MOSE TELLS HIS STORY
We took Mose back to the hotel, shut out the crowd, and gave him
something to eat. He was quite out of his head and it was only by dint
of the most patient questioning that we finally got his story. It was,
in substance, as Terry had sketched it in the cave.
In obedience to my request, Mose had gone back after the coat, not
knowing that the Colonel was before him. Suddenly, as he came near the
pool he heard a scream and looked up in time to see a big negro--the one
my uncle had struck with his crop--spring upon the Colonel with the cry,
"It's my tu'n, now, Cunnel Gaylord. You whup me, an' I'll let you see
what it feels like."
The Colonel turned and clinched with his assailant, and in the struggle
the light was dropped. Mose, with a cry, ran forward to his master's
assistance, but when the negro saw him climbing up the bank he suddenly
screamed, and hurling the old man from him, turned and fled.
"The fellow must have taken him for the devil when he saw those eyes,
and I don't wonder!" Terry interpolated at this point.
After the Colonel's murder, it seems that Mose, crazed by grief and
fear, had watched us carry the body away, and then had stayed by the
spot where his master had died. This accounted for the marks on the
border of the pool. Knowing all of the intricate passages and hiding
places as he did, it had been an easy matter for him to evade the party
that had searched for his body. He ate the food the murderer had left,
but this being exhausted, he would, I haven't a doubt, have died there
himself with the unreasoning faithfulness of a dog.
When he finished his rambling and in some places scarcely intelligible
account, we sat for a moment with our eyes upon his face, fascinated by
his look. Every bit of repugnance I had ever felt toward him had
vanished, and there was left in its place only a sense of pity. Mose's
cheeks were hollow, his features sharper than ever, and his face was
almost pale. From underneath his straight, black, matted hair his eyes
glittered feverishly, and their expression of uncomprehending anguish
was pitiful to see. He seemed like a dumb animal that has come into
contact with death for the first time and asks the reason.
Terry took his eyes from Mose's face and looked down at the table with a
set jaw. I do not think that he was deriving as much pleasure from the
sight as he had expected. We all of us experienced a feeling of relief
when the doctor appeared at the door. We turned Mose over to him with
instructions to do what he could for the poor fellow and to take him
back to Four-Pools.
As the door shut behind them, the sheriff said (with a sigh, I thought),
"This business proves one thing: it's never safe to lynch a man until
you are sure of the facts."
"It proves another thing," said Terry, dryly, "which is a thing you
people don't seem to have grasped; and that is that negroes are human
beings and have feelings like the rest of us. Poor old Colonel Gaylord
paid a terrible price for not having learned it earlier in life."
We pondered this in silence for a moment, then the sheriff voiced a
feeling which, to a slight extent, had been lurking in the background of
my own consciousness, in spite of my relief at the dénouement.
"It's kind of disappointing when you've got your mind worked up to
something big, to find in the end that there was nothing but a chance
nigger at the bottom of all that mystery. Seems sort of a let-down."
Terry eyed him with an air of grim humor, then he leaned across the
table and spoke with a ring of conviction that carried his message home.
"You are mistaken, Mattison, the murderer of Colonel Gaylord was not a
chance nigger. There was no chance about it. Colonel Gaylord killed
himself. He committed suicide--as truly as if he had blown out his
brains with a gun. He did it with his uncontrollable temper. The man
was an egoist. He has always looked upon his own desires and feelings as
of supreme importance. He has tried to crush the life and spirit and
independence from everyone about him. But once too often he wreaked his
anger upon an innocent person--at least upon a person that for all he
knew was innocent--and at one stroke his past injustices were avenged.
It was not chance that killed Colonel Gaylord. It was the inevitable law
of cause and effect. 'Way back in his boyhood when he gave way to his
first fit of passion, he sentenced himself to some such end as this.
Every unjust act in his after-life piled up the score against him.
"Oh, I've seen it a hundred times! It's character that tells. I've seen
it happen to a political boss--a man whose business it was to make
friends with every voter high and low. I've seen him forget, just once,
and turn on a man, humiliate him, wound his pride, crush him under foot
and think no more of the matter than if he had stepped on a worm. And
I've seen that man, the most insignificant of the politician's
followers, work and plot and scheme to overthrow him; and in the end
succeed. The big man never knew what struck him. He thought it was luck,
chance, a turn of the wheel. He never dreamed that it was his own
character hitting back. I've seen it so often, I'm a fatalist. I don't
believe in chance. It was Colonel Gaylord who killed himself, and he
commenced it fifty years ago."
"It's God's own truth, Terry!" I said solemnly.
The sheriff had listened to Terry's words with an anxiously reminiscent
air. I wondered if he were reviewing his own political past, to see if
by chance he also had unwittingly crushed a worm. He raised his eyes to
Terry's face with a gleam of admiration.
"You've been pretty clever, Mr. Patten, in finding out the truth about
this crime," he acknowledged generously. "But you couldn't have expected
me to find out," he added, "for I didn't know any of the circumstances.
I had never even heard that such a man existed as that chicken
thief--and as to there being two ghosts instead of one, there wasn't a
suggestion of it brought out at the inquest."
Terry looked at him with his usual slowly broadening smile. He opened
his mouth to say something, but he changed his mind and--with a visible
effort--shut it again.
"Terry," I asked, "how _did_ you find out about the chicken thief? I
confess I don't understand it yet."
He shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
"Nothing simpler. The trouble with you people was that you were
searching for something lurid, and the little common-place things which,
in a case like this, are the most suggestive, you overlooked. As soon as
I read the story of the crime in the papers I saw that in all
probability Rad was innocent. His behavior was far too suspicious for
him really to be guilty; unless he were a fool he would have covered up
his tracks. There was of course the possibility that Mose had committed
the murder, but in the light of his past devotion to the Colonel it did
not seem likely.
"I had already been reading a lot of sensational stuff about the ghost
of Four-Pools, and when the murder followed so close on the heels of
the robbery, I commenced to look about for a connecting link. It was
evident that Radnor had nothing to do with it, but whether or not he
suspected someone was not so clear. His reticence in regard to the ha'nt
made me think that he did. I came South with pretty strong suspicions
against the elder son, but with a mind still open to conviction. The
telegram showing that he was in Seattle at the time of the murder,
proved his innocence of that, but he might still be connected with the
ha'nt. I tried the suggestion on Radnor, and his manner of taking it
proved pretty conclusively that I had stumbled on the truth. The ha'nt
business, I dare say, was started as a joke, and was kept up as being a
convenient method of warding off eavesdroppers. Why Jefferson came back
and why Radnor gave him money are not matters that concern us; if they
prefer to keep it a secret that's their own affair.
"Jeff helped himself pretty freely to cigars, roast chickens, jam,
pajamas, books, brandy, and anything else he needed to make himself
comfortable in the cabin, but he took nothing of any great value. In the
meantime, though, other things commenced disappearing--things that
Radnor knew his brother had no use for--and he supposed the workers
about the place were stealing and laying it to the ghost, as a
convenient scapegoat.
"But as a matter of fact they were not. A second ghost had appeared on
the scene. This tramp negro had taken up his quarters in the spring-hole
and was prowling about at night seeking what he might devour. He ran
across Jeff dressed in a sheet, and decided to do some masquerading on
his own account. Sheets were no longer left on the line all night, so he
had to put up with lap robes. As a result, the spring-hole shortly
became haunted by a jet black spirit nine feet tall with blue flames and
sulphur, and all the other accessories.
"This made little impression at the house until Mose himself was
frightened; then Radnor saw that the hoax had reached the point where it
was no longer funny, and he determined to get rid of Jeff immediately.
While he drove him to the station he left Mose behind to straighten up
the loft; and Mose, coming into the house to put some things away, met
ghost number two just after he had robbed the safe. If Mose's eyes
looked as they did to-day I fancy the fright was mutual. The ghost, in
his excitement, dropped one package of papers, but bolted with the rest.
He made for his lair in the spring-hole and examined his booty. The
bonds were no more than old paper; he tossed them aside. But the pennies
and five-cent pieces were real; he lit out for the village with them.
The robbery was not discovered till morning and by that time the fellow
was at 'Jake's place' on his way toward being the drunkest nigger in the
county.
"He stayed at the Corners a week or so until the money was gone, then he
came back to the spring-hole. But he made the mistake of venturing out
by daylight; the stable-men caught him and took him to the Colonel, and
you know the rest.
"As soon as I heard the story of the beating I decided to follow it up;
and when I heard of a jet black spirit rising from the spring-hole, I
decided to follow that up too. At daylight this morning I routed out one
of the stable-men, and we went down and examined the spring-hole; at
least I examined it while he stood outside and shivered. It yielded an
even bigger find than I had hoped for. Chucked off in a corner and
trampled with mud I found the bonds. A pile of clothing and carriage
cushions formed a bed. There were the remains of several fires and of a
great many chickens--the whole place was strewn with feathers and bones;
he had evidently raided the roosts more than once.
"When I finished with the spring-hole it still lacked something of six
o'clock and I rode over to the village hoping to get an answer to my
telegram. I wanted to get Jeff's case settled. 'Miller's store' was not
open but 'Jake's place' was, and it was not long before I got on the
track of my man. There was no doubt but that I had him accounted for up
to the time of the thrashing; after that I could only conjecture. He
had not appeared in the village again; the supposition was that he had
taken to the woods. Now he might or he might not have come in the
direction of Luray. All the facts I had to go upon were, a man of
criminal proclivities, who owed Colonel Gaylord a grudge, and who was
used to hiding in caves. It was pure supposition that he had come in
this direction and it had to be checked at every point by fact. I didn't
mention my suspicions because there was no use in raising false hopes
and because, well--"
"You wanted to be dramatic," I suggested.
"Oh, yes, certainly, that's my business. Well, anyway I felt I was
getting warm, and I came over here this morning with my eyes open, ready
to see what there was to see.
"The first thing I unearthed was this story of the church social
provisions. There had, then, been a thief of some sort in the
neighborhood just at the time of Colonel Gaylord's murder. The further
theft of the boots fitted very neatly into the theory. If the fellow had
been tramping for a couple of days his shoes, already worn, had given
out and been discarded. The new ones, as we know, were too small--he
left them at the bottom of the pasture--and went bare-footed. The marks
therefore in the cave, which everyone ascribed to Mose, were in all
probability, not the marks of Mose at all. Actual investigation proved
that to be the case. The rest, I think, you know. The Four-Pools mystery
has turned out to be a very simple affair--as most mysteries
unfortunately do."
"I reckon you're a pretty good detective, Mr. Patten," said Mattison
with a shade of envy in his voice.
Terry bowed his thanks and laughed.
"As a matter of fact," he returned, "I am not a detective of any
sort--at least not officially. I merely assume the part once in a while
when there seems to be a demand. Officially," he added, "I am the
representative of the New York Post-Dispatch, a paper which, you may
know, has solved a good many mysteries before now. In this case, the
Post-Dispatch will of course take the credit, but it wants a little more
than that. It wants to be the only paper tomorrow morning to print the
true details. We four are the only ones who know them. I should,
perhaps, have been a little more circumspect, and kept the facts to
myself, but I knew that I could trust you."
His eye dwelt upon the sheriff a moment and then wandered to Pete Moser
who had sat silently listening throughout the colloquy.
"Would it be too much," Terry inquired, "to ask you to keep silent until
tomorrow morning?"
"You can trust me to keep quiet," said Mattison, holding out his hand.
"Me too," said Moser. "I reckon I can make up something that'll satisfy
the boys about as well as the real thing."
"Thank you," Terry said. "I guess you can all right! There doesn't seem
to be anything the matter with your imaginations down here."
"And now," said Mattison, rising, "I suppose the first thing, is to see
about Radnor's release, though I swear I don't know yet what was the
matter with him on the day of the crime."
"I believe you have the honor of Miss Polly Mathers's acquaintance?
Perhaps she will enlighten you," suggested Terry.
A look of illumination flashed over Mattison's face. Terry laughed and
rose.
"I have a reason for suspecting that Miss Mathers has changed her mind
and, if it is not too irregular, I should like by way of payment to
drive her to the Kennisburg jail myself and let her be the first to tell
him--I want to give her a reason for remembering me."