That morning, when Michael Hennessey's girl Mary--a girl sixteen
years old--carried the can of milk to the rear door of the silent
house, she was nearly a quarter of hour later than usual, and looked
forward to being soundly rated.
"He's up and been waiting for it," she said to herself, observing
the scullery door ajar. "Won't I ketch it! It's him for growling and
snapping at a body, and it's me for always being before or behind
time, bad luck to me. There's no plazing him."
Mary pushed back the door and passed through the kitchen, nerving
herself all the while to meet the objurgations which she supposed
were lying in wait for her. The sunshine was blinding without, but
sifted through the green jalousies, it made a gray, crepuscular light
within. As the girl approached the table, on which a plate with knife
and fork had been laid for breakfast, she noticed, somewhat
indistinctly at first, a thin red line running obliquely across the
floor from the direction of the sitting-room and ending near the
stove, where it had formed a small pool. Mary stopped short, scarcely
conscious why, and peered instinctively into the adjoining apartment.
Then, with a smothered cry, she let fall the milk-can, and a dozen
white rivulets, in strange contrast to that one dark red line which
first startled her, went meandering over the kitchen floor. With her
eyes riveted upon some object in the next room, the girl retreated
backward slowly and heavily dragging one foot after the other, until
she reached the gallery door; then she turned swiftly, and plunged
into the street.
Twenty minutes later, every man, woman, and child in Stillwater
knew that old Mr. Shackford had been murdered.
Mary Hennessey had to tell her story a hundred times during the
morning, for each minute brought to Michael's tenement a fresh
listener hungry for the details at first hand.
"How was it, Molly? Tell a body, dear!"
"Don't be asking me!" cried Molly, pressing her palms to her eyes
as if to shut out the sight, but taking all the while a secret creepy
satisfaction in living the scene over again. "It was kinder dark in
the other room, and there he was, laying in his night-gownd, with his
face turned towards me, so, looking mighty severe-like, jest as if he
was a-going to say, 'It's late with the milk ye are, ye hussy!'--a
way he had of spaking."
"But he didn't spake, Molly darlin'?"
"Niver a word. He was stone dead, don't you see. It was that still
you could hear me heart beat, saving there wasn't a drop of beat in
it. I let go the can, sure, and then I backed out, with me eye on 'im
all the while, afeard to death that he would up and spake them
words."
"The pore child! for the likes of her to be wakin' up a murthered
man in the mornin'!"
There was little or no work done that day in Stillwater outside
the mills, and they were not running full handed. A number of men
from the Miantowona Iron Works and Slocum's Yard--Slocum employed
some seventy or eighty hands--lounged about the streets in their
blouses, or stood in knots in front of the tavern, smoking short clay
pipes. Not an urchin put in an appearance at the small red brick
building on the turnpike. Mr. Pinkham, the school-master, waited an
hour for the recusants, then turned the key in the lock and went
home.
Dragged-looking women, with dishcloth or dustpan in hand, stood in
door-ways or leaned from windows, talking in subdued voices with
neighbors on the curb-stone. In a hundred far-away cities the news of
the suburban tragedy had already been read and forgotten; but here
the horror stayed.
There was a constantly changing crowd gathered in front of the
house in Welch's Court. An inquest was being held in the room
adjoining the kitchen. The court, which ended at the gate of the
cottage, was fringed for several yards on each side by rows of
squalid, wondering children, who understood it that Coroner Whidden
was literally to sit on the dead body,--Mr. Whidden, a limp,
inoffensive little man, who would not have dared to sit down on a
fly. He had passed, pallid and perspiring, to the scene of his
perfunctory duties.
The result of the investigation was awaited with feverish
impatience by the people outside. Mr. Shackford had not been a
popular man; he had been a hard, avaricious, passionate man, holding
his own way remorselessly. He had been the reverse of popular, but he
had long been a prominent character in Stillwater, because of his
wealth, his endless lawsuits, and his eccentricity, an illustration
of which was his persistence in living entirely alone in the isolated
and dreary old house, that was henceforth to be inhabited by his
shadow. Not his shadow alone, however, for it was now remembered that
the premises were already held in fee by another phantasmal tenant.
At a period long anterior to this, one Lydia Sloper, a widow, had
died an unexplained death under that same roof. The coincidence
struck deeply into the imaginative portion of Stillwater. "The Widow
Sloper and old Shackford have made a match of it," remarked a local
humorist, in a grimmer vein than customary. Two ghosts had now set up
housekeeping, as it were, in the stricken mansion, and what might not
be looked for in the way of spectral progeny!
It appeared to the crowd in the lane that the jury were
unconscionably long in arriving at a decision, and when the decision
was at length reached it gave but moderate satisfaction. After a
spendthrift waste of judicial mind the jury had decided that "the
death of Lemuel Shackford was caused by a blow on the left temple,
inflicted with some instrument not discoverable, in the hands of some
person or persons unknown."
"We knew that before," grumbled a voice in the crowd, when, to
relieve public suspense, Lawyer Perkins--a long, lank man, with
stringy black hair--announced the verdict from the doorstep.
The theory of suicide had obtained momentary credence early in the
morning, and one or two still clung to it with the tenacity that
characterizes persons who entertain few ideas. To accept this theory
it was necessary to believe that Mr. Shackford had ingeniously hidden
the weapon after striking himself dead with a single blow. No, it was
not suicide. So far from intending to take his own life, Mr.
Shackford, it appeared, had made rather careful preparations to live
that day. The breakfast-table had been laid over night, the coals
left ready for kindling in the Franklin stove, and a kettle, filled
with water to be heated for his tea or coffee, stood on the hearth.
Two facts had sharply demonstrated themselves: first, that Mr.
Shackford had been murdered; and, second, that the spur to the crime
had been the possession of a sum of money, which the deceased was
supposed to keep in a strong-box in his bedroom. The padlock had been
wrenched open, and the less valuable contents of the chest, chiefly
papers, scattered over the carpet. A memorandum among the papers
seemed to specify the respective sums in notes and gold that had been
deposited in the box. A document of some kind had been torn into
minute pieces and thrown into the waste-basket. On close scrutiny a
word or two here and there revealed the fact that the document was of
a legal character. The fragments were put into an envelope and given
in charge of Mr. Shackford's lawyer, who placed seals on that and on
the drawers of an escritoire which stood in the corner and contained
other manuscript.
The instrument with which the fatal blow had been dealt--for the
autopsy showed that there had been but one blow--was not only not
discoverable, but the fashion of it defied conjecture. The shape of
the wound did not indicate the use of any implement known to the
jurors, several of whom were skilled machinists. The wound was an
inch and three quarters in length and very deep at the extremities;
in the middle it scarcely penetrated to the cranium. So peculiar a
cut could not have been produced with the claw part of a hammer,
because the claw is always curved, and the incision was straight. A
flat claw, such as is used in opening packing-cases, was suggested. A
collection of the several sizes manufactured was procured, but none
corresponded with the wound; they were either too wide or too narrow.
Moreover, the cut was as thin as the blade of a case-knife.
"That was never done by any tool in these parts," declared
Stevens, the foreman of the finishing shop at Slocum's.
The assassin or assassins had entered by the scullery door, the
simple fastening of which, a hook and staple, had been broken. There
were footprints in the soft clay path leading from the side gate to
the stone step; but Mary Hennessey had so confused and obliterated
the outlines that now it was impossible accurately to measure them. A
half-burned match was found under the sink,--evidently thrown there
by the burglars. It was of a kind known as the safety-match, which
can be ignited only by friction on a strip of chemically prepared
paper glued to the box. As no box of this description was discovered,
and as all the other matches in the house were of a different make,
the charred splinter was preserved. The most minute examination
failed to show more than this. The last time Mr. Shackford had been
seen alive was at six o'clock the previous evening.
Who had done the deed?
Tramps! answered Stillwater, with one voice, though Stillwater lay
somewhat out of the natural highway, and the tramp--that bitter
blossom of civilization whose seed was blown to us from over
seas--was not then so common by the New England roadsides as he
became five or six years later. But it was intolerable not to have a
theory; it was that or none, for conjecture turned to no one in the
village. To be sure, Mr. Shackford had been in litigation with
several of the corporations, and had had legal quarrels with more
than one of his neighbors; but Mr. Shackford had never been
victorious in any of these contests, and the incentive of revenge was
wanting to explain the crime. Besides, it was so clearly robbery.
Though the gathering around the Shackford house had reduced itself
to half a dozen idlers, and the less frequented streets had resumed
their normal aspect of dullness, there was a strange, electric
quality in the atmosphere. The community was in that state of
suppressed agitation and suspicion which no word adequately
describes. The slightest circumstance would have swayed it to the
belief in any man's guilt; and, indeed, there were men in Stillwater
quite capable of disposing of a fellow-creature for a much smaller
reward than Mr. Shackford had held out. In spite of the tramp theory,
a harmless tin-peddler, who had not passed through the place for
weeks, was dragged from his glittering cart that afternoon, as he
drove smilingly into town, and would have been roughly handled if Mr.
Richard Shackford, a cousin of the deceased, had not interfered.
As the day wore on, the excitement deepened in intensity, though
the expression of it became nearly reticent. It was noticed that the
lamps throughout the village were lighted an hour earlier than usual.
A sense of insecurity settled upon Stillwater with the falling
twilight,--that nameless apprehension which is possibly more trying
to the nerves than tangible danger. When a man is smitten
inexplicably, as if by a bodiless hand stretched out of a
cloud,--when the red slayer vanishes like a mist and leaves no
faintest trace of his identity,--the mystery shrouding the deed
presently becomes more appalling than the deed itself. There is
something paralyzing in the thought of an invisible hand somewhere
ready to strike at your life, or at some life dearer than your own.
Whose hand, and where is it? Perhaps it passes you your coffee at
breakfast; perhaps you have hired it to shovel the snow off your
sidewalk; perhaps it has brushed against you in the crowd; or may be
you have dropped a coin into the fearful palm at a street corner. Ah,
the terrible unseen hand that stabs your imagination,--this immortal
part of you which is a hundred times more sensitive than your poor
perishable body!
In the midst of situations the most solemn and tragic there often
falls a light purely farcical in its incongruity. Such a gleam was
unconsciously projected upon the present crisis by Mr. Bodge, better
known in the village as Father Bodge. Mr. Bodge was stone deaf,
naturally stupid, and had been nearly moribund for thirty years with
asthma. Just before night-fall he had crawled, in his bewildered,
wheezy fashion, down to the tavern, where he found a somber crowd in
the bar-room. Mr. Bodge ordered his mug of beer, and sat sipping it,
glancing meditatively from time to time over the pewter rim at the
mute assembly. Suddenly he broke out: "S'pose you've heerd that old
Shackford's ben murdered."
So the sun went down on Stillwater. Again the great wall of pines
and hemlocks made a gloom against the sky. The moon rose from behind
the tree-tops, frosting their ragged edges, and then sweeping up to
the zenith hung serenely above the world, as if there were never a
crime, or a tear, or a heart-break in it all.