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WAS
IT A
GHOST?
THE MURDERS
in
BUSSEY’S WOOD
AN EXTRAORDINARY
NARRATIVE.
LORING, Publisher.
BOSTON
1868.
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[Illustration: THE GHOST.]
WAS IT A GHOST?
THE MURDERS IN BUSSEY’S WOOD.
An Extraordinary Narrative.
LORING, Publisher,
319 WASHINGTON STREET,
BOSTON.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by
A. K. LORING,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court for the District
of Massachusetts.
ROCKWELL & ROLLINS, STEREOTYPERS AND PRINTERS,
122 Washington Street, Boston.
DEDICATION.
I dedicate this book to that philosophy which can argue without
anger, can have a disbelief without sustaining it by insolence; which
can pause on the brink of a chasm, and, because there happens to be
no bridge by which it can cross over, will not proclaim to all the
world that no bridge can be built; to the philosophy which sees as
much beauty in a doubt as in a solution, and has not ventured, or
mayhap will never venture, to affix a limit to human thought, or
define the prerogatives of our Lord and Creator. I do not dedicate it
to the Free Thinker, but to the Just Thinker. The highest reverence
exists oftener than otherwise in the humblest soul, and the night of
our ignorance is lit by stars to accustom us to the effulgence of the
dawn. The future is the poetry of our hope; the present our rest,
from which we extend the wings of memory for the longer and more
glorious flight toward the end. My work will be found to look faintly
but fondly to those things, if it is read aright; and so in all and
everything I humbly say that I have no higher ambition than to serve
my Master.
PREFACE.
I take advantage of this antique form of literature to make a
statement.
The murders of which I shall have to speak in the following pages
have been misunderstood. There was only one species of crime in their
perpetration, and this I have from the highest authority. If I had
thought it advisable, I could have pointed out the progress by which
the assassin reached his determination, his peculiarity of character,
and his motives; but such a course would have detected justice to the
culprit, not the culprit to justice. Whenever he shall be discovered,
the evidence will be ample justification for my assertion with regard
to the character of the crime, and reveal the darkest, wickedest, and
most deliberate murders with which the history of humanity has been
cursed.
I am indebted to my friend, THOMAS HILL, Esq., the eminent landscape
painter, for the singularly appropriate adaptation of weird figures
to letters on the cover of my book, and also for the very felicitous
representation of the “Ghost.” His magic pencil masters the alphabet
as well as the higher regions of art, and I feel assured that my
readers will be pleased that I had, in my need, so able an assistant
in helping me to make my humble effort acceptable.
J. B.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Preliminary Remarks 9
I. The Roads 11
II. The Incidents 18
III. The Scene 22
IV. The Brook 25
V. The Dogs 30
VI. The Flat Bridge 34
VII. Suspected 41
VIII. The Murder-Rock 45
IX. Suspicion 49
X. Was it a Ghost? 57
XI. The Tests 67
XII. Tests 75
XIII. The Doctor’s Story 94
XIV. My Plan of Punishment 101
XV. The Children 110
XVI. Ghosts 113
XVII. Manifestations 123
PRELIMINARY REMARKS.
The main circumstances that form, in part, the topic of my recital,
excited, at the time of their occurrence, a feeling of unprecedented
horror. They came upon the public sensibility with a force that
even the previous recital of the bloody events of the civil war
could not lessen. Habituation to horror had not deadened the public
susceptibility; for there was around the incidents a belt of mystery
and affright that defied the approach of justice, and baffled private
speculation.
No necessity, even in the tortuous excuses of crime, was apparent
for the deed; for the victims had had no opportunities to establish,
individually of themselves, hostile relations with any one, and
their condition placed them beyond or beneath the chance of social
importance. They were claimants to no estate in litigation, stood
in no man’s way to advancement, could have produced no rivalry, had
inspired neither revenge, nor jealousy, nor love. They had, in fine,
none of those means that men and women have to incite to crime; for
they were children, and yet they were subjected to a fate that few,
if any, children, had confronted before.
The commission of the deed was a barbarity; its motives, apparently,
a paradox.
Everything, indeed, about the transaction was unusual. The hour, the
circumstances, and the locality, all contributed to inspire a greater
horror of the act; and yet, up to this moment, no man’s name, of
high or low, bears a blemish of continued suspicion. Justice seems
to rest, after the excitement of the instant search,—a search that, I
have every reason to know, was intricate and thorough; but, at the
same time, it is well to know that the intelligent Chief of the
police department has only seemed to pause. His eyes have never been
entirely withdrawn from the contemplation of the subject; and I feel
assured, from what I know, that his vigilant and nervous grasp will,
at the appointed time, be placed upon the shoulder of the atrocious
criminal. The murderer may have perhaps, ere this, caught glimpses,
from his abode of gloom in another world, of those two spirits whose
bodies he hacked so butcherly. If that be so, the Chief will have
naught to do; but if he be alive, wandering a desolate path through a
desolate world, it may be that justice will not have waited with an
energetic patience in vain.
THE NARRATIVE.
I.
THE ROADS.
There are two roads direct by which the scene I am about to describe
can be reached from Boston. One is the steam-car road, passing
through Roxbury, and dropping way-passengers at Laurel Hill Station.
The other is the horse-car line, that, for some portion of the
route, runs parallel to the steam. The third, and more picturesque,
is another horse-car line, which passes through Jamaica Plain, and
drops the passengers some several hundred yards west, and farther
removed from the official terminus of the two other routes. It was by
the second of these routes, that, on the 12th day of June, 1865, two
children, Isabella and John Joyce, started from their home in Boston,
where they were temporarily boarding, to spend a few hours in May’s
wood, intending to return, according to the elder one’s promise,
in time for her brother to attend his afternoon school. Thus it is
established that the sister never intended to go farther than the
wood first proposed; and in this we have the first glimmering of the
series of mysterious circumstances in which the wretched affair is
enveloped from the beginning to the end.
This girl was not sixteen years old.
The boy was barely eight.
Whatever happened after they took their seats in the car, and who
accompanied them, or joined them afterward, is a matter simply of
conjecture; and yet, as they sat there, these two young things, who,
of all the rest of the passengers that looked upon their fresh,
pleasure-anticipating faces, could have dreamed that, in a section
so civilized, a community so guarded, a population so abundant, in
the marginal outlines of a great city, that ere the sun went down,
within a few short hours, indeed, that girl and boy would be lying
stiff and stark, pierced,—the one, the girl, by twenty-eight poniard
stabs, and the boy by enough to have killed the captains of a full
regiment; the girl dead in the hollow of a rock within thirty feet
of a public road, the boy less than a quarter of a mile away, in the
dense shrubbery, by a tiny stream that flows through the shades of
Bussey’s wonderfully beautiful woods!
Now, this wood of Bussey’s—at present in the possession of Mr.
Motley, one of the heirs by marriage—is a subject of frequent thought
to the writer of this narrative. It was so before it became the
witness to the murder of these two children; after that, while of
course losing in sentiment and by association some of its innate
and sympathetic loveliness, it ever wore the weird aspect of a
mystic realm; but now is added that terrible consciousness of a
fright, a terror, pervading all its recesses. The wood lies about
six or seven miles southward of the Boston State House, on a county
road, and its summits are lofty enough to afford a view of the city
and the rattlesnake infested Blue Hills back of the Mattapan, more
southwardly yet.
The wood, as you approach down the road from Mr. Motley’s gate,
presents the aspect of a hill of pines, dark and massive; but,
crossing the fence that keeps it from the highway, you are almost at
once in the midst of a mingled growth of birch and beech and willows;
beneath these passes the brook, near to whose bank was found, farther
up, the body of the boy. Old Mr. Bussey, it would seem, was a man of
droll, yet picturesque fancies, mingled with a sturdy sense of the
useful; for no sooner are you free of the pasture land, and in among
the trees, than you discover traces of his handiwork. The path you
are upon is broad and well constructed, leading to a solid bridge
of masonry; and well may you pause here to take in the full effect
of the scenic entanglement. On your right is a fish-pond, fringed
with the swamp willow, and of sufficient capacity to contain fish
enough for a council of cardinals during the abstinent days of Lent;
and near by a spring of water, so cold that ice is never needed by
those frequent picnic parties that, up to the period of the murders,
sought these delicious retiracies for holiday festivals, or love’s
deeper and sweeter plans of recreation. Crossing this lower bridge,
and passing over a road with velvety grass borders, you turn to your
left, and if you have the time from sandwiches and other condiments,
or are not too absorbed in emotions that beat marches to the field of
matrimony, or much elaboration of flirtation, you will see the steep
ascent, bearded with huge pines, and covered with abutting rocks,
looking like the base of a minor incident of Alpine precipice. If
you choose, there is a wild pathway made among the zigzags, and this
you can pursue until the summit meets you, with the recompense of a
noble prospect, but with your muscles somewhat demoralized. Did those
children take this route?
Along the ridge, a broad walk leads to the spot where the
wounded-to-death body of the unhappy girl was found. But, if you
think otherwise, in your humor of unsettled choice, you can turn to
your right, and, winding around the base of the hill, through dwarf
pines at first, and heavy timber afterward, stroll on until you
reach the scene of the primal tragedy. Did they go by this way? The
wildness, the solemnity, and total seclusion of the place, even in
the broad daylight, are oppressive to the imagination, if you happen
to be alone. Company in a graveyard, at midnight, destroys in some
measure the unpleasant sense of other than human propinquity; and
it is the same in a modified form, in this umbrageous condensity.
By all but hilarious picnic parties, the solitude and seriousness
of a wood is admitted; and this wood is one of the most unique I
have ever visited. But, since then, it is no simple congregation of
trees and rocks and mysterious paths,—no longer a sylvan asylum of
perfect repose, inviting to reverie, to pleasure, or the interviews
of love, sweetened by the security that shadows of leaves throw upon
the blushing hieroglyphic of the cheek, or the deeper and softer and
better understood language of the eyes. A gloom is here established
forever. It is a witness of that most terrible of tragedies to which
our human condition is liable. The knife of the murderer has gleamed
here,—the cry of the victim been uttered. It is haunted! Haunted
by what? Who can tell? By ghosts, or the idea of ghosts? It makes
no difference which. In such cases, where logic is shattered over
a catastrophe, imagination lifts up the fallen form of contracted
reason, and ministers to its inability. Man does not always demand
facts; or, rather, in the solving of the many difficult problems
that are suggested by special and eccentric occurrences, he does
not demand an iron-clad testimony,—a testimony not in accordance
with the fact under inquisition. The existence of a thing is to be
proved by evidence that can apply to the nature of its existence.
The intention of Byron’s brain cannot be proved by the same process
you would take to prove that the ocean over the Banks of Newfoundland
is not so deep as in its centre. If we waited for facts in proof of
what we cannot directly understand, we should starve mentally, or go
mad. Air is invisible, but it exists. It is here; it is yonder. It
is more keenly felt by animals whose skins are thin. The armadilla,
possibly, doubts its existence, unless he has the gift of seeing
it; but the hairless dog of China is no sceptic on the subject of
atmospheric changes and attacks. Man, exposed to the blast, feels
it more sensibly than the elephant placed in the same current. The
_opinion_ of the armadilla, or of the elephant, has nothing to do
with the fact of the air’s existence. The former animal recognizes a
tempest, not by what he feels, but what he sees; and if he sees wind,
then I give up my illustration, but not my argument. He sees a vision
of flying dust, broken branches, prostrate trees. Possibly he draws
his deductions from the theory of the sliding faculty of sand,—which
phenomenon he has, perhaps, suffered from; and he has seen trees
overturned by sand-slides, and, as the tempest beats unfelt upon his
adamantine scales, he thinks the sand-power is at work, and would
debate all day with any thin-skinned animal who would assert that it
was done by a tempest of air. “I never saw it, I never felt it,”
Signor Armadilla would perpetually growl forth; and, so far as he
was concerned, the air would be sand, and his neighbor a credulous,
half-crazy believer in a thing perfectly intangible. He never could
attribute the results of a tempest to any force which is not within
the range of his experience. He is where he was, but the oak is where
it was not. He stood upon a sound place, the oak upon a slide,—that’s
all. There was no hurricane. Thus it is that while a thing may exist,
it may not always be apparent, and if apparent, only to a few.
Men take views according to the texture of their mental cuticle,
mercurial or otherwise, thick or thin; and can decisions based upon
such capricious contingencies be accepted as a philosophic solution
of a doubt, or a truth? But I shall, farther on in my recital, have
to deal more practically with this topic, because I shall be drawn
to its revelation by the inevitable force of circumstances and
incidents.
II.
THE INCIDENTS.
Two months previous to the murder of the Joyce children I had been
residing at the house of an acquaintance, a mile away from the
village of Jamaica Plain. The front of the house looked out upon the
road leading from Boston and passing through the village of Jamaica
Plain far away into the back country, and onward,—a pleasant drive
for those city dwellers who had only afternoon opportunities for
rural inhalation. The rear of the house gave view of a meadow watered
by a tiny rivulet and up to the woods of Bussey. This rivulet was
the one that went by the body of the boy, and where it was concealed
by its woods and weeds. The distance from our back porch to the spot
where the body of the boy was found, was about four hundred yards,
and to where the body of the girl was discovered, probably twice or
thrice that number; so I was rusticating near the footlights of the
theatre, little dreaming that, when the curtain rose, how terrible
would be the drama that would drip the stage with blood.
I have long since made up my mind that the most extraordinary
events transpire from a condition of repose, else we would never
be startled. The first earthquake is the terror; the residue are
but affairs of mercantile and architectural speculation. Whatever
is striking is struck quick. The practice of the prize ring is
the theory of wonders. The shoulder of a man propels a complex
system of muscles, and a man in front has his countenance smashed.
The suddenness of the experiment accounts for the surprise at its
result. Preparations for great deeds are not always apparent. A coup
d’etat is such because it is a coup. The killing of Mr. Lincoln was
more astounding as a positive deed than the beheading of Charles
the First, or the razoring of Louis the Sixteenth and his Queen,
daughter of the Cæsars. In the case of the President, silence and
mystery kept pace with the public confidence in his personal safety;
in the case of Charles and Louis, the politics of a people had long
been disturbed and outraged with regard to the traditional sanctity
of kings, and there was preparation almost evidently looking to
the final result, and the prelude, from the very nature of those
governments, admitted of hardly any other epilogue; but with Mr.
Lincoln it was different. He sat in his box at the theatre, secure,
in a war brought to a result suitable to his designs, with pleasant
painted scenery before him, a comedy of brimming humor in course of
acting, altogether in the very last place he or any one expected
that the blow upon his life would fall; but it fell, and the world
was astonished. Thus,—with the meadow and its brook before me, with
the grand belt of woods bowing over the fence, with the soft air of
summer in the boughs, with the mowers in the grass, with the sunlight
blinking through flower-stems and vegetables of homely nomenclature,
but admirable qualities,—I sat in the porch of my summer dwelling;
and while I sat there, musing and idling, a deed was done, so wicked,
so ruthless, so hideously unessential, that even now, after the
lapse of so long a time, I feel the need of a new word,—a word with
the thunder and the lightning in it, with the curse of man and the
anathema of God in it, to express the sensation it produced.
Those woods were to me a delight beyond all computation. To look
at them, to go into them, to sit underneath them, to watch by
the hour the veins of moss and the bark of the tree boles, to
follow the curvature of the limbs as they grasped at the white
clouds passing, to see the blue eyes of the sky peeping at me as I
stared at them, to listen to the nothings of sounds that all men
have heard in the sylvans, to forget in the balm of the scene the
bitterness of memories and knowledge,—furnished me a mighty feast
of harmless and negative enjoyment. With these feelings which I
have not exaggerated,—keeping in view this sanctity of nature,
for so many centuries uninvaded by any crime, save and except that
doubtful one, of lovers meeting there to love outside of domestic
parlors,—I perhaps more than anybody else was personally outraged
at the act which not only destroyed human life, but smote the peace
of the presence which Heaven had bestowed upon the scene, sublime
in its ministering to a waif out of the wreck of revolution. I
feel confident that to those persons who indulge in the faculty of
thought beyond counters and desks, I need make no excuses for these
digressions; for they will at once perceive that I am at least
exhibiting one phase of the prelude to those terrible atrocities.
The incident of my vicinity to the spot has great weight with me in
the writing of this narrative, as it would be to those persons, who,
though not being able to witness the actual battle, see the smoke of
the conflict and hear the reverberation of the dread artillery.
III.
THE SCENE.
It was on Sunday evening, the 18th of June, that we had the first
intimation of what had been going on in those great shadows opposite
to our house. I was sitting on the eastward porch,—which I said
before gave a lookout toward the wood,—and had been sending up my
quota of cloud to mingle with the fraternity of vapor around the
setting sun (my pipe, my laboratory), when, as the shades grew
purplish down in the ravine by the brook, I heard repeated shouts.
When an ordinary stillness is violently broken, there follows a
shock to the nervous system, repeated upon it by sympathy with the
divinity of silence whose reign has been disturbed. Sometimes terror
commences at once her frantic flight over all the barriers of reason;
and again, anger beats back the blow with imprecation. But when the
long-continued hush of a great forest, the mystic sleep of rocks and
trees, of air itself pervading a radius of miles, is suddenly and
sharply interrupted by that peculiar intonation of human outcry,
which declares an event out of the ordinary train of circumstances,
and when those outcries reach us out of thick concealment, wonder
and dread assume control of our faculties, and make us pause almost
in our breathing, to catch some other cry of different character by
which we can determine the cause and nature of the first. I had heard
from the paths and shades of those woods, during the summer, various
kinds of human noises; but none of them ever reached the mad gamut
of the one which had smitten the air but a moment since. Those other
cries came from children, grown and ungrown, romping in happy energy
along the glades,—from picnic parties calling to each other and
replying as they separated after the feast of sandwiches,—and I had
got to understand them all; but here was a yell that had in it the
modulation of groan and spasm, uplifting of hands and straining of
eyes, relaxing of muscles and whitening of faces, with stops put upon
it by the fluttering pulses of the frightened heart; and imagining
nothing of anything terrible that could have happened under that so
pleasant roof of waving foliage, I sat paralyzed in the abruptness
and terror of the interruption. But I was not kept long in such
suspense. The news now came up from the dell that the body of the
missing boy was found. The search of police and citizens had been
conducted on the principle of an open fan with the handle held by the
chief at the house where the children had been living. Thus the whole
region on either side of the route known to have been taken by them
was thoroughly gone over and examined, until the pursuit, almost
despairing of success, reached the Bussey wood, expanded around the
base of the hill, leaving no clump of bushes unexplored, until, upon
that quiet Sabbath evening they found the poor boy lying dead in the
midst of a thick screen of alder-bushes. Soon afterward the girl was
discovered, but not, I believe, by parties actually engaged in the
search. Two men unsuspectingly, perhaps unknowing of anything about
the missing ones, strangers, it is to be supposed, and in the woods
for a Sunday’s stroll, came upon a group of rocks lying a little off
from the path at the southern terminus of the hill, and overlooking
the common road of the county that leads to Dedham. Here, stretched
in the rugged fissure of the rock, or rather in a basin at its base,
lay the stabbed corpse of the sister. Another alarm, and the second
part of the drama was concluded.
IV.
THE BROOK.
So this much of the mystery was explained.
These children had left their home a week before, purposing a little
trip, that was to last only a few hours, to May’s wood, midway or
thereabout between their starting-point and Bussey’s wood, where
they were subsequently found dead. During all that week of vigorous
and unwearied search by the police of Boston and Roxbury, joined
in by that of the rural localities; while the sun shone so bright
and peace seemed so perfect over and within that green glory, while
hundreds of people as usual, suspecting nothing, came into and went
out of old Bussey’s groves; these two dumb humanities lay,—the girl,
with her poor fright-marked face towards the sky, appealing to it
for testimony and redress, the brother prone to the earth by the
sly little running stream, both stabbed over and over again,—for
thirty-four times did that mad arm rise and fall,—their bodies rough
with the clotted gore of their hideous wounds. The public stood
awe-struck in the presence of this spectacle, and parents trembled
when they saw such evidence of duty neglected in allowing these
waifs to wander so far away from home. (Or were they accompanied,
and by whom, when they went away?) For a time the junior members of
families had to confine themselves to a more restricted sphere of
locomotion, and the thought of murder haunting them drove them like
curfew to their homes at dusk. The latitude heretofore extended to,
or wrenched by, Young America underwent a revision, and the juvenile
eagles and doves of the social roosts were forced to bend to the yoke
of a new dispensation, the justification of which was found in the
fate of those two hapless wanderers who had been found slaughtered
in the woods of Bussey. Seldom, in the annals of crime, was there
so great an excitement as was manifested, not only in Boston, but
throughout the entire country, when the fate of the lost children was
made known by the public press. In one week afterward the woods were
daily crowded by people from the city and the suburbs, with parties
from the distant towns, and I met one man, wandering about in a white
state of nervousness, who said he had come from Maine to look at the
localities. An artist of one of the New York illustrated papers, with
whom I went over the woods, in company also with a policeman who had
been detailed for the purpose of pointing out the spots to the man
of wood-cuts, told me that in New York the murder of these children
had caused a greater excitement than the killing of Mr. Lincoln. I
could well understand that,—for the one was in its chief features, a
political event, while the other appealed to the commonest sensations
of our nature, through the avenues of mystery. On one Sunday alone, I
was told by one of the rural officers, that more than twelve hundred
people, men, women, and children, had visited the blood-stained
places of the murders.
One great misfortune was inevitable from this sudden and continued
irruption, and that was the total extinction of any foot-track of the
murderer, or any vestige of his garments which might have been torn
from him in the struggles with the stronger girl, or the conjectured
chase he made in pursuit of the fleeing boy; for strange it was,
that the bodies were found separated by several hundred yards of
distance, an interval of dense wood and shrubbery closing in in all
directions.[1] The one, as I said before, was killed on the summit
of the hill; the other, at its base. As strict an examination as it
was possible to effect was instituted, by the police authorities,
of all the paths leading to the two spots of deepest interest, of
every brake and shaded place; and very useless was it soon found
to be in the vicinity of the death-scene of the girl,—for there the
ground was dry and rocky; but where the boy was found the soil was
moist, and had not the paths been constantly travelled over during
that silent week and afterward, it was there that some clue might
have been found, the footsteps of the assassin evident, kept there
by that inscrutable and puzzling fatality that frequently attends on
such events. The party of discovery, however, not having the police
presence of mind at the moment when they came upon the desolate
object, obliterated, by an unconscious complicity with the assassin,
and demolished, in their eager rush, any marks he might have left;
for at least to that body no one had approached, and the footmarks
of the only living witness and actor must have kept company with the
bloody corpse throughout that interval. Thus everything tended to
shield the doer of the deed. The dry ground and flints around the
girl; the very solitude of the boy’s last asylum, to whose protection
he had fled with the breath of his pursuer hot upon him; the rain
that fell afterward, and that fatal week’s concealment,—gave him
ample time to perfect his plan of evasion; and well did the demon
use his opportunities; for, up to this moment, the public is in
possession of no clue by which he can be brought to the expiation, if
human expiation be possible, of his unparalleled offence. Whatever
may be known to the mysterious agent of legal vindication, the
keen-eyed chief, we cannot discover; possibly there is nothing to
discover, though I do not agree to that; he may be waiting for one
of those redressing incidents by which the chain of evidence is
united,—incidents simple of themselves and reaching forward out of
doubt and difficulty, and helping the law to a fulfilment of its
intentions.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Since I finished writing my narrative, a friend has informed me,
that, visiting the wood sometime after the discovery of the bodies,
and while searching for the exact spot where Isabella Joyce was
discovered, he picked up a portion of an old green coat, or some
other habiliment, and carried it out in the road to his friend, who
was waiting in the carriage the issue of his search, to show her, in
joke, as a relic of the murderer’s dress. His friend instantly grew
serious over the matter, and to this day believes it to have been
worn by the man who did the murders.
V.
THE DOGS.
And during all that week I had pursued my usual monotonies, happy
that they were such, tired to death of battles, and the bulletins
of newspapers, which had added such a tangle of falsehood to the
wickedness of slaughter; happy that I was where I could see the sun
rise and go down without touching with his ray, so far as my rustic
horizon was concerned, a soldier’s tent or a soldier’s grave; moping,
in the very licentiousness of laziness, with my seraphic pipe between
my teeth, over a thousand trifles, such as ingoing and outcoming
of shadows on the leaf-domes of the woods; enjoying the soothing
spasm with dinner of green peas, fresh pulled from vines that in my
airy fancy called back old travels through the low shrubbery of the
French vineyards; having now and then a townsman’s visit to cheer me
back, if cheerful it be, to a consciousness of taxes and municipal
street-sweepings, of city lamps lit up as regularly as the night
came down,—a visit that in its way was as pleasant to me as the old
trees or the gray rocks crowding around their base; a friend to sit
with me in the old back porch and look at the grand wooding of that
desecrated hill, to sip with me the test of hospitality, and smoke
the pipe of peace in the peaceful air that takes no offence at the
indulgence of any method by which honest men earn the recompense
of honest living; avoiding all topics of scandal, blessed in that
rural asylum in the absence of all objects of scandal; going into
the woods now and then and often, out of which, like Peter the Czar,
I had built my city and peopled it with my own people; and all the
time so ignorant of the two dead children who lay within easy range
of my vision. There they lay all that festering week, and here was I
so near to them, following out the idle purpose of a perhaps useless
life,—they perhaps of no greater use to all the world in their dead
slumbering than I in my grand philosophy of lethargy.
My host was blessed with two dogs, and, very oddly, they bore the
same name, Jack. One was a bull-dog, but, strange to say for his
breed, of a sweet and even, more than common, Christian disposition,
inasmuch as I never knew him to turn from the person he had once
elevated to his friendship. In his firm, calm old face, there was
nothing of deceit. Making his protestations of love to you in his own
way of muscular revelation, you might be sure of his proffer, and
that he never would trick you out of your confidence. I have known
bipedical bull-dogs do otherwise; and they turned out afterwards
to be such arrant cowards that even my solemn Jack, could he but
have become acquainted with their behavior, would have swept them
out of the sphere of respectable personalities by the vigor of his
superhuman sincerity. The other dog was a fighting character, and
as such I had not much sympathy with him,—war on a larger and more
brutal scale had sufficed me,—and yet about him there was a geniality
and honesty and pluck, that forced you, while you recognized his
“belligerent rights,” to offer him your respect,—at least I did;
and so there were times when he was allowed to accompany my placid
Jack and myself in our woodway journeys. Friendly as they were
with me, there was another whom they loved with the fervor of
canine Abeilardism, and that person was their master, my host. I
mention this fact now because it bears upon an incident of a very
extraordinary nature, and which I will state in its proper place.
At present I have but to add a few words about these dogs. Though
they bore the same name, they perfectly understood when they were
separately called; that is, they comprehended their own individuality
as we individualized them. I never knew them to make a mistake.
Thus it was, Jack the gentle was never addressed, or had his name
called, except in just such terms as we would use to a human being
gifted with his rare qualities. Jack the fighter, hard-biter, great
cat-worrier, knew when he was spoken to well enough; for the manner
of the family was such as they would use to a retired or active
member of the prize ring, a tone half of uncertainty and the other
half of admiration. They were, in fine, two distinct characters,
bearing the same name; but our voices being adapted to their peculiar
idiosyncrasies, they sensibly drew the line of distinction in sound,
and understood us.
It would be worth any one’s while to get two such distinctly
different dogs in character, and try the experiment of similar names.
It might at least afford Mr. John Tyndall, LL.D., of England, some
hints to his theory of sound.
VI.
THE FLAT BRIDGE.
So one week had passed since the committal of the murders and
the discovery of the bodies,—and the bodies lying in a wood so
frequently, indeed so constantly and largely visited. One would have
supposed that they would have been discovered half an hour after the
deeds were done; but, to understand why it was so long concealed,
you must visit the wood itself in the leafy month of June, and then
you will find out what a hiding-place it can be turned into. Now the
spot where the boy was found was a few feet from the little stream
frequently mentioned, and this stream was spanned by a flat bridge
just enough elevated from the surface of the water to allow it to
flow freely underneath. This bridge led over to a half-obliterated
path that you could with a little care follow until it brought you to
the regular path that led from the lower bridge, and which I before
observed conducted you to the rock where the girl was found, and
farther on to a spot which I am soon to speak of. This lower part
of the forest is composed of open spaces filled with low shrubbery,
small and close-growing pines, and by the brook-way with densely
thick alders. There is a wall running west from the brook, dividing
the property of my host from that of Mr. Motley. Mr. Motley’s
property, along the wall to the north-west, is composed of a wood of
great beauty. The path to which I have alluded connects with the main
county road that circles Bussey’s wood to the east, and it was by
this path that my host was in the habit of returning from his daily
city business, sometimes a little after sunset, but generally not
earlier than nine at night, and frequently later. Relative to this
circumstance I have hereafter something of an extraordinary character
to make mention of; so it may as well be remembered.
The low, flat bridge was about fifty feet from the corner of the
dividing line, and less that distance from the scene of one of the
murders. Near to it ran the path my friend had to pursue on his
return at night. In my walks, before the murders, I had passed over
this bridge almost daily, and afterward, during the sealed week,
I had not interrupted my habit, though probably I did not go that
route as often as before, for the weather was getting intensely hot,
and kept me to the woods nearer the house. In these walks, however
frequent or seldom, I was accompanied by old Jack; and though the
body of the boy, at one part of the track, lay not more than ten or
fifteen feet away on our left, hidden in the shrubbery, the dog never
attempted to approach it. I remembered afterward, when everything
was revealed, that as soon as we got over the bridge, he would walk
quietly at my heels, keeping as close to me as possible; but when I
had advanced to the denser wood, that clothed the base of the hill,
he was all alive, plunging in every direction, and opening with a
courageous vigor upon the up-tree, defying squirrels. I blamed him
much for his reticence; for I felt assured that both he and his
namesake had, before that, perhaps on the very day of the deed,
gone into that dense mass and gazed upon the slain. Be it as it
might, his manner changed completely whenever we passed by that red
resting-place.
On the morning of the murders—the 12th of June—I had prepared myself
for sketching (I have that gift, moderately to be sure, but yet
with wonderful kindness extended to me by a beneficent Providence),
intending to make a memorandum in oil colors of a group of rocks a
hundred yards or so beyond (eastward) the murder-rock, and to which I
have already referred. These gray rocks, that I intended to sketch,
can be seen from the road leading up to the hill, by which you reach,
from the direction of the railroad, the outer scarp of the ridge
behind which the girl was found. And this is the route by which the
children may have reached the wood.
As the sun rose higher in the heavens the heat increased in
proportionate intensity, and when I was ready to start, say about
half-past ten o’clock, I was glad to second the persuasions of my
friends not to venture out in such seething weather. Probably it was
providential, or possibly a great error, that I did not accomplish
my original design. To reach my objective point—the picturesque
rocks which had so fascinated my sense of the beautiful—I would have
been obliged to follow the path, first over the low bridge, and
subsequently within six or seven feet of the spot where the body of
Isabella Joyce was first seen. Now, it is a well-ascertained fact,
that the children left their home by the cars sometime about eleven
o’clock on that morning. Their intention was simply to go to May’s
wood, nearer to Boston than Bussey’s. What induced them to change
their purpose, and advance as far as the latter, is _partially_ a
mystery; and though I have a well-digested theory upon that very
important—indeed, all-important—point, I must withhold it; for well
I know that if he is alive, one of the first persons to read this
narrative, on its publication, will be the murderer himself, and I
cannot afford to give him farther chance to plot explanations and
arrange evasion by any word of mine. Leaving home at about eleven,
in three-quarters of an hour, or less, they could reach Bussey’s
wood (for I take it for granted they did not tarry at May’s wood,
persuaded by _some one_ to go farther off from Boston), say, about
twelve o’clock. Give them time to gather leaves and wreathe them, as
they did,—a wreath being found around the boy’s hat, and portions
of wreaths about the murder-rock, where the girl had evidently been
employed in such amusement,—and we reach half-past twelve, or perhaps
a little later; and that is the time I have fixed as the epoch; for
after that, whatever of garlands were woven, were made by hands we
cannot see, but only hope to see. Now, had I not changed my intention
to sketch that forenoon, I would have passed by the path beyond
which, hidden by the woody screen, the girl was afterward sitting,
and also grazed the spot whither the boy had fled, or been thrown;
but it would have been before they had entered the wood; but I would
have been at work at the moment of the killing, or, mayhap, passing
within a few feet of the place where Isabella Joyce was murdered, or,
after being murdered, concealed.
If, in passing at the moment when the deed was in the act of
accomplishment, and I had heard a cry ever so feeble, I would,
unquestionably, have proceeded to inquire into its cause; and had
I come upon the brute, and been at the instant in possession of as
much pluck as I had weapon,—an iron-clasped, well-seasoned, heavy
camp-stool,—he would have fared badly; for, once up, my arm is one
of very admirable development, and my temper not the best calculated
for easy martyrdom, and I might have saved her life at least, and in
doing which, an incident might have happened which the fiend would
not have had time to remember—in the flesh. Or, if I had not passed
at that exact exigency of time, but was engaged in my sketching,
I possibly might have been startled by her outcry for mercy from
him, or appeal to others, and by the manhood that is systematized,
for the defence of the weak and wronged, in this six-foot carcass
of mine, I would have gone with utter ferocity to the rescue; but
with what success crowning my enterprise, is only known to the Great
Inscrutable. However, had the murderer accomplished his bloody
purpose on the girl, and was following the boy, and I had passed
downward to the level bridge, I might have seen that supplemental
tragedy, or arrested it, and taken the culprit red-handed in his
course. I would, under any of these circumstances, have been more
happy in my life, had I been the means of saving two other lives, or
even one, though I question much if it would not have been at the
expense of another life as yet unclaimed by the gibbet.
Barring all these contingencies, and taking it for granted that I
had passed in and out of the wood without detecting anything of
those terrible occurrences, it might have fared ill with me in the
subsequent phases of the affair, for there was a strict investigation
made as to who was in that wood during that day; and beyond a
question, as I would not have attempted to conceal the fact of my
presence, my friends of the police would have laid their justifiable
hands upon me, and placed me in the black category of the suspected.
In mentioning this idea since to my friend the logician of judicial
mystery, the tall chief of the force, he assured me that I would not
have been interfered with, as I did not come in the least within the
principles of his theory of the murder. But that did not exempt me,
as I shall proceed to state.
VII.
SUSPECTED.
Keeping in view the fact of the week’s concealment, my reader will
readily understand that I had no inducement to change my usual
habits, so far as the woods were concerned, and I consequently kept
up my visitations; but as the heat was growing daily more severe, I
did not stroll far from the house, but confined myself in the main
to the wood that reaches from the brook to the westward road in our
front. I avoided thus pretty much my former walks, which included all
that space lying between the flat bridge and the old gray rocks it
had been my intention to make a memorandum of. Now and then, when the
heat of the day had subsided, I went as far down as the stream; for
exceedingly cool and pleasant was it there, and quiet, too, in the
shady evenings. Sometimes I took my sketching apparatus, but oftener
went without it; but it seems that, however I might go, I was not to
do so without creating a terrible suspicion.
The search, prompted by public duty, or instigated by private
curiosity, had apparently worn itself out, when, upon a sweet
morning, some two weeks after the discovery of the bodies, I stepped
out of the front door, and saw, sitting under a shady tree in the
stable-yard, holding converse with my host’s father, a member of
the polician fraternity. Naturally enough, thought I, this vigilant
is wandering round to see what he can pick up of stray hints and
suggestions that may lead to the discovery of the criminal, and the
obtaining of the large rewards that had been tendered by public and
private liberality. I recognized the policeman at once, having often
rode in the car on Tremont Street which he conducted. Circumstances
then induced quite an acquaintance of great kindness between us.
He had been left for dead after one of the great battles in the
Chickahominy, slaughtered by four or five bullets of the Southern
rifles, but picked up and cured, and fated in after days to have the
high prerogative of being put upon my track as one of, if not the
bloody villain of all, concerned in the killing of the Joyce children.
I went over to where the two were chatting under the
bee-laden lime-tree, and, after hand-shaking with the ex-dead
soldier-policeman, I helped to keep up the conversation, which flowed
naturally upon the subject of the universal curiosity. He smiled a
very peculiar smile when he saw me coming to him, and the farmer
smiled, too; but that passed in my mind for nothing more than the
fact of his meeting with an old friend. Ah! little did I think,
while I smoked my pipe and gossiped so sociably with that placid
friend of justice, that it was especially to find who the tall, dark
stranger was, who, with a bowie-knife in hand, and great firing of
his revolver, roved those haunted woods of Bussey. I did not know
until he had shaken hands and gone away; when the farmer told me that
the policeman had come to inquire who it was that was living with
the family, and what my habits were, and where I was on the day of
the murders, etc. My coming out of the house had interrupted this
diabolical inquisition, and, upon seeing me, they both had looked at
each other and exchanged a knowing smile, which, interpreted into
English, could be spelled out thus: “Oh, I know him!” on the part
of the policeman; and “You’re sold this time,” on the part of the
farmer. The fact was that a youth, with his head full of ghosts and
shrieking children, had seen me in the vicinage woods before and
after the murders, and, frightened at my pallette knife and my ball
practice, had hastened to the station at Jamaica Plains and made
report of the terrible bandit and assassin. My friend of the police
has often since laughed with me over the adventure, and I have almost
grown to look upon myself as a gentleman of rather a forbidding
and ferocious cut, and feel prepared to let myself out to some of
my friends at the Studio Building as a model for any species of
brigand, of Italy or Wall Street; or, if it be not treason to say
so, of State Street, Boston. There is something, after all, in being
remarkable. However, it so happened that in one way or another I
became a satellite to the sanguinary meteor that had swept over those
woods, and, had I allowed it, I would have grown into a morbid mass
of melodramatic idiosyncrasy. But the worst had not come yet.
VIII.
THE MURDER-ROCK.