Retribution
THE sound of that piercing scream, and the sight of Silas Tunstall
dropping lifeless to the ground, gave me such a shock that I stopped
dead where I was, unable to stir hand or foot. For a moment longer, I
saw, with starting eyes, the two ghostly figures circling uncertainly
around the prostrate form, in the increasing gloom; then they stopped,
drew together, and I heard a hasty consultation in muffled tones, which
I seemed to recognize.
“Biffkins!” called Dick’s frightened voice, at last; “come here, will
you, and get these things off us!”
He was tearing frantically at his white mufflings, and the other--Tom,
of course--was dancing a kind of furious war-dance in the effort to
get free. And both of them were so excited that they were getting more
entangled every instant. I don’t believe I had ever really thought them
ghosts; still, it was a relief to know that they were familiar flesh
and blood. I ran to them with a glad cry, in a moment their ghostly
cerements lay about their feet, and they stood disclosed as two very
tousled and very frightened boys.
“Do you suppose he’s dead?” asked Tom, in a husky whisper, as they
bent over the fallen man, who lay in a limp heap, enveloped in a
finely-meshed fishing-net.
“I don’t know,” answered Dick, paler than I had ever seen him. “But I
shouldn’t think people’d die that easy. It’s not natural!”
Tom had whipped out his knife and was cutting away the net, quite
forgetful of the fact that it was one of his most precious treasures.
“See if you can feel his pulse,” he said; and Dick gingerly applied his
fingers to Mr. Tunstall’s wrist.
“No,” he gasped, after a moment; “not a sign! Oh! oh!” and he stared
down at his victim with eyes fairly starting from his head.
“So this was the great secret!” I began. I know it was ungenerous; but
they had been very unkind, and revenge was my due. Besides, the memory
of my profitless afternoon’s work was hot upon me--and of how I had
watched and hoped--“So this--”
“Oh, cut it out, Biffkins!” broke in Dick, huskily. “Don’t rub it
in! We--we can’t stand it. You’d better go and call someone--call
mother--while we get him out of this thing,” and he began to tear
savagely at the net.
“Mother hasn’t come home yet,” I said.
“My father’s at home,” suggested Tom, and without waiting to hear more,
I was off along the path to the gate, and then out along the road
toward the Chester house, the whole horror of the affair suddenly upon
me. I burst up to the door, panting, breathless, and pulled the bell
with a fury I was far from realizing. Mr. Chester himself flung the
door open.
“Why, what’s the matter?” he cried, seeing my blanched face. “What has
happened?”
“The boys,” I gasped incoherently, growing more frightened every
minute, “tried to--scare--Silas Tunstall--and he--dropped dead!”
“Dropped dead!” he echoed, and I saw his face go white with sudden
horror.
“And they want you to come at once, sir,” I concluded, getting my
breath.
“Very well; lead the way,” he said, and he followed me down the path,
his lips compressed.
My legs were beginning to tremble under me with fatigue and excitement,
but I managed to keep on my feet until we reached the althea bush,
and then, pointing mutely to the boys, I tumbled down upon the bench,
utterly unable to take another step.
Mr. Chester bent over the prostrate man silently, and looked at him
for an instant. Then he dropped to his knees, loosened the victim’s
waistcoat and listened at his breast. The boys stood watching him with
bated breath.
“One of you go and get some cold water,” he said, abruptly, looking up.
Dick was off like a flash, thankful, doubtless, for the chance to
do something--and glad, too, perhaps, to escape from Mr. Chester’s
accusing eyes.
“Now, help me straighten him out here, sir,” he said to his son, and in
a moment they had Mr. Tunstall extended flat on his back. I shuddered
as I looked at him, he seemed so limp and cold and lifeless.
Then Mr. Chester bent over him again and began to compress his ribs and
allow them to expand, as I had read of doing for drowned persons. He
chafed his hands and slapped them smartly and seemed to be pummelling
him generally, but the gathering darkness prevented me from seeing very
clearly. Dick soon came back with the water, with which Mr. Chester
bathed the unconscious man’s face and neck. I had forgotten my fatigue
in the stress of the moment’s emotion, and instinctively had joined the
two boys, who were kneeling beside their victim, peering down at his
flaccid, bloodless countenance, in a very agony of apprehension.
The chafing and rubbing and bathing seemingly produced no effect, and
as minute followed minute and no sign of life appeared, the fear that
it had altogether fled deepened to certainty. The boys looked already
like convicted murderers, and I could not help pitying them, in spite
of the way they had treated me. Somehow my hand stole into Tom’s, and I
was shocked to feel how cold and clammy it was. He felt the pressure of
my fingers, and smiled at me wanly, and leaned over and whispered, “I’m
sorry, Biffkins;” and thereupon all the anger I had felt against him
melted quite away.
At last, Mr. Chester, despairing of gentler methods, caught up a double
handful of water and dashed it violently into the unconscious face. For
an instant, there was no response, then the eyelids slowly lifted and
a deep sigh proceeded from the half-open mouth. A moment more, and,
rubbing his eyes confusedly, he sat up and looked about him.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded, anxiously. “Where am I?”
The difference of tone and accent from those he had used with me only
a few minutes before fairly startled me. He had dropped his drawl, his
nasal tone, his slip-shod enunciation. And his face had changed, too.
It was thinner and more alert; and the ragged whiskers seemed absurdly
out of place upon it.
“You’ve had a fainting-spell,” answered Mr. Chester, gently. “You will
soon be all right again, I hope.”
A dark flush suffused Mr. Tunstall’s face, and he rose awkwardly to his
feet.
“Oh, yes; I’ll soon be all right ag’in,” he said, with a weak attempt
at a laugh. The drawl was back again--the nasal twang; but none of the
others seemed to have noticed that he had used another tone a moment
before. I began to fear him--to have a different conception of him--he
was an enemy far more formidable than I had thought. Which was his
natural tone, I wondered--and yet, on second thought, there could be no
question as to that. His natural tone was the one he had used when he
first came to himself, before he fully realized where he was, before he
had quite got his senses back.
“Have you had such attacks before?” asked Mr. Chester.
“Oh, yes; they ain’t nothin’. I has ’em every onct in a while. Didn’t
say nothin’ foolish, I hope?” he added, and shot a quick, suspicious,
threatening glance at us.
“No,” said Mr. Chester, “you didn’t say a word--you didn’t even
breathe, so far as I could see.”
“Only a scream at the first,” I said.
“A scream?” repeated Mr. Tunstall. “What’d I scream fer?”
Then his eyes fell upon the tumbled white robes on the ground. He gazed
at them an instant, then lifted his eyes and fixed them on the two
boys, with a malevolence which made me shudder.
“Oh, yes,” he said, at last, in a low, hoarse voice. “I remember, now.
I remember, now!”
“I’m sure, sir,” began Dick, but Mr. Tunstall silenced him with a
fierce gesture.
“All right; all right,” he interrupted. “I don’t want to listen. Much
obleeged fer your trouble,” he added to Mr. Chester. “I reckon I’ll be
goin’ along home.”
“Do you think you’re strong enough?” asked Mr. Chester. “If you’re not,
I can have my carriage--”
“No, no,” broke in the other, impatiently. “I’m all right, I tell ye,”
and he slouched off across the garden.
We stood and watched him as he walked away, until the dusk hid him;
then Mr. Chester turned to the boys with a stern light in his eyes.
“Now,” he said, “perhaps you two young gentlemen will be good enough to
explain what you hoped to accomplish by this trick.”
“We were going to make him confess, sir,” answered Dick, in a subdued
voice.
“Confess? Confess what?”
“Where the treasure is, sir. You know you said you thought he knew
where it was, and then you told about coming on him that time dressed
as a ghost; and we thought maybe if we dropped on him sudden in the
dark in the same place, he might think we were for-sure ghosts--”
“One of us was going to pretend to be Mrs. Nelson,” supplemented Tom.
“We thought we might frighten it out of him.”
“But, of course,” said Dick, miserably, “we hadn’t any idea it would
turn out like that.”
For a moment, Mr. Chester continued to stare at them in astonishment;
then a peculiar inward convulsion seized him, as though he wanted to
sneeze and couldn’t. As I looked at their downcast faces, I felt very
much like laughing, but I didn’t dare with Mr. Chester standing there.
“A brilliant scheme!” he commented, at last, in a voice which trembled
a little. “May I ask which of you devised it?”
“It was I, sir,” answered Tom, guiltily.
“How did you know that Mr. Tunstall would be here this evening?”
queried his father.
“We--we sent him a message by our boy, Jimmy.”
“A message?”
“Yes, sir--that he’d learn something to his advantage if he came out
here this afternoon. We knew Mrs. Truman had gone to town.”
“He thought it was mother sent the message,” I remarked.
“And the message was a falsehood,” said Mr. Chester, sternly. “It was,
of course, inevitable that they should tell a lie. Go on.”
“Well, Mr. Tunstall came,” said Tom, flushing deeply at his father’s
words. “We watched him come up the road and go up to the house and
knock and try the front door. Then he wandered around a bit, and
finally saw Cecil sitting on the bench there. She’d been digging some
more.”
“Yes, and he frightened me nearly to death for a minute,” I said.
“It couldn’t have happened better,” said Dick. “He talked quite a
while, and we had time to get all our trappings ready; and just as he
turned to go, we threw Tom’s big seine over him and dropped off the
wall. Before we had time to do any more, he had fainted--we thought he
was dead.”
“And suppose he had been dead,” said Mr. Chester, “as he might easily
have been, since his heart is probably diseased, do you know that at
this moment both of you would be guilty of manslaughter? You hadn’t
thought about that, of course?”
“No, sir,” answered both boys, together.
“Do you think your mother, Dick, would have been willing to pay such a
price as that for this place?”
“No, sir,” burst out Dick; “nor I wouldn’t either. I--I don’t like the
place any more--mother won’t either, when I tell her.”
“Oh, Dick!” I cried reproachfully.
Mr. Chester said nothing for a moment, but stood in deep thought.
“I will tell your mother myself,” he said, finally. “We mustn’t
have her prejudiced against the place. But I hope this afternoon’s
experience will teach both of you a lesson--I hope that neither of
you will ever again try to startle anyone as you tried to startle Mr.
Tunstall this afternoon. There is no kind of joke so dangerous. And, by
the way, Cecil,” he went on, turning to me, “what was it you and Mr.
Tunstall were talking about so long?”
“Why, I don’t just remember, sir,” I answered. “He told me about
getting the message, and I told him I was sure it wasn’t from mother;
and then we talked about the treasure, and he said to go ahead and hunt
for it, that it wasn’t any of his business until the seventeenth of
May, and that he was going to play fair.”
“Was that all?” he asked, looking at me keenly. “Try to think. Mr.
Tunstall is a very clever man. A silly note like the one sent him
wouldn’t have got him out here unless he had some very definite object
in coming, and was hoping for an excuse to do so.”
“I don’t remember anything else, sir,” I said, making a desperate
effort at recollection. “Oh, yes; he asked if I’d heard mother say
anything about trying to break the will, and I told him that I had
heard her tell you that she wouldn’t think of doing so--that if she
couldn’t get the place the way grandaunt provided, she didn’t want it
at all.”
Mr. Chester’s lips tightened, and he looked grimly at the boys.
“The note wasn’t such a lie, after all,” he said, in a voice very
stern. “Mr. Tunstall has learned something very decidedly to his
advantage.”