CHAPTER XVIII

I

Thursday, October 18, 1900.

Dear Judy: You are a good kid, all right, but someway or other your letters seem to rub me the wrong way. For gosh sakes, Jude, stop telling me that I didn’t murder Father. If you keep on with that line, I’ll think, as I thought for a while about Chris and Irene, that you are protesting too much. After all, you can’t _know_ that I didn’t do it, as you keep declaring with underlines. Nobody here _knows_—anything. How can you know, away off there in Colorado?

It serves me right enough, for beginning this crazy, underhanded business of writing to you. The nights were long, and I had to have something to do, I guess, and the letters gave me a good excuse for writing, as Olympe says, “at a time like this.” Funny, how we’ll find excuses for ourselves. Funnier, how we’ll believe what we desire to believe. I don’t know what right I have to the plural. No matter; don’t stop, too long, to laugh over the humour I have just presented. I have something much more amusing to give to you.

Olympe had supposed that Uncle Phineas would come with Dr. Joe from Portland this afternoon. (Dr. Joe had been out of town and hadn’t got my telegram until late Wednesday.) When Uncle Phineas did not come, her fury propelled her from her bed and downstairs in her black gown—by this time fully denuded of its festive colour.

At seven this evening, Lucy came to me and asked me to come upstairs with her. She led me directly to Olympe’s room. Lucy is so choice, that I am going to attempt to quote her, as nearly as I can.

“Neal,” said she, “I have something to tell to someone, and I have decided that, just now, you are probably the best one of the family to tell.”

Said I: “To tell what?”

Said Lucy: “To tell that I am very sure no man with a red mask came to Olympe’s room on Tuesday night. Ever since I decided to be an author, Grandfather has been training me to observe closely. Now, Neal dear, will you please observe with me?”

She asked me to lie down on Olympe’s bed, where Olympe had been lying on Tuesday night. She had the night lamp lighted and on the table as it had been that night. She crossed the room, stood in front of the window, and asked me whether I could see her white face.

I could not. The night lamp, shaded as it is, lights a small circle on the bedside table, and lights nothing else.

I heard her open the window. “I am sitting in the window now,” she said, “with the pane pulled down between you and me. Does the glass make a difference? Can you see my white face?”

I could not.

“Then how,” she asked, “could Olympe have seen a man, and the bright red mask, at this same time on Tuesday night? Now listen,” she went on. “When I bang the window up hard, like this, you can hear it? But can you hear it when I raise it slowly, like this, inch by inch?”

Since it made no sound whatever, I could not.

“You see,” Lucy stated, “Olympe said that the window being raised, slowly, inch by inch, was what she heard to make her look toward it. She kept on hearing it, raised inch by inch. I can’t hear it myself, when I’m raising it slowly. You can’t hear it, over there. Olympe is, really, a trifle deaf.”

Neal shines. Neal is brilliant. “Just the same, Lucy, we all of us heard the shot. There is no arguing away from that.”

Lucy grows maternal. “Yes, Neal darling, of course. But, you know, I think that Olympe fired the shot herself. You see, she always slept with Uncle Phineas’s gun under her pillow when he was away from home. She kept it unloaded—or meant to. But the cartridges for it are right here in the commode drawer, where you found them the other night. Olympe could have put just one of them into the gun, and got into bed, and shot it off up there into the wall, where she knew it would stick and not hurt anyone. Then she could have jabbed it back under her pillow, and plumped right down into bed again. If we had searched for a gun, this time, and we didn’t, none of us would have thought it odd if we’d found the unloaded one under her pillow where she always kept it.”

“At least not as odd,” I said, “as I think it is for you to accuse Olympe of this. Why are you doing it, Lucy?”

“I’ll tell you my purpose in a minute or two,” Lucy said. “First, I should like to get through with my thinking. I think that Olympe’s reason for planning to do this was that Uncle Phineas went away and left her alone, when she kept telling him she needed his protection. Uncle Phineas, of course, will be shocked and remorseful when he finds how nearly Olympe did come to being killed. And, too, you know, Neal, Olympe has been sort of left out of things since Father was killed. Being almost killed herself, gives her an entrée. We know that is the way Olympe is made, and that she can’t help it at all—not any more than she can help being rather dull.

“The mask was cut from one of Olympe’s old ball gowns that I used to dress up in, in the attic. The trouble is, some little snips of it were here in her work basket, and some threads of it were still caught in her dull scissors. I thought it wise to look, because Sherlock Holmes was always making such important discoveries with bits of tweed, you know. Now, I think, I can tell you my purpose. I want you to explain to Olympe, Neal. She must be explained to, and I think it would be much better taste for you to do the explaining than for me, at my age, to attempt it.”

“Explain—what, Lucy?” I was shocked at the way I croaked it.

“But, Neal! You must explain to her that the man jumped quite heavily into the room from the window. That he came gliding across the floor, and stooped to glare, or peer, or some such thing, at her, beneath the lamp. That she took one horror-stricken glance at the frightful eyes, burning through the holes in the red mask, and, as he made a cruel, menacing sound, and seemed to reach for his gun, she fainted dead away. I have cleaned all the scraps out of her work basket, of course.

“You must be very careful, darling. It will be difficult. But it is necessary, now that Olympe has left her room, that she should not tell that story of hers outside the family circle. She had planned it so nicely, she thought, to have it all exactly like the other time. She even stole out in the hall, after you had left her, and locked all the doors. I think she must have brought the rope from the attic in the afternoon, and hidden it in Father’s room. Then she had only to dash in there, and carry it into her room. She must have hurried to get things all arranged and play the whole scene in so short a time. Poor Olympe—it must be sad for anyone to have to be as important to herself as Olympe is. You do understand, don’t you, Neal, that being an actress is really an affliction of Olympe’s, like Panys Gummer’s short leg?”

I told Lucy I understood that. What I did not understand, I went on to say, was how a little girl, who could think through a thing as intricate as this could possibly have been frightened by a silly story about Archie Biggil hiding in locked trunks.

Lucy said: “I only pretended to believe in that story. I thought if you could possibly think that I was afraid of Archie Biggil it would be so much better than for you to know the truth. Neal, dear, you have seemed to need comfort of late.”

I asked her if she would please consider that I had been comforted, and tell me, if she knew, what she had been afraid of.

“Why, Neal,” she said, “I was afraid of Olympe, of course.”

II

She left me wordless. I must have looked my need for comfort, however, for Lucy hastened with it.

“Darling,” she said, “that was my mere physical fear. It wasn’t by any means as uncomfortable as my unphysical fear that outsiders might discover the truth; but it made me more of a baby. I was especially afraid after I had laughed at Olympe, that evening. But, of course, I have had to be a little afraid from the first. And the Archie Biggil story made it worse. When Olympe told me that, I knew. Even Olympe, you see, Neal, couldn’t have credited that Archie Biggil story.”

“Lucy,” I managed to question, “are you saying that you believe Olympe murdered Father?”

“Yes,” she answered, in that direct way of hers, “that is what I believe. I am sure, of course, that Olympe didn’t mean to do it. I think she went into Father’s room with Uncle Phineas’s gun that night, and that she thought the gun was unloaded. When she got into Father’s room, she acted one of her scenes for him. I think she must have been trying to make him promise that he would not consent to Christopher’s selling the ranch. Christopher might not have sold if Father had opposed it strongly enough. Olympe was worried about the poorhouse, you know. So I think she went to Father to play like she was very, very brave—probably she had Charlotte Corday in mind, or some other fearless lady. Yes, Neal, I know it is very silly. But, you see, Olympe lives in this very silly world that she makes for herself—I mean, really lives in it all the time.

“I fancy, when she took the revolver from her dress, that Father just lay there and laughed at her. You know what laughing does to Olympe. You saw her the other night, when I laughed. And so, quite carried away with her acting, as she does get, you know, she pulled the trigger of the gun. She never thought that it would—but it did—go off. She must have been dreadfully shocked and frightened. She ran straightway back to her room, and fainted.

“Of course, she’d have had to be a little crazy ever to have begun any of that—or to think she could point a revolver at Father and get a promise. And I thought such a horrible accident might have made her a little more crazy. And I thought—I’m afraid this is not clear thinking, though—that suppose she’d suspect I had guessed the truth. And I know, Neal, this was silly of me; but I couldn’t keep from being afraid she might play another scene, and have another accident.”

Why, I asked, if Olympe had had no idea of using her gun, if she had thought that it was unloaded, had she locked us all in our rooms before she had gone into Father’s room?

“I think,” Lucy answered, “that she didn’t. I think that, when Irene came upstairs and found Christopher had locked her out, it vexed her so much that she slipped along the hall and locked all the doors—just to make trouble in the morning. You know, she told me herself that she locked the stairway doors to show Christopher that two could play at that lock-out game.”

“Do you think, Lucy, that Irene could have opened all of our doors, removed the keys, and locked us in without our hearing her?”

“I think she could have with all of us but Grandfather. If Grandfather had heard someone fumbling at his door, he would have supposed it was some one of the family, and, while he might have called a question, he might not have. If he had thought some one of us was trying to do something or other to his door without disturbing him, it would be just like Grandfather to be too courteous to let us know he had been disturbed.”

“And you believe that Grandfather would lie about it, afterwards?”

“That is wrong of you, Neal. But I do think that Grandfather might be generous rather than just. Since he didn’t know that it was Irene who took his key, he might think it more generous not to say that he suspected her. Since Grandfather would die, as you know, to save the Quilter honour, surely he would keep silent to save it.”

“All right. How did the keys get into Father’s room?”

“Perhaps Irene had them with her, in her wrapper pocket, when she came back upstairs after she heard the shot.”

“And why did she, from the very start, lie about locking the doors?”

“I thought,” Lucy said, “that she didn’t like to confess she had been the one to lock us all in. Everyone seemed to think that whoever had locked us in had committed the murder.”

“All right. Can you answer this? When Irene locked us all in our rooms, wouldn’t she have locked Olympe in her room, too?”

“She might have locked Olympe in Father’s room.”

“Only,” I protested, “when Irene opened Father’s door to get his key, wouldn’t Olympe and Father both have seen her?”

“If Father’s key had not been in the keyhole,” Lucy answered, “Irene might have heard voices in his room, and not have opened the door. She might have locked it with one of the keys she already had.”

“Very well. You have locked Father’s door. How did Olympe get out of it, after the shooting, and into her own locked room again?”

“If Father’s key had been in some handy place, she might have used it to unlock the door, and to open her own door, and to lock her own door after her, again. Or, Olympe, when she went into Father’s room, might have turned the key in the lock. It would have made a gesture, and a speech. She might have held the key in her hand, and have shown it to Father, and told him that, until she had his promise, neither of them could leave that room. Irene’s locking was just naughtiness. If Father’s door had been locked on the inside, she wouldn’t have bothered about it. She’d have locked the others and gone on downstairs.”

“And the rope, hanging out of the open window?”

Judy, on the square, I fully expected the kid to have some logical, well-thought-out explanation of the rope. I have spared you a description of my own mental processes during this interview with our little twelve-year-old sister. I have assumed that your imagination would be more competent than my powers of description. Well, thank the Lord, the baby stuck at the rope.

“Could it be,” she questioned, “that Olympe had threatened to hang herself out of the window with the rope?”

“Or to hang Father?” I suggested.

“I know,” she agreed, and blushed, “that is bad. That is allowing my literary imagination to run away with my logic. No, Neal, I can’t explain the rope. There is a chance that Father had wanted to get someone into the house that night, and had fixed it to help him in. Grandfather has told me about other incidents, that life allows such coincidences—I mean as Father having fixed the rope on the same night that he was shot by accident—but that literature does not. This is life—so that might be. Or it might be that Father had lowered something out of the window that night; something heavy that would have pulled the bed a bit. If he had done so before the snow was on the ground, whoever was below to receive it could have taken it and walked right away, or wheeled it in a barrow, and the snow would have covered any footprints or barrow tracks.”

“And Father, who had gone to all that trouble for secrecy, would have lowered his treasure chest out of the window, and have gone back to bed, leaving the window wide open for the wind to blow over him, and the rope dangling to be seen?”

Lucy argued: “The rope couldn’t have been seen until morning. Father might have had some reason for leaving it as it was for a few hours. Perhaps someone was going to send something up again—and couldn’t when he realized that the snow would show the footprints in the morning. Father would have closed the window. But Olympe might have opened it, at the last minute. She might have thought she’d throw the gun out of it. And then, when she saw the snow, and realized how a black gun would show in the white snow, changed her mind.”

“By the way, Lucy, why did Father say ‘red mask’ to Irene?”

“If he did say it, I think he said it to save Olympe. He’d wish to, you know. He’d have been sure that Olympe did not mean to shoot him.”

“Have you decided what heavy thing it was that Father lowered out of the window, and to whom he lowered it?”

“I had thought,” Lucy answered, “that you might know that. I had thought it might have something to do with the secret you and Uncle Phineas have been keeping together. I thought Uncle Phineas, since no one knew where he was the night Father was killed, might have been under Father’s window.”

As it happens, Judy, that is utter idiocy. Ruled out. A good many persons know exactly where Uncle Phineas was that night. We shall all know it, before long now. I told Lucy this. She remarked that she was glad.

I told her, next, that this mistake of hers should be a lesson to her concerning how easily mistakes could be made in matters of this sort. (That sounds like me and my heavy platitudinous, pedagogic style. Odd, the continuation of Lucy’s devotion.)

She asked me what other mistakes she had made.

I explained to her that, though she had worked her problem neatly, she had not got the right answer because she had left out an important equation—the human equation. I asked her, if Olympe had actually planned to go through with such a scene in Father’s room, what her first thought would have been.

“To dress up for the part,” said Lucy. “But I decided that she had undressed, again, before we found her in her outing-flannel nightgown.”

“Very well,” I said. “But examine this. Would Olympe leave Father, mortally wounded, run to her room, get out of her costume, hang it in the closet—it was not strewn about her room—put on her nightgown, take the gun again into her hand, and fall in a dead faint on the floor? Not only would she have done all that, but also could she have done all that before she fainted?”

“I should think,” said Lucy, “since she did miss meeting Irene in the hall, there’d have been plenty of time, after that.”

“Narrow it down,” I insisted. “Would Olympe, if she had shot Father by mistake, have left him alone to suffer and die? Remember, Lucy, that in spite of her artificiality, Olympe is a good woman.”

“Do you mean,” Lucy gasped, “that Olympe shot Father on purpose?”

“I mean,” I said, “you little nonny, you, that Olympe did not shoot Father at all. I mean, that it has been wrong of you to think these thoughts.”

“Doubtless,” she sighed, in that seldom-used, grown-up manner of hers. “But I have decided that I must have a wicked personality. I have broken all the rules of conduct Grandfather gave to me. But at least, Neal, I am logical.”

I told her that if deciding one of the family was a murderer, or, at best, a brutal beast of a coward, and that all the rest of the family were scamps and liars was an evidence of logic, she was logical right enough.

“Whom have I accused of lying?” she asked.

“Begin with Chris. He said, under oath, that he did not lock Irene out of their room that night.”

“I didn’t hear him say it. But, even so, I’d call that a very light lie—a lie that any gentleman should be willing to use to get a lady out of serious trouble, especially since the lady was his wife.”

“And what serious trouble was Irene in?”

“But, Neal, she was the only one of the family who was locked out in the hall.”

“Lucy,” I questioned, “whom have you been talking to?”

“Really, only to myself,” she said. “But I’ve pretended to be talking to Sherlock Holmes. I have been Dr. Watson for days now—whenever I have felt at all up to it. It is an excellent way to clear one’s mind, Neal. Why don’t you try it, dear?”

I told her that I didn’t care for the sort of clear brain that could clean out a good woman’s character in a swoop and leave a bad woman, a woman rotten to the core. I asked her if the second affair had not come up, how long she had planned to keep this mad belief of hers, that Olympe had done the murder, a secret?

“I had meant,” she replied, “to keep it forever. It seemed best. You’d think, Neal, that keeping it would have been quite easy. No. It hasn’t been.”

You’ll hate me for this, Judy, I suppose. It was beastly of me, I know. But I’d thought that Lucy needed a lesson. And—why not be honest?—I love the working of the kid’s mind. I am as proud as a parent when I get a peek at the way it goes. But that final little, “No. It hasn’t been,” of hers, got the best of me.

I told her then what I should have told her in the beginning, and what she had had no opportunity to know without being told, since she was not at the inquest: That the bullet, which Dr. Joe had removed from Father’s body, had been fired from a .38 Colt’s of fairly recent make. That Uncle Phineas’s old Colt’s was a .32 calibre. That he left it at home, now, when he went on prospecting trips, because he had the new .38 that he bought a couple of years ago when Father and Grandfather bought theirs of that man who came around on a bicycle taking orders for them.

“Was the kind he sold the kind that killed darling Father?” Lucy questioned.

“Yes. And every man who has a gun in three counties has one of them. We can’t get far with that; but far enough to prove that a .38 bullet cannot be fired from a .32 gun.”

“I had thought,” Lucy said, “that Uncle Phineas went to the city. You and I telegraphed there.”

I told her that before long now she’d know where Uncle Phineas had been; and, until she did know, it would be more polite to stop guessing about it.

“I only meant,” she explained, “that, if Uncle Phineas had gone to Portland, and not prospecting, he probably wouldn’t have taken his new .38 Colt’s with him.”

For a wonder, I understood what she meant. It proves again, plainly, my contention that guns, ropes, coal oil, and their ilk are worthless, worse than worthless, when it comes to finding the truth in a case of this sort.

“Very well, Lucy,” I said. “If you can believe, after having known Olympe all your life, that she would run away from Father, whom she really loved, when he was lying there with blood streaming from his breast, dying—run away, hide a gun so that it could never be found, get out of her clothes, and the rest of it, with no thought of anything but saving herself—it wouldn’t help you much to tell you that Uncle Phineas did have his gun with him, his .38 Colt’s, on that trip. I took it out of his valise myself, when I helped him to unpack.”

Lucy looked at me, drew in a long breath, and burst into tears. For a moment I thought they were tears of relief. Not so.

“It was so much better,” she sobbed, “to think that Olympe did it by accident. None of the rest of us could have done it by accident. And, besides, nothing is real to Olympe. Neal—Neal—— See, now—the rest of us!”

She said it, Judy. The rest of us. The more I think of it, the more I am certain that Lucy is right, absolutely right, about Olympe’s little drama of Tuesday evening. It is all perfectly evident. But I do not believe that Olympe staged it either to spite Uncle Phineas or to get the centre of the stage. I know that she is too good a woman to have yielded to the temptation for no better reasons than these. I think that she thought the act would do just what it did do, for me at least. That it would remove suspicion from every member of our household.

Damn it all, Jude! Why didn’t I think of something of the sort? Why didn’t any other one of us? Do you get the irony of it? Olympe, the one person here on the ranch—I suppose we should have to except Irene, also—who would have bungled it hopelessly was the one person who thought of the scheme. If Chris, or Aunt Gracia, or I had possessed wits for the conception, we’d have had wits for carrying it through convincingly.

I don’t know whether or not I have been the one fool of the household. If any of the others have doubted Olympe’s story, they have not betrayed their doubt by the flicker of an eyelash. Though, of course, Grandfather doubted it from the beginning. His first question, I am sure I told you, was whether Olympe had discharged a revolver by accident. That, too, explains his reluctance to having me ride immediately to Quilterville. Also, when the county bunch arrived, Grandfather had them come directly to his room. He said that Olympe was in no condition to be troubled with questions. You see, he wished to tell Olympe’s story for her. And when I heard him telling it, “Mrs. Quilter was aroused from her sleep, on Tuesday evening, by hearing a noise in her room. She opened her eyes and saw a man creeping toward her; a man whose face appeared to be covered with the red mask we have since found. She fainted from terror——” I merely thought that he had been too much fuddled at the time to get Olympe’s story entirely as to detail.

It seems to me, now, that Chris did flash an odd glance while Grandfather was telling Olympe’s story. If I am right about that, it might easily mean that Chris thought as I thought concerning Grandfather’s befuddlement. Because I have dreaded it, I suppose, I have imagined, once or twice, that Grandfather was getting less keen here of late. He is not. This proves it. Or, if he is, he could lose about half of his intelligence and still give us all cards and spades.

This, then, Judy, so far as I am concerned, is the end of it. We are back where we began, the night of Father’s murder. I am through. I am not writing any more of these Mr. Micawber epistles. I don’t know who the murderer is. I don’t want to know. You don’t know. I don’t want you to know. So, no more brain storms, no more nervous palpitations, no more fake jubilations, and but one more apology—sorry, Jude, that I ever began any of this rot—from,

Your loving brother, Neal.