Jake Sanderson, with the pay for the mill-hands, did not arrive that
night, nor yet the following morning. Along toward noon, however, there
arrived a breathless stripling, white-faced and wild-eyed, with news of
him. The boy was young Stephens, son of Andy Stephens, the game-warden.
He and his father, coming up from Cribb’s Ridge, had found the body of
Sanderson lying half in a pool beside the road, covered with blood. Near
at hand lay the bag, empty, slashed open with a bloody knife. Stephens
had sent his boy on into the Settlement for help, while he himself had
remained by the body, guarding it lest some possible clue should be
interfered with.
Swift as a grass fire, the shocking news spread through the village. An
excited crowd gathered in front of the store, every one talking at once,
trying to question young Stephens. The Sheriff was away, down at
Fredericton for a holiday from his arduous duties. But nobody lamented
his absence. It was his deputy they all turned to in such an emergency.
“Where’s Tug Blackstock?” demanded half a dozen awed voices. And, as if
in answer, the tall, lean figure of the Deputy Sheriff of Nipsiwaska
County came striding in haste up the sawdusty road, with the big, black
dog crowding eagerly upon his heels.
The clamour of the crowd was hushed as Blackstock put a few questions,
terse and pertinent, to the excited boy. The people of Nipsiwaska County
in general had the profoundest confidence in their Deputy Sheriff. They
believed that his shrewd brain and keen eye could find a clue to the
most baffling of mysteries. Just now, however, his face was like a mask
of marble, and his eyes, sunk back into his head, were like points of
steel. The murdered man had been one of his best friends, a comrade and
helper in many a hard enterprise.
“Come,” said he to the lad, “we’ll go an’ see.” And he started off down
the road at that long loose stride of his, which was swifter than a trot
and much less tiring.
“Hold on a minute, Tug,” drawled a rasping nasal voice.
“What is it, Hawker?” demanded Blackstock, turning impatiently on his
heel.
“Ye hain’t asked nothin’ yet about the Book Agent, Mister Byles, him as
sold ye ‘Mother, Home, an’ Heaven.’ Maybe _he_ could give us some
information. He _said_ as how he’d had some talk with poor old Jake.”
Blackstock’s lips curled slightly. He had not read the voluble stranger
as a likely highwayman in any circumstances, still less as one to try
issues with a man like Jake Sanderson. But the crowd, eager to give
tongue on any kind of a scent, and instinctively hostile to a book
agent, seized greedily upon the suggestion.
“Where is he?” “Send for him.” “Did anybody see him this mornin’?” “Rout
him out!” “Fetch him along!” The babel of voices started afresh.
“He’s cleared out,” cried a woman’s shrill voice. It was the voice of
Mrs. Stukeley, who kept the boarding-house. Every one else was silent to
hear what she had to say.
“He quit my place jest about daylight this morning,” continued the woman
virulently. She had not liked the stranger’s black whiskers, nor his
ministerial garb, nor his efforts to get a subscription out of her, and
she was therefore ready to believe him guilty without further proof. “He
seemed in a powerful hurry to git away, sayin’ as how the Archangel
Gabriel himself couldn’t do business in this town.”
Seeing the effect her words produced, and that even the usually
imperturbable and disdainful Deputy Sheriff was impressed by them, she
could not refrain from embroidering her statement a little.
“Now ez I come to think of it,” she went on, “I did notice as how he
seemed kind of excited an’ nervous like, so’s he could hardly stop to
finish his breakfus’. But he took time to make me knock half-a-dollar
off his bill.”
“Mac,” said Blackstock sharply, turning to Red Angus MacDonald, the
village constable, “you take two of the boys an’ go after the Book
Agent. Find him, an’ fetch him back. But no funny business with him,
mind you. We hain’t got a spark of evidence agin him. We jest want him
as a witness, mind.”
The crowd’s excitement was somewhat damped by this pronouncement, and
Hawker’s exasperating voice was heard to drawl:
“No _evidence_, hey? Ef that ain’t _evidence_, him skinnin’ out that way
afore sun-up, I’d like to know what is!”
But to this and similar comments Tug Blackstock paid no heed whatever.
He hurried on down the road toward the scene of the tragedy, his lean
jaws working grimly upon a huge chew of tobacco, the big, black dog not
now at his heels but trotting a little way ahead and casting from one
side of the road to the other, nose to earth. The crowd came on behind,
but Blackstock waved them back.
“I don’t want none o’ ye to come within fifty paces of me, afore I tell
ye to,” he announced with decision. “Keep well back, all of ye, or ye’ll
mess up the tracks.”
But this proved a decree too hard to be enforced for any length of time.
When he arrived at the place where the game-warden kept watch beside the
murdered man, Blackstock stood for a few moments in silence, looking
down upon the body of his friend with stony face and brooding eyes. In
spite of his grief, his practised observation took in the whole scene to
the minutest detail, and photographed it upon his memory for reference.
The body lay with face and shoulder and one leg and arm in a deep,
stagnant pool by the roadside. The head was covered with black, clotted
blood from a knife-wound in the neck. Close by, in the middle of the
road, lay a stout leather satchel, gaping open, and quite empty. Two
small memorandum books, one shut and the other with white leaves
fluttering, lay near the bag. Though the roadway at this point was dry
and hard, it bore some signs of a struggle, and toward the edge of the
water there were several little, dark, caked lumps of puddled dust.
Blackstock first examined the road minutely, all about the body, but the
examination, even to such a practised eye as his, yielded little result.
The ground was too hard and dusty to receive any legible trail, and,
moreover, it had been carelessly over-trodden by the game-warden and his
son. But whether he found anything of interest or not, Blackstock’s
grim, impassive face gave no sign.
At length he went over to the body, and lifted it gently. The coat and
shirt were soaked with blood, and showed marks of a fierce struggle.
Blackstock opened the shirt, and found the fatal wound, a knife-thrust
which had been driven upwards between the ribs. He laid the body down
again, and at the same time picked up a piece of paper, crumpled and
blood-stained, which had lain beneath it. He spread it open, and for a
moment his brows contracted as if in surprise and doubt. It was one of
the order forms for “Mother, Home, and Heaven.”
He folded it up and put it carefully between the leaves of the note-book
which he always carried in his pocket.
Stephens, who was close beside him, had caught a glimpse of the paper,
and recognized it.
“Say!” he exclaimed, under his breath. “I never thought o’ _him_!”
But Blackstock only shook his head slowly, and called the big black dog,
which had been waiting all this time in an attitude of keen expectancy,
with mouth open and tail gently wagging.
“Take a good look at him, Jim,” said Blackstock.
The dog sniffed the body all over, and then looked up at his master as
if for further directions.
“An’ now take a sniff at this.” And he pointed to the rifled bag.
“What do you make of it?” he inquired when the dog had smelt it all over
minutely.
Jim stood motionless, with ears and tail drooping, the picture of
irresolution and bewilderment.
Blackstock took out again the paper which he had just put away, and
offered it to the dog, who nosed it carefully, then looked at the dead
body beside the pool, and growled softly.
“Seek him, Jim,” said Blackstock.
At once the dog ran up again to the body, and back to the open book.
Then he fell to circling about the bag, nose to earth, seeking to pick
up the elusive trail.
At this point the crowd from the village, unable longer to restrain
their eagerness, surged forward, led by Hawker, and closed in,
effectually obliterating all trails. Jim growled angrily, showing his
long white teeth, and drew back beside the body as if to guard it.
Blackstock stood watching his action with a brooding scrutiny.
“What’s that bit o’ paper ye found under him, Tug?” demanded Hawker
vehemently.
“None o’ yer business, Sam,” replied the deputy, putting the
blood-stained paper back into his pocket.
“I seen what it was,” shouted Hawker to the rest of the crowd. “It was
one o’ them there dokyments that the book agent had, up to the store. I
always _said_ as how ’twas him.”
“We’ll ketch him!” “We’ll string him up!” yelled the crowd, starting
back along the road at a run.
“Don’t be sech fools!” shouted Blackstock. “Hold on! Come back I tell
ye!”
But he might as well have shouted to a flock of wild geese on their
clamorous voyage through the sky. Fired by Sam Hawker’s exhortations,
they were ready to lynch the black-whiskered stranger on sight.
Blackstock cursed them in a cold fury.
“I’ll _hev_ to go after them, Andy,” said he, “or there’ll be trouble
when they find that there book agent.”
“Better give ’em their head, Tug,” protested the warden. “Guess he done
it all right. He’ll git no more’n’s good for him.”
“_Maybe_ he did it, an’ then agin, maybe he didn’t,” retorted the
Deputy, “an’ anyways, they’re just plumb looney now. You stay here, an’
I’ll follow them up. Send Bob back to the Ridge to fetch the coroner.”
He turned and started on the run in pursuit of the shouting crowd,
whistling at the same time for the dog to follow him. But to his
surprise Jim did not obey instantly. He was very busy digging under a
big whitish stone at the other side of the pool. Blackstock halted.
“Jim,” he commanded angrily, “git out o’ that! What d’ye mean by foolin’
about after woodchucks a time like this? Come here!”
Jim lifted his head, his muzzle and paws loaded with fresh earth, and
gazed at his master for a moment. Then, with evident reluctance, he
obeyed. But he kept looking back over his shoulder at the big white
stone, as if he hated to leave it.
“There’s a lot o’ ordinary pup left in that there dawg yet,” explained
Blackstock apologetically to the game-warden.
“There ain’t a dawg ever lived that wouldn’t want to dig out a
woodchuck,” answered Stephens.