so mindful of his
old grudge that he sought out your domicile, and, with the intention of
murder, climbed the trellis leading to your room and turned his pistol
upon the shadowy figure which was all he could see in the semi-obscurity
of a much lowered gas-jet?”
“A man in the dark does not need a bright light to see his enemy when he
is intent upon revenge.”
Miss Strange altered her tone.
“And your husband? You must acknowledge that he shot off his pistol
whether the other did or not.”
“It was in self-defence. He would shoot to save his own life--or the
baby’s.”
“Then he must have heard or seen--”
“A man at the window.”
“And would have shot there?”
“Or tried to.”
“Tried to?”
“Yes; the other shot first--oh, I’ve thought it all out--causing my
husband’s bullet to go wild. It was his which broke the mirror.”
Violet’s eyes, bright as stars, suddenly narrowed.
“And what happened then?” she asked. “Why cannot they find the bullet?”
“Because it went out of the window;--glanced off and went out of the
window.”
Mrs. Hammond’s tone was triumphant; her look spirited and intense.
Violet eyed her compassionately.
“Would a bullet glancing off from a mirror, however hung, be apt to
reach a window so far on the opposite side?”
“I don’t know; I only know that it did,” was the contradictory, almost
absurd, reply.
“What was the cause of the quarrel you speak of between your husband and
yourself? You see, I must know the exact truth and all the truth to be
of any assistance to you.”
“It was--it was about the care I gave, or didn’t give, the baby. I feel
awfully to have to say it, but George did not think I did my full duty
by the child. He said there was no need of its crying so; that if I gave
it the proper attention it would not keep the neighbours and himself
awake half the night. And I--I got angry and insisted that I did the
best I could; that the child was naturally fretful and that if he wasn’t
satisfied with my way of looking after it, he might try his. All of
which was very wrong and unreasonable on my part, as witness the awful
punishment which followed.”
“And what made you get up and leave him?”
“The growl he gave me in reply. When I heard that, I bounded out of bed
and said I was going to the spare room to sleep; and if the baby cried
he might just try what he could do himself to stop it.”
“And he answered?”
“This, just this--I shall never forget his words as long as I live--‘If
you go, you need not expect me to let you in again no matter what
happens.’”
“He said that?”
“And locked the door after me. You see I could not tell all that.”
“It might have been better if you had. It was such a natural quarrel and
so unprovocative of actual tragedy.”
Mrs. Hammond was silent. It was not difficult to see that she had no
very keen regrets for her husband personally. But then he was not a very
estimable man nor in any respect her equal.
“You were not happy with him,” Violet ventured to remark.
“I was not a fully contented woman. But for all that he had no cause to
complain of me except for the reason I have mentioned. I was not a
very intelligent mother. But if the baby were living now--O, if he were
living now--with what devotion I should care for him.”
She was on her feet, her arms were raised, her face impassioned with
feeling. Violet, gazing at her, heaved a little sigh. It was perhaps in
keeping with the situation, perhaps extraneous to it, but whatever its
source, it marked a change in her manner. With no further check upon her
sympathy, she said very softly:
“It is well with the child.”
The mother stiffened, swayed, and then burst into wild weeping.
“But not with me,” she cried, “not with me. I am desolate and bereft. I
have not even a home in which to hide my grief and no prospect of one.”
“But,” interposed Violet, “surely your husband left you something? You
cannot be quite penniless?”
“My husband left nothing,” was the answer, uttered without bitterness,
but with all the hardness of fact. “He had debts. I shall pay those
debts. When these and other necessary expenses are liquidated, there
will be but little left. He made no secret of the fact that he lived
close up to his means. That is why he was induced to take on a life
insurance. Not a friend of his but knows his improvidence. I--I have not
even jewels. I have only my determination and an absolute conviction as
to the real nature of my husband’s death.”
“What is the name of the man you secretly believe to have shot your
husband from the trellis?”
Mrs. Hammond told her.
It was a new one to Violet. She said so and then asked:
“What else can you tell me about him?”
“Nothing, but that he is a very dark man and has a club-foot.”
“Oh, what a mistake you’ve made.”
“Mistake? Yes, I acknowledge that.”
“I mean in not giving this last bit of information at once to the
police. A man can be identified by such a defect. Even his footsteps can
be traced. He might have been found that very day. Now, what have we to
go upon?”
“You are right, but not expecting to have any difficulty about the
insurance money I thought it would be generous in me to keep still.
Besides, this is only surmise on my part. I feel certain that my husband
was shot by another hand than his own, but I know of no way of proving
it. Do you?”
Then Violet talked seriously with her, explaining how their only hope
lay in the discovery of a second bullet in the room which had already
been ransacked for this very purpose and without the shadow of a result.
A tea, a musicale, and an evening dance kept Violet Strange in a whirl
for the remainder of the day. No brighter eye nor more contagious wit
lent brilliance to these occasions, but with the passing of the midnight
hour no one who had seen her in the blaze of electric lights would have
recognized this favoured child of fortune in the earnest figure sitting
in the obscurity of an up-town apartment, studying the walls, the
ceilings, and the floors by the dim light of a lowered gas-jet. Violet
Strange in society was a very different person from Violet Strange under
the tension of her secret and peculiar work.
She had told them at home that she was going to spend the night with a
friend; but only her old coachman knew who that friend was. Therefore a
very natural sense of guilt mingled with her emotions at finding
herself alone on a scene whose gruesome mystery she could solve only by
identifying herself with the place and the man who had perished there.
Dismissing from her mind all thought of self, she strove to think as he
thought, and act as he acted on the night when he found himself (a man
of but little courage) left in this room with an ailing child.
At odds with himself, his wife, and possibly with the child screaming
away in its crib, what would he be apt to do in his present emergency?
Nothing at first, but as the screaming continued he would remember the
old tales of fathers walking the floor at night with crying babies,
and hasten to follow suit. Violet, in her anxiety to reach his inmost
thought, crossed to where the crib had stood, and, taking that as a
start, began pacing the room in search of the spot from which a bullet,
if shot, would glance aside from the mirror in the direction of the
window. (Not that she was ready to accept this theory of Mrs. Hammond,
but that she did not wish to entirely dismiss it without putting it to
the test.)
She found it in an unexpected quarter of the room and much nearer
the bed-head than where his body was found. This, which might seem to
confuse matters, served, on the contrary to remove from the case one of
its most serious difficulties. Standing here, he was within reach of the
pillow under which his pistol lay hidden, and if startled, as his wife
believed him to have been by a noise at the other end of the room, had
but to crouch and reach behind him in order to find himself armed and
ready for a possible intruder.
Imitating his action in this as in other things, she had herself
crouched low at the bedside and was on the point of withdrawing her hand
from under the pillow, when a new surprise checked her movement and held
her fixed in her position, with eyes staring straight at the adjoining
wall. She had seen there what he must have seen in making this same
turn--the dark bars of the opposite window-frame outlined in the
mirror--and understood at once what had happened. In the nervousness and
terror of the moment, George Hammond had mistaken this reflection of
the window for the window itself, and shot impulsively at the man he
undoubtedly saw covering him from the trellis without. But while this
explained the shattering of the mirror, how about the other and still
more vital question, of where the bullet went afterward? Was the angle
at which it had been fired acute enough to send it out of a window
diagonally opposed? No; even if the pistol had been held closer to the
man firing it than she had reason to believe, the angle still would be
oblique enough to carry it on to the further wall.
But no sign of any such impact had been discovered on this wall.
Consequently, the force of the bullet had been expended before reaching
it, and when it fell--
Here, her glance, slowly traveling along the floor, impetuously paused.
It had reached the spot where the two bodies had been found, and
unconsciously her eyes rested there, conjuring up the picture of the
bleeding father and the strangled child. How piteous and how dreadful
it all was. If she could only understand--Suddenly she rose straight
up, staring and immovable in the dim light. Had the idea--the
explanation--the only possible explanation covering the whole phenomena
come to her at last?
It would seem so, for as she so stood, a look of conviction settled over
her features, and with this look, evidences of a horror which for all
her fast accumulating knowledge of life and its possibilities made her
appear very small and very helpless.
A half-hour later, when Mrs. Hammond, in her anxiety at hearing nothing
more from Miss Strange, opened the door of her room, it was to find,
lying on the edge of the sill, the little detective’s card with these
words hastily written across it:
I do not feel as well as I could wish, and so have telephoned to my own
coachman to come and take me home. I will either see or write you within
a few days. But do not allow yourself to hope. I pray you do not allow
yourself the least hope; the outcome is still very problematical.
When Violet’s employer entered his office the next morning it was to
find a veiled figure awaiting him which he at once recognized as that of
his little deputy. She was slow in lifting her veil and when it finally
came free he felt a momentary doubt as to his wisdom in giving her just
such a matter as this to investigate. He was quite sure of his mistake
when he saw her face, it was so drawn and pitiful.
“You have failed,” said he.
“Of that you must judge,” she answered; and drawing near she whispered
in his ear.
“No!” he cried in his amazement.
“Think,” she murmured, “think. Only so can all the facts be accounted
for.”
“I will look into it; I will certainly look into it,” was his earnest
reply. “If you are right--But never mind that. Go home and take a
horseback ride in the Park. When I have news in regard to this I will
let you know. Till then forget it all. Hear me, I charge you to forget
everything but your balls and your parties.”
And Violet obeyed him.
Some few days after this, the following statement appeared in all the
papers:
“Owing to some remarkable work done by the firm of ---- & ----, the
well-known private detective agency, the claim made by Mrs. George
Hammond against the Shuler Life Insurance Company is likely to be
allowed without further litigation. As our readers will remember, the
contestant has insisted from the first that the bullet causing her
husband’s death came from another pistol than the one found clutched in
his own hand. But while reasons were not lacking to substantiate this
assertion, the failure to discover more than the disputed track of a
second bullet led to a verdict of suicide, and a refusal of the company
to pay.
“But now that bullet has been found. And where? In the most startling
place in the world, viz.: in the larynx of the child found lying dead
upon the floor beside his father, strangled as was supposed by the
weight of that father’s arm. The theory is, and there seems to be none
other, that the father, hearing a suspicious noise at the window, set
down the child he was endeavouring to soothe and made for the bed and
his own pistol, and, mistaking a reflection of the assassin for the
assassin himself, sent his shot sidewise at a mirror just as the other
let go the trigger which drove a similar bullet into his breast.
The course of the one was straight and fatal and that of the other
deflected. Striking the mirror at an oblique angle, the bullet fell to
the floor where it was picked up by the crawling child, and, as was
most natural, thrust at once into his mouth. Perhaps it felt hot to
the little tongue; perhaps the child was simply frightened by some
convulsive movement of the father who evidently spent his last moment in
an endeavour to reach the child, but, whatever the cause, in the quick
gasp it gave, the bullet was drawn into the larynx, strangling him.
“That the father’s arm, in his last struggle, should have fallen
directly across the little throat is one of those anomalies which
confounds reason and misleads justice by stopping investigation at the
very point where truth lies and mystery disappears.
“Mrs. Hammond is to be congratulated that there are detectives who do
not give too much credence to outward appearances.”
We expect soon to hear of the capture of the man who sped home the
death-dealing bullet.