The Millbank Case
_A MAINE MYSTERY OF TO-DAY_
BY
GEORGE DYRE ELDRIDGE
_With a Frontispiece in Colour_
BY ELIOT KEEN
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1905
COPYRIGHT, 1905
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
_Published May, 1905_
THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS
RAHWAY, N. J.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A STATEMENT OF THE CASE 1
II. MRS. PARLIN TESTIFIES 14
III. ALIVE AT MIDNIGHT 33
IV. TRAFFORD GETS AN ASSURANCE 51
V. THE WEAPON IS PRODUCED 67
VI. MRS. MATTHEWSON AND TRAFFORD 85
VII. HUNTING BROKEN BONES 101
VIII. A MAN DISAPPEARS 119
IX. “YOU ARE MY MOTHER” 133
X. A SECOND MURDER? 153
XI. ALREADY ONE ATTEMPT 167
XII. AT THE DRIVERS’ CAMP 185
XIII. THE PRIEST’S STORY 199
XIV. A DUEL 212
XV. IN MATTHEWSON’S CHAMBERS 227
XVI. THE RANGE 16 SCANDAL 243
XVII. THE STORY OF THE PAPERS 259
XVIII. THE MAN IS FOUND 275
XIX. THE LAST OF THE PAPERS 290
THE MILLBANK CASE
CHAPTER I
A Statement of the Case
Theodore Wing had no known enemy in the world. He was a man of forty;
“well-to-do,” as they say in New England; a lawyer by profession, and
already “mentioned” for a county judgeship. He was unmarried, but there
were those who had hopes, and there was scarce a spinster in Millbank
who hadn’t a kindly word and smile for him--at times. He was not a
church member, but it was whispered that his clergyman was disposed to
look leniently on this shortcoming, for Wing was a regular attendant
at service and liberal with money for church purposes, which, shrewd
guessers said, some of the church members were not.
Wing lived in the River Road, just at the top of Parlin’s Hill. He
was from “over East, somewheres,” and had come to Millbank as a law
student, when old Judge Parlin was at the head of the Maine bar. He
became in turn chief clerk, junior partner, and finally full partner
to the judge, and when the latter died--of disappointment, it was
said, due to failure to secure the chief justiceship--Wing became the
head of the firm, and finally the firm itself; for he had a dislike
for partnerships, and at forty his office associates were employés
associated in particular cases, not partners in the general business.
Judge Parlin was less than sixty years of age when he died and left
a widow, the Parlin homestead, and an estate of private debts, that
seemed to breed as Wing attempted to untangle affairs. For years his
income had been large and his expenses small. His townsmen had rated
him as their richest man who was not of the great Millbank logging
firms. There was not a man but would have considered it an insult
to the town to hint that Judge Parlin was worth less than a hundred
thousand dollars. His investments turned out the veriest cats and dogs;
and even in cases where the security might have been ample, the papers
were often executed with such carelessness that collection rested
on the honesty of the borrower and not on sufficiency of documentary
evidence. In fact, the debts outvalued the resources two to one--that
is, they seemed to, until it was announced that the Parlin homestead
had been sold for a sum sufficient to pay all obligations and leave the
widow a life income of five hundred dollars a year. People understood
when it was learned that Wing himself was the purchaser.
Mrs. Parlin was fifty years of age at the time of her husband’s
death--a woman to whom stateliness had come with white hairs and the
growth of ambition. From the hour of the judge’s death, the devotion
she had given him living turned to the protection of his good name.
In a distant, cold way she had always shown a regard for Wing, which
changed to more marked affection, when his interposition provided
the means to meet the last of her husband’s debts. She harboured no
suspicion that the price paid for the homestead was beyond value. Not
only had it been her home throughout her married life, but the judge
had always spoken of its value in the large terms that were habitual
with him in dealing with personal matters, and, from the moment
when Wing discovered the condition of the estate, he held before her
constantly the idea that the homestead would bring a price sufficient
to cover the indebtedness. Indeed, she felt that she was making a
sacrifice, when she consented to waive her dower rights, and chiefly
she rejoiced that the purchaser was Wing and not a stranger.
It is possible that some suspicion attached in her mind to the purchase
of the annuity, and this may have been confirmed by Wing’s insistence
that he would consent to occupy the homestead only on condition that
she should make it her home for her lifetime. If, however, this was
so, she proved herself large-minded enough to understand that her
happiness--so far as this was possible to her now dwarfed life--was the
best acknowledgment she could make to such a man, and during the five
years since the judge’s death, she had been the mistress of Wing’s home.
The house stands at the crown of Parlin’s Hill. The estate embraces
twenty acres, divided nearly equally between farm land, meadow, and
woodland. The portion lying west of River Road is an apple orchard,
covering the slope of the hill from the road to the river. The roll of
the land is to the southwest, where all through the summer days the
sun lies in warm splendour, that seems to live in the heart and juices
of the red and yellow fruit, which is the pride of Millbank. To have
apples from the Parlin orchard, is to have the best that Millbank can
give.
The house is near the road on the easterly side. The winter snows are
too deep to warrant building far from the travelled roads, and for
the same reason the buildings are connected one with another, under a
continuous roof, so that the breaking of roads and paths is unnecessary
for access to stock. The house is large and square, with a long wing
stretching to the ample woodshed, through which one passes to the
barns. The body of the buildings is white, and the shutters green. A
drive runs to the south of the house, leading from the road to the
doors of the great barn. It passes the side door of the main house, the
door to the wing and the woodshed, and the buildings shelter it from
the fierce northern winds. In the flower-beds that border this drive,
under the shelter of the house, the earliest flowers bloom in spring
and the latest in autumn.
Between the road and the front of the house is an enclosure of about
half an acre--the “front yard,” as Millbank names it. A footpath
runs from the front gate to the main door of the house, dividing the
enclosure into two nearly equal parts. This enclosure is crowded with
flower-beds and shrubbery; the paths are bordered with box hedges,
while a few great evergreens tower above the roof, and make the place
somewhat gloomy on dull days. In midsummer, however, when the sun turns
the corner and thrusts strongly into the enclosure, the deep shadows of
the great trees are cool and inviting.
From the principal door, the main hall, broad and unencumbered, makes
back until it is cut by the narrower hall from the south-side door.
This side hall carries the stairs, and east of it are the dining room,
kitchens, and pantries. The main hall goes on, in narrowed estate,
between the dining room on the south and kitchens on the north, to the
woodsheds. To the left, as one enters the house, is the great parlour,
seldom used, and a sitting room, the gloomiest room on the floor, for
it has a northern outlook only.
In the angle of the two halls is the great room which Wing used as
his library. It is some twenty-four by thirty-six feet, high-posted,
and has a warm, sunny outlook to the south and west. It is lined with
books and pictures; a great desk stands in the centre front, and
lounges and easy chairs are scattered about in inviting confusion.
The room above was his bedchamber, adjoining which is a bathroom, in
its day the wonder and challenge of Millbank. An iron spiral stairway
leads from the lower to the upper room, so that the occupant has the
two rooms at his command independent of the remainder of the house.
This was Wing’s special domain. Outside these two rooms, Mrs. Parlin
ruled as undisputed as during her thirty years of wifehood. Within,
Wing held control, and while no small share of his personal work was
done here, the great room saw much of his private life of which his
everyday acquaintances had little suspicion. The cases contained many a
volume that belongs to literature rather than law, and here he found
that best of rest from the onerous demands of a constantly growing
practice--complete change in matter and manner of thought.
On the night of the 10th of May, 1880, the light burned late in Lawyer
Wing’s library. It was the scandal of Millbank that this occurred
often. The village was given to regarding the night as a time when no
man should work. “Early to bed and early to rise” was its motto, and
though an opposite practice had left Theodore Wing with more of health,
wealth, and wisdom than most Millbankians possessed, he had never
succeeded in reconciling his townsmen to his methods. But to-night
conditions were more outrageous than usual. Mrs. Merrick, from the
bed of an ailing grandchild, glanced up the hill at midnight and saw
the light still burning. Old Doctor Portus, coming villageward from a
confinement case, an hour later, saw the light as he passed the house
and shook his head with dire prognostications. If Wing should be sick,
old Doctor Portus would certainly not be called in attendance, and
therefore he could measure this outrage of nature’s laws with a mind
uninfluenced by personal bias.
At four o’clock, however, a farmer’s son, who had yielded the night to
Millbank’s temptations, hurrying farmward to his morning chores, saw no
light growing dim in the first flush of the spring morning to attract
his attention to a scene that later knowledge revealed. At six, the
hired man came down the back stairs and went through the woodshed to
the barns. Turning the heavy wooden bar that held the great doors fast,
he swung them open and let in the soft morning air.
Then, his eye travelled along the stretch of house and he saw something
that startled him. The side door was standing ajar--half open--and on
the stone step was a huddled mass that looked strangely like a man,
half lying and half crouching. Before the hired man had passed half the
distance to the door, he knew that the huddled mass was Theodore Wing.
His head and right arm rested on the threshold and held the door from
closing; his body was on the stone step. There was blood spattered on
the white of the westerly door-post, and the left temple of the man,
which was upward as he lay, showed a spot around which the flesh was
blackened as if powder-burnt, while between the head and the threshold
a thin stream of blood still flowed and fell drop by drop on the stone
below. The eyes were wide open and the look in them seemed to say that,
suddenly as death had come, it had not come too suddenly for the man to
realise that here had fallen the end of his hopes and ambitions, his
strivings and accomplishments, in a form that left him powerless to
strike a blow in his own behalf.
This murder was the most tragic event that had ever happened in the
history of Millbank. It caused the more terror in that, so far as
any one could understand, it was absolutely without motive. It was
not known that Theodore Wing had an enemy in the world. Millbank was
proud of him with a wholesome, kindly pride, which found much of
self-gratulation in having such a citizen. Yet this man had been struck
down by a murderer’s hand, so silently that no sound had been heard,
and the murderer had gone as he had come, without leaving trace of his
coming or going.
Contrary to expectation aroused by the first news, the house seemed
not to have been entered. The whole of the crime was evidenced in the
dead man on the stone step. Apparently, there had been a ring at the
bell and a shot from a pistol, held close to the head of the man, as
he stood in the doorway, by some one who had stationed himself at
the easterly end of the doorstep, and who, his purpose accomplished,
slipped into the darkness which had opened to give him way for this
deed. It was uncanny in the extreme and gave a sense of insecurity
to life that an ordinary murder, due to traceable causes, would have
failed utterly to give.
The closest inspection furnished no clue. There was no footprint on
the drive, and the grass at the end of the step, where the murderer
must have stood, gave no token. And yet--here was another fearsome
fact--the deed had been done by some one who knew the house and its
peculiarities. The door had two bell-pulls, one on either door-post.
Originally there had been only the one on the right or easterly
post, and this was the general bell. When Wing took the library as
his special room, he had a change made and the bell transferred to
that room, so that his personal visitors could come and go without
disturbing the house. In a little time, however, this proved very
annoying, because most visitors came to this door, and he gave an order
for a general bell to be put in. This he intended should also have a
pull on the right-hand post, but the workman, who seemed to have no
conception that one post could carry two pulls, put it on the left.
Thus the post nearest Wing’s room carried the general bell, and the
further post his own, and neither of the bells could be heard on the
premises devoted to the other. At first, this condition gave rise to
troublesome mistakes, and Wing talked often of a change, but gradually
the visitors to the house became accustomed to the condition and the
need of a change disappeared.
It was clear, therefore, that whoever the murderer was, he had rung
the bell which alone could be heard by the lawyer at his desk, and
therefore must have been acquainted with the peculiarity of the
bell-pulls. Had the lawyer had any cause to fear? Apparently not, for
the shade to the window nearest his desk was raised and he evidently
had answered the bell as a matter of course, not even taking with him
a light. But, if he was seated at his desk, as seemed clearly the case,
the man must have seen him as he came up the drive and might easily
have shot him through the window. Why, then, had he called him to the
door? The body had not been disturbed after it fell; the watch was in
the fob, and money in the pocket. Murder was evidently the murderer’s
purpose; yet he had summoned his victim, when clearly he had him in his
power without so doing.