CHAPTER X

I

Wednesday night, October 10, 1900.

Dear Judy: I am just home from Quilterville where I got your telegram asking me to tell you the truth about what has happened here. I told Grandfather and the others that they had no right to lie to you, and that they couldn’t fool you if they tried. I knew you could tell from the crazy telegram we sent to you that we were hiding something from you.

Judy, I’m going to do for you what I’d want you to do for me. I’m going to tell you the truth. This business of sparing you and all that is sentimental twaddle. It isn’t only your right to know, it is your duty to know that Father did not die mercifully and peacefully and all that rot last Monday night.

Father was murdered in his room. He was shot and killed. That would seem horror enough, wouldn’t it? That isn’t the horror. That isn’t why we have been lying to you. That isn’t what has beaten us. I’ll tell you what the real horror is. And yet—it can’t be true. If it can’t be true, it must be false. I’ll tell you why. I’ve thought it all out. I’ve thought it all out carefully. It can’t be true. I mean, it can’t be true that some one of us right here in the house that night, some member of our family, the Quilter family, murdered Father.

That is the first thing we have to do, Judy, you and I. We have to prove that no member of the Quilter family murdered Father. When that is out of the way, we can think straight again. We can go ahead and find out who did do it—damn him! And we’ll attend the hanging.

That’s why, before I tell you anything else, I’ll have to tell you what I have thought out about the family. You know I’m not as crumby about the family as the rest of you are. You know I can think more clearly about them than you could. I know that we are a doggone faulty bunch. I have accepted that. I think it wise to accept that, first.

Beginning with Grandfather, who is the best of the lot now Father is dead. Grandfather is a sentimentalist, and something of a poseur, and—— Let it go at that. What’s the use? Next to Father, Grandfather is the decentest person, man or woman, that I have ever known or ever shall know. He’s not perfect, I suppose. But he comes too darn near being for me to point his imperfections. Any denial of wrongdoing for Grandfather would be desecration. Grandfather’s world revolved around Father—and Aunt Gracia and Lucy.

Now for the handsome Christopher. Chris is wormy with selfishness, and lazy as a dog, and weak as water, and conceited. All right. But when it comes to murder—he’s as clean out of it as Grandfather or Lucy, and there’s no sense in dodging it. Chris would half kill Father with worry—he’s been at that, hard, for six months now. But, in his way, we are bound to grant that Chris loved Father. He wouldn’t shoot him, if he had the best reason in the world for doing it. We know that. And we know, too, that right now Chris needed to have Father alive, as an excuse for selling Q 2 and to manage the smaller ranch Chris said he was going to get for us. Father’s death puts a decided crimp in Chris’s plans.

Olympe. She’s vain and affected, and has her share of common ordinary faults. But could any living being, in his senses, suggest that Olympe would shoot a dying kitten to put it out of its misery? If Chris has sold us out, as he was threatening to do, Father’s ability to establish us on another place was Olympe’s best chance for keeping out of the poorhouse she’s been talking about all the time lately. Olympe loved Father.

Aunt Gracia. She has had her mind all mussed up for years with that fool religion of hers. She has gone a bit sour, of late, as the rest of us have, from overwork and overworry. But anyone who would whisper murder in the same breath with Aunt Gracia’s name would be a liar and a criminal fool, and I know it, and you know it, and everyone who has ever seen her knows it. Just writing it makes me hot. Aunt Gracia loved Father.

Irene. She is one of the crumbiest specimens I ever saw. She’s at the bottom of Chris’s threatening to sell the place—she has nagged him into it. She has caused all sorts of trouble here from the first night she came. I’ve hated her like a burr under the saddle. I hate her yet. Partly because of that I know that she would not commit a murder—could not have committed this murder. It took a smart person, and a plucky person, and a darn tricky person to get away with this business on Monday night. Irene is a first-rate idiot. She is a chatterbox, and a coward. Tell me that a woman who is afraid of a cow will walk into a room and shoot a man dead? Not on your life she wouldn’t. If she had wanted Father out of the way, she might have tried slow poison. She had no reason for wanting Father out of the way. She didn’t love him, or anyone. But she liked Father; she couldn’t help it. Three months ago Father gave up trying to influence Chris in any way about selling Q 2. Irene needed Father alive for the same reason Chris needed him—his ill health as an excuse for selling us out; his ability to manage the new place for us.

Lucy and I were the only other people in the house on Monday night. The missionaries who had been visiting here left Q 2 early Monday morning, and old Dong Lee went in with them to Portland to see a dentist.

I’ll be damned if I’ll defend Lucy. And Neal Quilter didn’t do it. I know that. The others here may not know it. If I were any one of them, I’d suspect Neal Quilter, and with good cause.

Read this, Jude. I’ve had plenty of reason to think, here lately, that Father was losing his mind. His giving up, and allowing Chris to plan to sell us out. And then that baptism junk. Lucy wrote it to you. Father’s explanation satisfied her. It didn’t satisfy me—not by a long shot; not from Father. Father was no sap. Well, then, suppose I knew that he’d rather be cleanly dead than living with his mind worse than dead—and he would. Suppose I knew that Father would rather die than to have the Quilter name tainted with insanity? He would have. You know Father, and Grandfather, and their “ten generations of sound-minded, clean-bodied men and women.” All right. I am smart enough, and I have pluck enough to have planned this thing, and to have done it.

Read this. Having Father dead doesn’t do any of us any good. Having Chris die would have saved the Q 2 Ranch. Since Chris had no sons, the ranch would have gone to Grandfather. Well, Father and Chris have changed rooms lately. All of us were always butting into the wrong rooms. I starred at it. Irene was downstairs in the sitting room when Father was shot. Suppose I had meant to sneak in and kill Chris, and had been so excited—I would have been excited, I suppose—that I got into the wrong room. Suppose I had seen a man there in bed, and suppose I’d shot on the instant, thinking that he was Chris. That is, suppose I had meant to kill Chris and had killed Father, by mistake.

I am the only member of the family who is unsentimental enough to do it. Or mean enough. Or, funny how we’ll stand up for our precious selves, loyal enough to Q 2 Ranch. Not long ago I told Lucy that I’d stop at nothing, including bloodshed, to save the place. I said it. I meant it. I must have had murder in my mind—or the potentialities for murder—to have said a thing of the sort.

You see, assuming that I did it, it works out smoothly enough. I didn’t do it. I swear to God that I know I did not. If I had done it, I’d know it. I didn’t do it. Lucy knows that I didn’t. Lucy knows that within two minutes after we’d heard the shot, she came running into my room, through our inside door, and found him—me, I mean—hammering at the door into the hall, trying to break the damn thing down. But then you know, Jude, that Lucy would lie herself into Hades to save me from being suspected. This, though, isn’t a question of her needing to lie. I mean, she did find me locked in my room. I know that. It is a fact. I’ve got to keep hold of it, and of one or two other facts that I have. You see, you and I have to prove, first, that I didn’t murder Father. I mean, that none of the Quilters did do it. I mean——

II

Later, Wednesday night.

I stopped writing there and went out and walked to the road and back. Breathed some sweet snow air into my lungs. Cleared my head. Time I did, I guess. That last page or so seems to be rather raving. Sorry. But I am going to send it along because I want you to have all this straight, and because, as Grandfather always says, we do have to think this thing through—straight through.

Straight thinking isn’t easy as yet. Writing does me a pile of good. To write a thing you have to get it more or less into shape. That is what I’m going to do. I’m going to sit here—I am staying up for a few nights—and write the whole thing out, in black letters on white paper to you. It will keep my thoughts in order—you’ve no notion what a filthy mess they have been in for the past two days. It will do more than that.

I said, in the beginning of this, that it was your duty to know the truth. This is what I meant. It would be just like you not to think so, but you’ve a long way the best of it, being off in Colorado and not in the midst of this hell here. You should be able to think better and to see more clearly than I can. I’ll give you a straight account of facts from here. You’ll have the enormous advantage of perspective. Together we’ll get the truth. We have to. You and I are young. The others are old. I don’t wish to be crumby and sentimental about it. But you and I won’t even have a right to die until we find who murdered Father. Out in the air, just now, I decided that, if a member of the family did do it—then we must find that out, too. You know, Judy; if not for the sake of punishment, at least for the sake of justice to the others.

Take a brace then, dear, and get ready for the facts. They aren’t sweet, I’ll warn you.

On Monday evening we all milled around in the sitting room, about the same as usual, as far as I can remember. I have been so darn grouchy, lately, though, and so much interested in _Descent of Man_ that I haven’t paid much attention to the folks. I have asked Chris about Monday evening (one doesn’t quizz Grandfather), and he says that no one acted nervous, or excited, or peculiar in any way. An opinion worth nothing, I am afraid, since he was so busy spooning with Irene that he probably would not have noticed a fit on the hearthrug. I think perhaps Lucy will know whether anyone acted in an unusual way. But Lucy, poor little kid, isn’t fit to be questioned just now. Aunt Gracia agrees with Chris. So, for the present, we’ll record that everyone acted as he usually does act.

Around nine o’clock Olympe went up to bed. Then Grandfather went, and Aunt Gracia went with him, as usual, to turn down his bed and so on. Chris and Irene ambled out together. I waited until I was sure I wouldn’t meet them hugging in the hall, and then I went and suggested to Lucy that it was time for her to come. She said she would when she had finished the chapter she was reading. I heard her come into her room, just before I went to sleep. I don’t know, nor does anyone seem to know, what time Father came up to his room.

The next thing I knew I heard the shot, loud as a cannon, bang through the house. I jumped out of bed and ran to my door. It was locked. I ran back to the table and got the lamp lighted and began to hunt around for the key. I don’t know why, but I thought that the door was locked on the inside. I couldn’t find the key. I was scared. I grabbed a chair and began to try to bang through the door with it. At about the second bang, Lucy came running into my room in her nightgown, screaming my name, and what was it, and that her door was locked. I didn’t pay much attention to her. I was crazy by that time, for the house was a bedlam. Everyone was trying to do what I was trying to do—get doors open. And everyone was shouting and screaming to everyone else.

I had busted two of the bedroom chairs before I realized what a fool I was—trying to crash a heavy oak door with a frail maple chair.

I noticed that Lucy had gone. I ran into her room. Her lamp was lighted, and she was showing more sense than I had shown by trying nail files and hairpins in her keyhole. All the time the noise in the hall kept up. Everyone was shouting and calling and rattling his door and trying to bang it down—everyone, that is, but Olympe. I’ll tell you about her later.

I ran to Lucy’s window. I had some wild idea of getting out that way. For a second, then, I almost keeled over. Things seemed to break loose and stampede in my head, and the only thought I could corral had to do with Aunt Gracia’s judgment day. It took me fully half a minute to realize that the new world out there meant merely a heavy fall of snow. I opened the window. Snow was two inches deep on the sill. I leaned out. A cloud uncovered a ghastly moon. The snow had stopped. Lucy came and caught hold of me and said that we could not get out of that window. All this seems unimportant; but I wish I had as definite an account of everything that went on behind the other locked doors. This may not seem unimportant to you. I am trying to give you facts. You must try to interpret them.

I knew that Lucy was right about attempting to get out of the window. I closed it. She was shivering from cold and fright, so I got her wrapper and made her put it on. She went back to her job of trying to unlock the door with a nail file. I looked on her bureau to find something that might work better. I noticed the time by her little clock. It said ten minutes to twelve. It had seemed much longer, but I believe it had been less than ten minutes since we had heard the shot. Chris said that he looked at his clock, as he lighted his lamp, and it said a quarter to twelve. That tallies closely enough, I guess.

Chris missed Irene, for the first time, when the shot woke him, and he admits that he was senseless from fright. If he hadn’t been, he could have climbed out of his window and have run along the porch roof right there to the window of Father’s room. He did not know, of course, that the shot had been fired in Father’s room. But, if he’d had his senses—something that none of us did have—he surely would have used the window and the porch roof to get with some other member of the family.

I found a glove buttoner on Lucy’s bureau and tried it in the keyhole—fool’s work, of course. I think the others were trying the same racket, though, for most of the noise had stopped by that time. I suppose because Lucy and I were together was the reason that we didn’t call to the others. All the rest of them called. Aunt Gracia, in particular, kept shouting to Grandfather, over and over: “Father! Are you hurt? Father! Are you all right?” Lucy and I could hear Grandfather answering her, but Aunt Gracia seemed not to hear him. I think she was too excited, and too frightened to listen. Chris kept shouting like a Comanche for Irene.

I wonder, Jude, how we all knew that some terrible thing had happened? Nothing terrible ever had happened on Q 2. Why, then, the minute we all heard a gunshot in the house, late at night, did it throw us into a panic? I suppose the locked doors would be the answer. Yes, of course it was the locked doors and not the sound of the shot that locoed all of us.

Lucy and I were still monkeying with the lock when Irene shoved the key into it. She unlocked the door and said, or sort of mewed at us, “Your father!” and ran across the hall to Chris’s room.

Lucy’s door was the first one that Irene unlocked. Lucy was in front of me; so she was the first one into Father’s room—that is, since Irene had left it. Father was lying in bed. Irene had pulled the counterpane close under his chin. Lucy ran to him and caught him up in her arms.

Lucy is a thoroughbred all the way through. She didn’t scream. She didn’t faint. She didn’t utter a sound. She turned her head and looked at me. That was all. The trouble is, the same paralyzed look is still on her face. It has not worn off, not in two days.