languidly pitching horseshoes--"quaits" they called them--at a stake
driven in the earth. Just beyond, the woods shredded out into a long,
yellow and green peninsula which stretched up almost to the back door of
the smithy, so that late of afternoons the slanting shadows of the
near-most trees fell on its roof of warped shingles. At the extreme end
of this point of woods Mr. Trimm was squatted behind a big boulder,
squinting warily through a thick-fringed curtain of ripened goldenrod
tops and sumacs, heavy-headed with their dark-red tapers. He had been
there more than an hour, cautiously waiting his chance to hail the
blacksmith, whose figure he could make out in the smoky interior of his
shop, passing back and forth in front of a smudgy forge fire and
rattling metal against metal in intermittent fits of professional
activity.
From where Mr. Trimm watched to where the horseshoe-pitching game went
on was not more than sixty feet. He could hear what the players said and
even see the little puffs of dust rise when one of them clapped his
hands together after a pitch. He judged by the signs of slackening
interest that they would be stopping soon and, he hoped, going clear
away.
But the smith loafed out of his shop and, after an exchange of bucolic
banter with the three of them, he took a hand in their game himself. He
wore no coat or waistcoat and, as he poised a horseshoe for his first
cast at the stake, Mr. Trimm saw, pinned flat against the broad strap of
his suspenders, a shiny, silvery-looking disk. Having pitched the shoe,
the smith moved over into the shade, so that he almost touched the clump
of undergrowth that half buried Mr. Trimm's protecting boulder. The
near-sighted eyes of the fugitive banker could make out then what the
flat, silvery disk was, and Mr. Trimm cowered low in his covert behind
the rock, holding his hands down between his knees, fearful that a gleam
from his burnished wristlets might strike through the screen of weed
growth and catch the inquiring eye of the smith. So he stayed, not
daring to move, until a dinner horn sounded somewhere in the cluster of
cottages beyond, and the smith, closing the doors of his shop, went away
with the three yokels.
Then Mr. Trimm, stooping low, stole back into the deep woods again. In
his extremity he was ready to risk making a bid for the hire of a
blacksmith's aid to rid himself of his bonds, but not a blacksmith who
wore a deputy sheriff's badge pinned to his suspenders.
* * * * *
He caught himself scraping his wrists up and down again against the
rough, scrofulous trunk of a shellbark hickory. The irritation was
comforting to the swollen skin. The cuffs, which kept catching on the
bark and snagging small fragments of it loose, seemed to Mr. Trimm to
have been a part and parcel of him for a long time--almost as long a
time as he could remember. But the hands which they clasped so close
seemed like the hands of somebody else. There was a numbness about them
that made them feel as though they were a stranger's hands which never
had belonged to him. As he looked at them with a sort of vague curiosity
they seemed to swell and grow, these two strange, fettered hands, until
they measured yards across, while the steel bands shrunk to the thinness
of piano wire, cutting deeper and deeper into the flesh. Then the hands
in turn began to shrink down and the cuffs to grow up into great, thick
things as cumbersome as the couplings of a freight car. A voice that Mr.
Trimm dimly recognized as his own was saying something about four
million dollars over and over again.
Mr. Trimm roused up and shook his head angrily to clear it. He rubbed
his eyes free of the clouding delusion. It wouldn't do for him to be
getting light-headed.
* * * * *
On a flat, shelving bluff, forty feet above a cut through which the
railroad ran at a point about five miles north of where the collision
had occurred, a tramp was busy, just before sundown, cooking something
in an old washboiler that perched precariously on a fire of wood coals.
This tramp was tall and spindle-legged, with reddish hair and a pale,
beardless, freckled face with no chin to it and not much forehead, so
that it ran out to a peak like the profile of some featherless,
unpleasant sort of fowl. The skirts of an old, ragged overcoat dangled
grotesquely about his spare shanks.
Desperate as his plight had become, Mr. Trimm felt the old sick shame at
the prospect of exposing himself to this knavish-looking vagabond whose
help he meant to buy with a bribe. It was the sight of a dainty wisp of
smoke from the wood fire curling upward through the cloudy, damp air
that had brought him limping cautiously across the right-of-way, to
climb the rocky shelf along the cut; but now he hesitated, shielded in
the shadows twenty yards away. It was a whiff of something savory in the
washboiler, borne to him on the still air and almost making him cry out
with eagerness, that drew him forth finally. At the sound of the
halting footsteps the tramp stopped stirring the mess in the washboiler
and glanced up apprehensively. As he took in the figure of the newcomer
his eyes narrowed and his pasty, nasty face spread in a grin of
comprehension.
"Well, well, well," he said, leering offensively, "welcome to our city,
little stranger."
Mr. Trimm came nearer, dragging his feet, for they were almost out of
the wrecks of his patent-leather shoes. His gaze shifted from the
tramp's face to the stuff on the fire, his nostrils wrinkling. Then
slowly: "I'm in trouble," he said, and held out his hands.
"Wot I'd call a mild way o' puttin' it," said the tramp coolly. "That
purticular kind o' joolry ain't gen'lly wore for pleasure."
His eyes took on a nervous squint and roved past Mr. Trimm's stooped
figure down the slope of the hillock.
"Say, pal, how fur ahead are you of yore keeper?" he demanded, his
manner changing.
"There is no one after me--no one that I know of," explained Mr. Trimm.
"I am quite alone--I am certain of it."
"Sure there ain't nobody lookin' fur you?" the other persisted
suspiciously.
"I tell you I am all alone," protested Mr. Trimm. "I want your help in
getting these--these things off and sending a message to a friend.
You'll be well paid, very well paid. I can pay you more money than you
ever had in your life, probably, for your help. I can promise----"
He broke off, for the tramp, as if reassured by his words, had stooped
again to his cooking and was stirring the bubbling contents of the
washboiler with a peeled stick. The smell of the stew, rising strongly,
filled Mr. Trimm with such a sharp and an aching hunger that he could
not speak for a moment. He mastered himself, but the effort left him
shaking and gulping.
"Go on, then, an' tell us somethin' about yourself," said the freckled
man. "Wot brings you roamin' round this here railroad cut with them
bracelets on?"
"I was in the wreck," obeyed Mr. Trimm. "The man with me--the
officer--was killed. I wasn't hurt and I got away into these woods. But
they think I'm dead too--my name was among the list of dead."
The other's peaky face lengthened in astonishment.
"Why, say," he began, "I read all about that there wreck--seen the list
myself--say, you can't be Trimm, the New York banker? Yes, you are! Wot
a streak of luck! Lemme look at you! Trimm, the swell financeer,
sportin' 'round with the darbies on him all nice an' snug an' reg'lar!
Mister Trimm--well, if this ain't rich!"
"My name is Trimm," said the starving banker miserably. "I've been
wandering about here a great many hours--several days, I think it must
be--and I need rest and food very much indeed. I don't--don't feel very
well," he added, his voice trailing off.
At this his self-control gave way again and he began to quake violently
as if with an ague. The smell of the cooking overcame him.
"You don't look so well an' that's a fact, Trimm," sneered the tramp,
resuming his malicious, mocking air. "But set down an' make yourself at
home, an' after a while, when this is done, we'll have a bite
together--you an' me. It'll be a reg'lar tea party fur jest us two."
He broke off to chuckle. His mirth made him appear even more repulsive
than before.
"But looky here, you wus sayin' somethin' about money," he said
suddenly. "Le's take a look at all this here money."
He came over to him and went through Mr. Trimm's pockets. Mr. Trimm said
nothing and stood quietly, making no resistance. The tramp finished a
workmanlike search of the banker's pockets. He looked at the result as
it lay in his grimy palm--a moist little wad of bills and some
chicken-feed change--and spat disgustedly with a nasty oath.
"Well, Trimm," he said, "fur a Wall Street guy seems to me you travel
purty light. About how much did you think you'd get done fur all this
pile of wealth?"
"You will be well paid," said Mr. Trimm, arguing hard; "my friend will
see to that. What I want you to do is to take the money you have there
in your hand and buy a cold chisel or a file--any tools that will cut
these things off me. And then you will send a telegram to a certain
gentleman in New York. And let me stay with you until we get an
answer--until he comes here. He will pay you well; I promise it."
He halted, his eyes and his mind again on the bubbling stuff in the
rusted washboiler. The freckled vagrant studied him through his
red-lidded eyes, kicking some loose embers back into the fire with his
toe.
"I've heard a lot about you one way an' another, Trimm," he said.
"'Tain't as if you wuz some pore down-an'-out devil tryin' to beat the
cops out of doin' his bit in stir. You're the way-up, high-an'-mighty
kind of crook. An' from wot I've read an' heard about you, you never
toted fair with nobody yet. There wuz that young feller, wot's his
name?--the cashier--him that wuz tried with you. He went along with you
in yore games an' done yore work fur you an' you let him go over the
road to the same place you're tryin' to dodge now. Besides," he added
cunningly, "you come here talkin' mighty big about money, yet I notice
you ain't carryin' much of it in yore clothes. All I've had to go by is
yore word. An' yore word ain't worth much, by all accounts."
"I tell you, man, that you'll profit richly," burst out Mr. Trimm, the
words falling over each other in his new panic. "You must help me; I've
endured too much--I've gone through too much to give up now." He pleaded
fast, his hands shaking in a quiver of fear and eagerness as he
stretched them out in entreaty and his linked chain shaking with them.
Promises, pledges, commands, orders, arguments poured from him. His
tormentor checked him with a gesture.
"You're wot I'd call a bird in the hand," he chuckled, hugging his slack
frame, "an' it ain't fur you to be givin' orders--it's fur me. An',
anyway, I guess we ain't a-goin' to be able to make a trade--leastwise
not on yore terms. But we'll do business all right, all right--anyhow, I
will."
"What do you mean?" panted Mr. Trimm, full of terror. "You'll help me?"
"I mean this," said the tramp slowly. He put his hands under his
loose-hanging overcoat and began to fumble at a leather strap about his
waist. "If I turn you over to the Government I know wot you'll be worth,
purty near, by guessin' at the reward; an' besides, it'll maybe help to
square me up fur one or two little matters. If I turn you loose I ain't
got nothin' only your word--an' I've got an idea how much faith I kin
put in that."
Mr. Trimm glanced about him wildly. There was no escape. He was fast in
a trap which he himself had sprung. The thought of being led to jail,
all foul of body and fettered as he was, by this filthy, smirking wretch
made him crazy. He stumbled backward with some insane idea of running
away.
"No hurry, no hurry a-tall," gloated the tramp, enjoying the torture of
this helpless captive who had walked into his hands. "I ain't goin' to
hurt you none--only make sure that you don't wander off an' hurt
yourself while I'm gone. Won't do to let you be damagin' yoreself;
you're valuable property. Trimm, now, I'll tell you wot we'll do! We'll
just back you up agin one of these trees an' then we'll jest slip this
here belt through yore elbows an' buckle it around behind at the back;
an' I kinder guess you'll stay right there till I go down yonder to that
station that I passed comin' up here an' see wot kind of a bargain I kin
strike up with the marshal. Come on, now," he threatened with a show of
bluster, reading the resolution that was mounting in Mr. Trimm's face.
"Come on peaceable, if you don't want to git hurt."
Of a sudden Mr. Trimm became the primitive man. He was filled with those
elemental emotions that make a man see in spatters of crimson. Gathering
strength from passion out of an exhausted frame, he sprang forward at
the tramp. He struck at him with his head, his shoulders, his knees, his
manacled wrists, all at once. Not really hurt by the puny assault, but
caught by surprise, the freckled man staggered back, clawing at the air,
tripped on the washboiler in the fire, and with a yell vanished below
the smooth edge of the cut.
Mr. Trimm stole forward and looked over the bluff. Half-way down the
cliff on an outcropping shelf of rock the man lay, face downward,
motionless. He seemed to have grown smaller and to have shrunk into his
clothes. One long, thin leg was bent up under the skirts of the overcoat
in a queer, twisted way, and the cloth of the trouser leg looked
flattened and empty. As Mr. Trimm peered down at him he saw a red stain
spreading on the rock under the still, silent figure's head.
Mr. Trimm turned to the washboiler. It lay on its side, empty, the last
of its recent contents sputtering out into the half-drowned fire. He
stared at this ruin a minute. Then without another look over the cliff
edge he stumbled slowly down the hill, muttering to himself as he went.
Just as he struck the level it began to rain, gently at first, then
hard, and despite the shelter of the full-leaved forest trees, he was
soon wet through to his skin and dripped water as he lurched along
without sense of direction or, indeed, without any active realization of
what he was doing.
* * * * *
Late that night it was still raining--a cold, steady, autumnal downpour.
A huddled figure slowly climbed upon a low fence running about the
house-yard of the little farm where the boy lived who got thrashed for
losing a milkpail. On the wet top rail, precariously perching, the
figure slipped and sprawled forward in the miry yard. It got up,
painfully swaying on its feet. It was Mr. Trimm, looking for food. He
moved slowly toward the house, tottering with weakness and because of
the slick mud underfoot; peering near-sightedly this way and that
through the murk; starting at every sound and stopping often to listen.
The outlines of a lean-to kitchen at the back of the house were looming
dead ahead of him when from the corner of the cottage sprang a small
terrier. It made for Mr. Trimm, barking shrilly. He retreated backward,
kicking at the little dog and, to hold his balance, striking out with
short, dabby jerks of his fettered hands--they were such motions as the
terrier itself might make trying to walk on its hindlegs. Still backing
away, expecting every instant to feel the terrier's teeth in his flesh,
Mr. Trimm put one foot into a hotbed with a great clatter of the
breaking glass. He felt the sharp ends of shattered glass tearing and
cutting his shin as he jerked free. Recovering himself, he dealt the
terrier a lucky kick under the throat that sent it back, yowling, to
where it had come from, and then, as a door jerked open and a
half-dressed man jumped out into the darkness, Mr. Trimm half hobbled,
half fell out of sight behind the woodpile.
Back and forth along the lower edge of his yard the farmer hunted, with
the whimpering, cowed terrier to guide him, poking in dark corners with
the muzzle of his shotgun for the unseen intruder whose coming had
aroused the household. In a brushpile just over the fence to the east
Mr. Trimm lay on his face upon the wet earth, with the rain beating down
on him, sobbing with choking gulps that wrenched him cruelly, biting at
the bonds on his wrists until the sound of breaking teeth gritted in the
air. Finally, in the hopeless, helpless frenzy of his agony he beat his
arms up and down until the bracelets struck squarely on a flat stone and
the force of the blow sent the cuffs home to the last notch so that they
pressed harder and faster than ever upon the tortured wrist bones.
When he had wasted ten or fifteen minutes in a vain search the farmer
went shivering back indoors to dry out his wet shirt. But the groveling
figure in the brushpile lay for a long time where it was, only stirring
a little while the rain dripped steadily down on everything.
* * * * *
The wreck was on a Tuesday evening. Early on the Saturday morning
following the chief of police, who was likewise the whole of the day
police force in the town of Westfield, nine miles from the place where
the collision occurred, heard a peculiar, strangely weak knocking at
the front door of his cottage, where he also had his office. The door
was a Dutch door, sawed through the middle, so that the top half might
be opened independently, leaving the lower panel fast. He swung this top
half back.
A face was framed in the opening--an indescribably dirty, unutterably
weary face, with matted white hair and a rime of whitish beard stubble
on the jaws. It was fallen in and sunken and it drooped on the chest of
its owner. The mouth, swollen and pulpy, as if from repeated hard blows,
hung agape, and between the purplish parted lips showed the stumps of
broken teeth. The eyes blinked weakly at the chief from under lids as
colorless as the eyelids of a corpse. The bare white head was filthy
with plastered mud and twigs, and dripping wet.
"Hello, there!" said the chief, startled at this apparition. "What do
you want?"
With a movement that told of straining effort the lolled head came up
off the chest. The thin, corded neck stiffened back, rising from a
dirty, collarless neckband. The Adam's apple bulged out prominently, as
big as a pigeon's egg.
"I have come," said the specter in a wheezing rasp of a voice which the
chief could hardly hear--"I have come to surrender myself. I am Hobart
W. Trimm."
"I guess you got another thing comin'," said the chief, who was by way
of being a neighborhood wag. "When last seen Hobart W. Trimm was only
fifty-two years old. Besides which, he's dead and buried. I guess maybe
you'd better think agin, grandpap, and see if you ain't Methus'lah or
the Wanderin' Jew."
"I am Hobart W. Trimm, the banker," whispered the stranger with a sort
of wan stubbornness.
"Go on and prove it," suggested the chief, more than willing to prolong
the enjoyment of the sensation. It wasn't often in Westfield that
wandering lunatics came a-calling.
"Got any way to prove it?" he repeated as the visitor stared at him.
"Yes," came the creaking, rusted hinge of a voice, "I have."
Slowly, with struggling attempts, he raised his hands into the chief's
sight. They were horribly swollen hands, red with the dried blood where
they were not black with the dried dirt; the fingers puffed up out of
shape; the nails broken; they were like the skinned paws of a bear. And
at the wrists, almost buried in the bloated folds of flesh, blackened,
rusted, battered, yet still strong and whole, was a tightly-locked pair
of Bean's Latest Model Little Giant handcuffs.
"Great God!" cried the chief, transfixed at the sight. He drew the bolt
and jerked open the lower half of the door.
"Come in," he said, "and lemme get them irons off of you--they must hurt
something terrible."
"They can wait," said Mr. Trimm very feebly, very slowly and very
humbly. "I have worn them a long, long while--I am used to them.
Wouldn't you please get me some food first?"
II
THE BELLED BUZZARD
There was a swamp known as Little Niggerwool, to distinguish it from Big
Niggerwool, which lay across the river. It was traversable only by those
who knew it well--an oblong stretch of tawny mud and tawny water,
measuring maybe four miles its longest way and two miles roughly at its
widest; and it was full of cypress and stunted swamp oak, with edgings
of canebrake and rank weeds; and in one place, where a ridge crossed it
from side to side, it was snaggled like an old jaw with dead tree
trunks, rising close-ranked and thick as teeth. It was untenanted of
living things--except, down below, there were snakes and mosquitoes, and
a few wading and swimming fowl; and up above, those big woodpeckers that
the country people called logcocks--larger than pigeons, with flaming
crests and spiky tails--swooping in their long, loping flight from snag
to snag, always just out of gunshot of the chance invader, and uttering
a strident cry which matched those surroundings so fitly that it might
well have been the voice of the swamp itself.
On one side little Niggerwool drained its saffron waters off into a
sluggish creek, where summer ducks bred, and on the other it ended
abruptly at a natural bank of high ground, along which the county
turnpike ran. The swamp came right up to the road and thrust its fringe
of reedy, weedy undergrowth forward as though in challenge to the good
farm lands that were spread beyond the barrier. At the time I am
speaking of it was mid-summer, and from these canes and weeds and
waterplants there came a smell so rank as almost to be overpowering.
They grew thick as a curtain, making a blank green wall taller than a
man's head.
Along the dusty stretch of road fronting the swamp nothing living had
stirred for half an hour or more. And so at length the weed-stems
rustled and parted, and out from among them a man came forth silently
and cautiously. He was an old man--an old man who had once been fat, but
with age had grown lean again, so that now his skin was by odds too
large for him. It lay on the back of his neck in folds. Under the chin
he was pouched like a pelican and about the jowls was wattled like a
turkey gobbler.
He came out upon the road slowly and stopped there, switching his legs
absently with the stalk of a horseweed. He was in his shirtsleeves--a
respectable, snuffy old figure; evidently a man deliberate in words and
thoughts and actions. There was something about him suggestive of an old
staid sheep that had been engaged in a clandestine transaction and was
afraid of being found out.
He had made amply sure no one was in sight before he came out of the
swamp, but now, to be doubly certain, he watched the empty road--first
up, then down--for a long half minute, and fetched a sighing breath of
satisfaction. His eyes fell upon his feet, and, taken with an idea, he
stepped back to the edge of the road and with a wisp of crabgrass wiped
his shoes clean of the swamp mud, which was of a different color and
texture from the soil of the upland. All his life Squire H. B. Gathers
had been a careful, canny man, and he had need to be doubly careful on
this summer morning. Having disposed of the mud on his feet, he settled
his white straw hat down firmly upon his head, and, crossing the road,
he climbed a stake-and-rider fence laboriously and went plodding
sedately across a weedfield and up a slight slope toward his house, half
a mile away, upon the crest of the little hill.
He felt perfectly natural--not like a man who had just taken a
fellowman's life--but natural and safe, and well satisfied with himself
and with his morning's work. And he was safe; that was the main
thing--absolutely safe. Without hitch or hindrance he had done the thing
for which he had been planning and waiting and longing all these months.
There had been no slip or mischance; the whole thing had worked out as
plainly and simply as two and two make four. No living creature except
himself knew of the meeting in the early morning at the head of Little
Niggerwool, exactly where the squire had figured they should meet; none
knew of the device by which the other man had been lured deeper and
deeper in the swamp to the exact spot where the gun was hidden. No one
had seen the two of them enter the swamp; no one had seen the squire
emerge, three hours later, alone.