Part 7

"It was a week-old paper. I was there ... wait a moment." I made a rough calculation in my mind. "This happened, apparently, on the Thursday previous. That should bring it to about the third of the month."

"The third was a Thursday," said Lessing. He pulled out an almanac from the bookshelves and ran the pages over. I saw him frown.

"There was a full moon on that evening. It is just possible he was riding without a light at all. If so, that throws my whole theory out."

"The whole thing," said I, "looks to me like the work of a maniac. Take the lamp. It was picked up some yards away. Now a bicycle lantern isn't merely hung on; it's screwed on, and you can't imagine any sort of blow struck from above that would dislodge it and throw it that distance. It must have been either unscrewed or torn off, deliberately, and that in itself suggests human agency."

Lessing barely heard me. He was staring at the scrap of paper spread out on his knee.

"The first man, according to your reporter was killed actually in the woods. The second was picked up some twenty feet from the edge of the woods, on the open road. That's important. It was a clear night. Why should he be attacked in the open when there were woods within half a dozen yards that would have given ample ambush?" Unconsciously he was repeating the reporter's argument. "That doesn't look like the work of a human being. Besides, the man wasn't robbed. I tell you, Haverill, there's something that doesn't satisfy me in all this. Either they made some extraordinary mistake, or ... but he was riding _towards_ the woods!"

"Apparently."

"On what evidence?"

"I suppose the position of the bicycle," I said lamely.

"There had been no rain for some days. The roads are hard about here, and a bicycle wouldn't be likely to leave tracks, especially on the edge of the path. You're a doctor, Haverill. Suppose a man died from heart failure, would he necessarily die at the instant of the shock?"

"Only in romances. Actually, there would be several seconds' interval at least."

"He might run, say, twenty feet and then drop?"

"Quite possibly. But I don't see how that helps."

"It means just this," said Lessing, "that according to my idea the man was not riding towards the woods at all. He was attacked actually in the woods or at the edge of them, and he ran the twenty feet to where his body was found. Listen. The moon did not rise that evening until 10.30. Anyone riding through the woods the earlier part of the evening would have used a lamp. He was a stranger in the district and was identified only by papers. No one in Coopersville knew him or had apparently ever seen him before. Coopersville is not a large place, and a case like this makes sufficient talk. If he had passed through there during the evening someone would have seen him, and it would have been mentioned at the inquest. The chances are that he had come from a distance, and that he was riding _towards_ Coopersville with the idea of putting up there for the night. Assuming that, and that he was carrying a lamp at the time, we have our facts fairly clear. He was attacked just within cover of the woods, that is to say, where the light would be more clearly noticeable than on an open stretch of moonlit road. The overhanging trees would break the attack more or less, which accounts for the comparative slightness of his own injury. The primary object of attack being the lamp, the rider would have the chance of escape, whereas if he had been struck actually in the open, at full force, he would have been probably killed on the spot."

The whole theory was fairly ingenious, but it didn't account for the wrecking of the bicycle, for its being found where it was, some distance clear of the woods and near the man's own body. I told Lessing so. He looked at me queerly.

"Have you ever seen a dog worry a stick?" he asked.

"We aren't dealing with dogs."

"Whatever wrecked the bicycle could have dragged it that distance."

"If your theory has anything in it the bicycle was carried. If it had been dragged they would have found traces. Don't tell me that any animal capable of such insensate fury as you suggest would have had the intelligence to conceal its tracks!"

We were both getting rather heated over the argument. It seemed to me that Lessing was bent obstinately on maintaining his own views, to the point of extravagance. For my part, I was equally positive that the affair was due to some human agency. Neither of us, therefore, was aware of a shadow in the doorway until Mary Lessing's pleasant mocking voice broke in upon our discussion.

"What on earth," she said, "are you two people scrapping about so vehemently?"

"We weren't scrapping," I smiled. "We were discussing a problem--you might call it a scientific riddle. It concerns the law which governs the movement of bodies through space."

Mary turned on me her invariable reproachful glance when she suspected that anyone was making fun of her. She sat down, pulling the pins from her hat, and let the sunlight strike on her roughened bronze-coloured hair.

"Is it anything," she inquired, "with which my inferior feminine mind might be capable of grappling?"

"Certainly," I returned promptly. "We will illustrate it with the simple objects now before us. How would it be possible, for instance, for that extremely solid book-case to be moved, say, to the other end of the room, without being dragged or carried?"

Mary affected to consider, her head on one side.

"Simple enough," she said, laughing. "It would have to fly through the air, that's all."

There was a moment's silence in the room, while I looked at Lessing and he looked at me.

"Suppose we have some tea?" he said then.

X

THE CHICKEN-HUCKSTER'S HOUSE

It was the last week-end in August that Herrick arrived. For nearly two days before it had rained steadily, and I had spent the time indoors, discounting old scores in the shape of letters, and enlivened only by a visit from Lessing, who walked over in oilskins on the Thursday afternoon to spend a couple of hours smoking on a sheltered corner of the front porch. The weather lifted on Friday night, and by Saturday morning the roads were passable. As I did not expect Herrick before the 5.40 train I took my bicycle out after lunch and went for a spin to stretch my limbs.

I set out by way of the village, posting my letters on the way, and intending to make a circuit that would bring me home from the opposite direction. I managed, however, to lose my bearings, and after some fruitless bungling stopped at a farmhouse to ask my way. The farmer seemed rather less taciturn than most of the folk about, and readily pointed me out a short cut which, according to him, would bring me out at the cross roads just above the dam.

The road, which lay for the first few miles through cultivated land, entered eventually upon a stretch of sparsely wooded country, desolate and inhospitable enough. Stunted spruce trees, powdered with blue berries, clung tenaciously to the barren ground, and everywhere the grey monotonous boulders cropped out, scattered as though in the idle finish to some giant's play. Their uncouth rounded outlines suggested from a distance a field dotted with grey misshapen sheep, for ever movelessly browsing. The road was bad; a horse would have had difficulty in picking his way, and I cursed the well-meaning farmer roundly as I dismounted to push my heavy machine.

A little distance on, however, things became better. I reached the beginning of a wood, gaunt ragged hickories interspersed with tangles of wild grape-vine, and matted creepers, and a few hundred yards beyond a broken snake-fence suggested the whereabouts of a house.

I came upon it at the turn of the road, a square, red-painted frame house and barn, surrounded by a medley of small sheds and outhouses in every degree of dilapidation. There was no gate, merely a couple of bars let down in the fencing, and I left the bicycle a moment and went inside.

The yard upon which I entered was a litter of old junk of every description, ancient packing-cases, broken barrels, scrap-iron, and bones flung into piles. The wagon-ruts leading up to the house were sunken deep in filth, and an indescribable odour filled the air, in which the smell of badly kept fowls predominated. They ran everywhere, a ragged nondescript crew, scratching, cackling, gazing at me from evil yellow-rimmed eyes. Many more were confined in the coops, mere oblong boxes of lath from which protruded gaunt heads and outstretched necks, whose mournful protest mingled with the clamour of their untrammelled brethren. So far as I could see, every shed held its prisoners, all in the same state of filth and neglect, a sore to the eyes and offence to the nostrils. There was that in the look and smell of the place that stuck in my throat, used as I was to poverty in both town and country. There seemed no one about, and after a moment's hesitation I retraced my steps across the black mire of the yard and regained the roadway.

On the opposite side of the way a little ragged girl of about thirteen watched my retreat with keen eyes. She had been in the woods gathering the small uneatable nuts that children call pig-hickories; her apron was filled with the green unripe hulls. She grinned, backing a little at my approach.

"Hello, sis," I said. "Who lives in that house there?"

"'S Mister Menning's."

"Ah!" I took another backward glance at the ill-kept yard, with its indescribable litter. As I did so a low moan, almost human in its misery, came from the barn behind the jumbled sheds. It was repeated, long-drawn and mournful, the protest of a dumb thing exhausted by suffering. I turned to the child sharply.

"What's the matter there?"

"It's the cow." She shuffled her bare toes in the dust, looking with a fascinated curiosity towards the place whence the sound came. "She hollers awful sometimes."

"Is it ill?"

"Mennin beats her." She said with the curious indifference of the country-bred child towards animal suffering. "He's allus beatin' her. Gran'pap's spoke to him, onct. He says she don't make no profit an' Gran'pa says she can't make no profit if he's allus beatin' her."

I remembered her face suddenly.

"Aren't you Mrs. Nevill's little girl, from the Bend?"

"Yep. Gran'pa's house is jest back there." She jerked her head up the road.

"How's your mother? I'll step in and see her, as I'm here."

"Mother's up. She's been washin'."

She began to retreat up the road, with the sudden movement of a half-wild thing, and I followed her, glad enough to turn my back on the chicken-huckster's dwelling. The moaning of the cow was in my ears again as I walked on.

I knew the Nevills' cottage, and my road from there lay straight enough. I had never approached the Bend before from this side, and so the lie of the land was unfamiliar to me. The Nevills were one of the few Irish families about. The household consisted of a rheumatic old grandfather, his daughter, whom I had attended a short while ago, and her husband, a steady young fellow who worked at a harness factory in the village.

Paddy was an old sinner if there ever lived one, but now, along in the green seventies, he confined himself to the cultivation of religion and the smoking of a particularly vile corncob pipe. He had been employed most of his life on the railway, and his rheumatism was the result of six weeks' work in a flooded cutting. Providence had released him some two years ago from a vituperative wife, whose latter years had been soured by the burden of an invalid husband; I gathered from the old man's talk that she had to her last day regarded his rheumatism as a form of criminal idleness, and since her death Paddy had taken a fresh lease of life.

I found him on his usual corner of the cottage porch, his square old head with its bristly jaws--Paddy still shaved once a week--framed by the window-ledge and its row of flowering plants in tin cans. His daughter was inside, getting supper, and the new baby lay in a ramshackle baby-coach near Paddy's elbow. He was rocking the coach with one toe on the wheel while he smoked, the smell of his unspeakable tobacco mingling with that of the frying onions in the kitchen, through the open door.

I always felt like holding my breath when I approached the Nevill cottage. The stuffiness was of that permanent, impenetrable sort which seems to encompass the house solidly for a radius of five yards at least.

I sat down on the porch step and asked after Paddy's rheumatism. He looked down at his feet, shapeless in list slippers, like fearsome parcels.

"I ain't long fur this world, doctor, and that's truth I'm tellin' yer. Don't I know it? We ain't a long-lived fam'ly. Me father died at seventy-eight an' me brother at eighty, an' I'm thinkin' I won't be long after thim." He raised his voice suddenly to a shout, without turning, "Mary, git a cheer out fur th' doctor!"

I refused the chair hastily; the porch step at least bordered on fresh air.

"I've just come round by Aaron Menning's place," I said. "I met the little girl there."

Paddy's face darkened.

"Ain't I allus tellin' the young limb I won't hev her hangin' round the likes of thim dirrty Dutchmen! It's her mother'll be after takin' the strap to her fur that. The place ain't fit fur a dog these days. Did ye take heed to the cow there?"

I nodded.

"The poor baste do be after cryin' day an' night, like a Christian. I've told him again an' again, but he's a bad man is Aaron. He's took after his brother, an' that's sayin' ill enough of anyone. Ye wouldn't mind Jake Mennin', doctor?"

"No. It was before I came here."

"Sure I've lived neighbors to thim fifteen years, an' I've seen things to turn your stomach on yer. He had a bad streak in him, Jake, an' it was the devil took him in the end. They had a little girl there workin', the year before Jake died.... That's why I tell Lizzie I'll break her neck before I see her hangin' round there. The ould mother's a decent woman, or used to be. God knows the poor soul's had enough to turn her crazy."

"There is a mother, then?"

"Sure, but ye don't see her nowadays. 'Tis Aaron keeps her to the house, most like. I used to be civil spoke to Aaron a while back, but sence Jake died there ain't no good to him at all. Would any Christian man treat a dumb baste the way he does? An' he treats his ould mother the same, if all's known."

He pulled on his pipe.

"Two weeks ago, it would be, as we saw her last. Yes, I mind now it was the day I was thinkin' of puttin' the new winder-pane in. She come over to borry a half-cup o' sugar, an' I says to Mary to let her have it, the poor soul. She had her hand all wrapped up to here"--he measured a space on his gaunt grimy wrist--"an' she says to Mary as she'd scalded it in the kitchen. Aaron was away with the wagon, or she wouldn't 'a' come then."

"I suppose Aaron does a good business," I said casually.

"By the talk he does. I do be thinkin' he does most of it in the next county, fur I don't see him drivin' the village way more'n onct in a week or so. He'll be gone three days on a stretch wid the wagon, an' Lizzie's seen him come home mornin's wid the poor baste in a lather. Lizzie says he has hundreds o' chickens there, an' he can't be after sellin' thim all. They die on him all the time, fur she's seen him pull 'em out o' the coops and throw 'em to the pigs."

I asked after his son and rose to go, after turning the half of my tobacco pouch into Paddy's old tin box. It was getting on toward five o'clock, and I would have just time to clean up, get the mare put in, and drive to the depot for the afternoon train.

XI

JAKEY WALKS

It did me good to see Herrick's cheery face on the platform, and to feel the hand-grip he gave me. Our friendship dated back to college days, and unlike so many of those early intimacies, it had strengthened instead of decreased with the passage of time. Then, as now, Herrick had been the same curious mixture of enthusiast and practical hard-headed worker, and in spite of the inevitable schooling of experience and years of exacting and often discouraging labour, he had carried into the early forties a certain boyish confidence, a freshness of outlook, which gave to one instinctively, on meeting him, the impression of indomitable health and vitality.

When we had tucked his valise into the back of the buggy and turned the mare about, he looked at me with a laugh.

"Well, Haverill, you look quite the country practitioner already! Seven weeks' change--ye gods! But you haven't grown a beard yet!"

"I'm keeping the beard for my leisure moments," I told him. "So far they haven't been many."

"Don't tell me this place is in the throes of an epidemic! It looks like one of those ideal Sleepy Hollows where you get about one call for whooping-cough every six months. I came here for repose, you know."

"Oh, you'll get it," I assured him. "You'll get the kind of repose that keeps you awake nights wondering where it's going to hit you next. They don't want a doctor down here; they want a new lunacy commission officer, and the first suspect will be me. Oh, I'm going to make you work, Jack! Have no idle dreams on the subject."

"Work! You look as if you'd forgotten the meaning of the word! If ever a man had the luck to stumble on a good excuse for a holiday it's you. This air, this sky, these woods to fish and loaf in---- Hello, what's up? The whooping-cough I spoke of, or have you arranged a little semblance of business for my benefit! That good lady seems about to welcome us with open arms."

A woman was hurrying down the road toward us, from the direction of my house. She had a gingham sunbonnet on which flapped at each step as she walked, and on catching sight of the buggy with the familiar roan mare in the shafts she waved her hand in unmistakable signal. I pulled Bess up, and by the time the woman came pantingly abreast of us I recognized her for Mrs. Sliefer, who lived in the first farm-house beyond the Bend, past the cross roads.

"I been to your house, doctor," she began, "an' Mis' Searle told me you weren't to hum, so I come right on. My niece is took bad an' she's been queer sence the mornin', and I'd like you to come straight back with me an' see her."

She spoke with an air somewhat of indignation, born of her toilsome walk. Mrs. Sliefer was a stout lady, to put it at the mildest, and the heat and exercise had obviously tried her. I leaned from the buggy.

"Get right up, Mrs. Sliefer! There's plenty of room, and you can tell me as we drive."

She hoisted herself laboriously into the buggy, with our combined help, and collapsed, rather than sat down, between us. Luckily the seat was a broad one. As it was, her generous proportions all but crushed us.

I kept the mare at a walk while Mrs. Sliefer told her errand. Briefly, as I gathered from her rather spasmodic utterance, the facts were these.

Her niece, Rebecca Durn, who lived with Mr. and Mrs. Sliefer at the farm, was keeping company with the young man from Haskell's grocery store. The young couple were in the habit of meeting of an evening, after Rebecca had washed her supper dishes, in the woods near the sawmill, some fifteen minutes from the farm-house and in the line of the short cut which the young man used to walk up from the village. They usually took a short stroll about the dam before returning to the farm, to finish the evening in the older folks' company on the home porch. Yesterday, as I have said, was rainy, and Rebecca had expected her sweetheart at the house. As he did not arrive, however, and the weather had lifted since five o'clock, Rebecca, thinking he might possibly have gone to the usual trysting-place, put on a shawl and her rubber shoes and went out to find him. He was not to seen, and she loitered a few moments in the neighborhood of the dam before returning home. It was then just getting dusk. According to her account, she was strolling near the saw-mill when the ghost of Jakey Menning, surrounded by light and with flames coming from his mouth, sprang out from the bushes and yelled at her. Rebecca, struck of a heap, as she expressed it, had still the sense to turn and run, and being a sturdy young woman she speedily outdistanced the alleged ghost and gained the shelter of her own home. Once on the porch, however, she collapsed in hysterics, and it was not until she came to, a good half-hour after, that her aunt and uncle could learn what had happened. Rebecca's sweetheart had meantime arrived, and being a strong-minded young man had at once induced Mr. Sliefer to set out with him, armed with a stout cudgel and the farmer's shotgun, to investigate. They patrolled the neighborhood of the saw-mill thoroughly, but needless to say nothing was found.

Rebecca recovered, but this morning, on the matter being mentioned at breakfast, had promptly gone off again into hysterics, a state which had lasted all day, off and on, and which her aunt had been unable to check. The hysteria had brought on sickness, and the girl, so Mrs. Sliefer told me, was now in bed in a state of utter collapse.

I told Herrick I would drop him at the house.

"On the contrary," he returned, "I'll come along, with Mrs. Sliefer's permission."

We drove on accordingly, the three of us, covering the distance past Dutchman's Hill and the Lessing's bungalow at a smart trot. A few minutes beyond the saw-mill, along the road Mary Lessing and I had taken some mornings ago, the Sliefer's farm-house came in sight, a comfortable low-built dwelling standing back in a good-sized orchard with the barn and out-buildings clustered near it.

We found Rebecca in an upper bedroom, watched over by a mute and scared-looking neighbor, who had been fetched in to sit with her while her aunt was away. The girl lay in bed, her eyes rolling, her hands twitching nervously on the covers. There was nothing alarming in her condition, which had been brought about as much by Mrs. Sliefer's well-meant home physicking as by the original fright.

I went to the bedside and put my hand on her wrist.