“IWON’T consent to any further chasing of this woman.”
It was Charles Matthewson who spoke, standing in front of his brother in the library at Waterville, where the original interview regarding Cranston had taken place. It was a long time since Charles had spoken so positively to Henry, and the latter looked up half amused and half irritated, yet with an ugly expression on his face.
“You have suddenly become very much concerned for this—woman. I’ll use your polite term,” he said.
“I’ve suddenly become concerned for myself,” the other replied hotly. “I know, as you do, that she and her—misfortune have nothing to do with this murder; and I know, as you do, if you’ll stop to think a moment, that it’s a cowardly piece of business for men to engage in to hunt down a woman,simply because they may do so with the approval of the hunters.”
Henry gave a low whistle.
“Who’s been talking to you? You’ve got a sudden conversion as to this woman’s—misfortune.” He gave an ugly slur to that last word. “Time was when you’d call it by another name.”
“Well, whether I would or not, Cranston’s got to be called off from that line: and he’s got to be called off quick!”
“But Frank Hunter has been very insistent on this point. He seems to have some reason for thinking it important,” Henry answered.
“Because he thinks that a sensation there will stop folks asking questions nearer home. If he can raise a dust behind which he can negotiate for those papers, he’s got all he’s looking for just now.”
“Perhaps you don’t feel any interest in those papers,” Henry answered.
“Interest or no interest, I’m not going to skulk any longer behind a petticoat. I’m ashamed to have done it so long.”
“Good boy,” Henry said, making a motion as ifto pat him on the shoulder. “I ask again, who’s been stirring up your conscience?”
“Our mother,” said Charles simply.
Henry stopped in his act, and a new look came over his face.
“Does she think it unmanly?” he asked.
“She thinks it cowardly and mean,” Charles said strongly.
Not a sign of anger at these stinging words came into Henry’s face, but instead the look of a child justly reproved.
“I guess she’s right, Charles,” he said. “I guess she’s right. I hadn’t thought of it before, but it is mean and cowardly. I’ll call Cranston off at once.”
“And Hunter?” Charles asked in his turn.
“He can find something else to raise a dust, or he can come out into the open and fight; but he shan’t fight longer behind this woman’s petticoat. I wish we hadn’t done it at all!”
“I’d give more than I can tell,” Charles answered, giving cry to that bitterness of shame which, hidden in his heart, he dared not uncover.
“Yes,” said Henry; “to think that mother should call our act mean and cowardly! I’d rather the old papers——” Then he stopped short.
“Has it ever occurred to you that the papers may have had something to do with Wing’s death?” Charles asked.
“Hush up!” exclaimed Henry roughly. “There are some things a man shouldn’t even dare think, much less say.”
“But—by God,” Charles answered, “there are some things a man can’t help thinking and perhaps saying. I tell you, I’m not so certain I wouldn’t have shot Wing myself for the sake of getting hold of those papers!”
“And if you’re going to keep on talking this way, you might as well have done it,” Henry answered bitterly. “I wouldn’t trust myself to think such things as you’re saying.”
“But, Henry, think, just think——”
“I won’t,” the other shouted in a wild passion. “I won’t think, and I forbid you to ask me to! The man is dead and the Lord only knows into whose hands those papers have fallen. There’sonly one thing I keep thinking—thinking all the time,” and his voice dropped, while he looked anxiously over his shoulder, as if he feared the very walls of his library: “and that is that it was safer to have those papers in his hands, so long as we knew that they were there, than it is to have them in the hands of somebody—we don’t know who, for a purpose, we don’t know what.”
Charles grew paler than Henry had ever seen him. There was a gasp in his voice, as if he found breathing difficult, and he almost clutched at his brother as he said:
“That means that you are afraid, as I am, that the papers had some connection with his death, and you are trying to persuade yourself to the contrary. A month ago, you’d have jumped at the chance of somebody else having them, no matter who that somebody else might be: yet to-day you try to make me think that you believe it has increased the danger.You know better.I don’t care whose hands they’re in, we’re safer than we were when Wing had them. Now it’s only a question of money.”
“Then why don’t we hear from them?”
“It would be so safe, with matters as they are, for any one to offer to sell Wing’s papers,” sneered Charles.
“Suppose whoever’s got them makes copies of them?” Henry suggested.
“And you tell me not to think of these things!” Charles cried.
Henry Matthewson at once called Cranston off from the Bangor matter and then sent for Frank Hunter. The latter came in the early evening, uneasy, restless, and irritable. The mood was confirmed when he discovered what had been done.
“It’s that, or let him go to Millbank and keep excitement alive there,” he said. “Trafford strikes me as entirely capable of doing enough of that.”
“As matters stand,” demanded Henry, regardless of the caution he had given his brother, “do you know who were most likely to profit by Wing’s death?”
“We were,” answered Frank coldly. “Do you think I’ve ever failed to recognise that fact? I don’t do business that way.”
“Then you mean to say that you have seen fromthe first that if men looked for motives, they’d fasten on us?”
“I mean to say exactly that,” Frank Hunter answered; “and unless we can dig up something that shows that somebody else was in as bad a position as we, it will go hard with us, unless we can tire the detectives out and make them give it up as a bad job.”
It was Henry Matthewson’s turn to look and feel uneasy. Born to affluence, raised in wealth, and encouraged to high ambition, he had already gone far for a young man, and it seemed a piteous thing that in his own house, with his wife and children almost within call of his voice, he should be told that unless men could be made to forget and so abandon their interest in the Wing murder, it might go hard with him—that he might become an object of suspicion.
“I don’t mean,” Hunter said, “that we are in any danger of being convicted of Wing’s murder, or even of being arrested for it. That’s way beyond reason. But how much better off would we be, if the community should take up the suspicion that we were interested in Wing’s death; that we procuredit? The public is an unreasoning brute. Look at poor Oldbeg!”
“Poor Oldbeg!” repeated Matthewson. “What in the name of thunder makes you so tender of Oldbeg?”
“It is Charles more than I,” Hunter said, referring to his brother. “He insists that the man is innocent; that there’s not a scintilla of proof against him, and he won’t consent that the unreasoning whim of the people shall do such injustice; and in fact, when I think that our time may come at any moment, I can’t help feeling a good deal that way myself.”
In the shrubbery outside the window a man, who had followed Hunter from Millbank, listened and watched. He could hear nothing and see as little, but hour after hour he kept his post, with dogged patience, using a night to catch a single hint. Had Hunter known how closely he was followed and watched, he would have been still more uneasy and disturbed.
“What is it about this new corpse that’s been found at Millbank?” Matthewson asked.
“Oh, merely a drowned logger. Nobody knows him and he’s been unceremoniously put under ground. Nobody’d have thought anything of it at any other time, for there’s never a spring that one or more of them don’t turn up; but just now we are living on sensations, and it added to the interest that Trafford was on hand and almost the first on the spot.”
“Wasn’t it one of Trafford’s men who found it?” the other asked.
“So it’s said.”
“Was he looking for it, or for something else?” Matthewson persisted.
“What do you mean?”
“Why should Trafford have sent men to search the lower river, if he didn’t expect to find something? Had some one disappeared? You say a mere logger. What might Trafford say?”
“I believe you see a bogy every time you turn round,” Hunter said impatiently.
“‘’Tis conscience doth make cowards of us all,’” Matthewson answered. “I don’t like to be in this position. I don’t dare move to find the papers, forfear in doing so I stir suspicions concerning Wing’s death. I don’t dare leave the papers in the uncertain hands where they are, lest they arouse the very same suspicions. It’s a nice position for an innocent man to be in.”
The curiosity of the public, no longer fed on rumours and inquests, had begun to flag, giving place to the inevitable sneers at the police and detective force, with renewed predictions daily made that the murder would remain an unsolved mystery. But for the occasional sight of Trafford, and the expectation that the inquest might be reconvened at almost any time, the village would already have begun to forget the murdered man, so easily does a sensation fade into the commonplace.
But Trafford remained, or at least reappeared at unexpected moments, like an uneasy spirit that found no rest. He was working now on two murders, confident that if he found the perpetrator of the one, he would solve both. It was an aid to him that the public accepted the second as an accident, he alone having knowledge of the attempted murder of himself which, unaccomplished, had brought this fate onthe unhappy wretch who was to be himself a murderer.
About this time, however, he had proof that he had not ceased to interest some one. On returning to his room at the hotel one evening, he found that it had been entered during his absence and a thorough search of all his papers and luggage made. At first, he was inclined to complain to the landlord, but this purpose passed as quickly as it came, resulting in his taking apparently no notice of the affair.
It called to mind very forcibly, however, the tale that McManus had told him of the rifling of Wing’s desk, and caused him to take a professional view of the incident. He had said at the time that a pair of trained eyes would have seen something of importance. He was thus placed on his mettle to prove his boast. In fact, there was little to see. It was evident that the intruder had come by a window opening on to the roof of a long porch. A dusty footprint on the carpet under the window, pointing inward, proved this, and Trafford was able to find traces along the roof to a hall window, but the returningtracks were not traceable. He was not so much offended at the liberty taken with his property as by the implication on his sagacity, in the expectation of finding anything he preferred should remain unfound.
He had his suspicions as to the person who had ransacked Wing’s desk, and it was a satisfaction to be given an opportunity to test that suspicion by this later act. If he could bring it home to the possible culprit in the former case, he felt that a very considerable advance would be made. It was true that the method smacked a trifle of seeking facts with which to sustain a preconceived opinion, rather than permitting facts to lead up to judgment; but strict adherence to rule was not always possible, and this appeared a case in which exception was to be made.
Because, however, of this yielding to temptation, possibly, it troubled him more to discover that the assumed trespasser on Wing’s desk could by no means be the culprit in the present case, for it was beyond controversy that the suspected individual had not been within many miles of the Millbank hostelryat the hour of the intrusion. It might be a touch of cunning, but the alibi was not to be questioned. None the less, here was the fact that Wing’s desk was broken open because he was believed to be in possession of certain papers of a compromising character, and that when it was believed that these papers had come into the possession of the detective, his room and papers were in turn ransacked. That there was connection of cause and effect between the facts was scarcely to be doubted, even though it was not as simple as he had at first supposed to establish it.
Uncertainty as to the nature of the missing papers, and his inability to secure any definite information, were the tantalising features of the case. He questioned McManus only to find that his knowledge of the matter was no less hazy. These papers had been seen by no one in the office excepting in package. Whether they had been received by Wing from Judge Parlin or not was unknown. There was a general understanding that they had come from the judge, and that Wing had given a great deal of attention to them, so that they had grown materiallyin his hands. The scandal of the ransacking of the desk had caused a great deal of excitement in the office and no little discussion, but this had brought out no facts bearing on the subject-matter. That it involved some one was guessed, but even this guess was wild and general, rather than specific.
“Unless something of certainty is arrived at,” Trafford said, “it will be impossible to delay the re-opening of the inquest more than a week longer, and in the present temper of the public mind a verdict implicating Oldbeg would not be impossible.”
He said it half musingly, as if rather talking to himself than otherwise, and yet there was a look under the eyelids that would not have been quite reassuring to a close observer. McManus did not seem to note it, but took up the matter rather with Trafford’s own manner.
“But there the papers stand as the insurmountable difficulty. Oldbeg could have no object in stealing them. He could scarcely have known of their existence—that is, as papers of value. If the connection could be made, it would be serious for him.”
“But it can’t be made,” Trafford said, as if he were waking from his lethargic condition. “I’ve told you what kind of a man it was that did this murder, and when the murderer is discovered, as discovered he will be, you’ll find I’ve described him correctly. Those papers caused this murder and caused it because they were a menace to some one. That some one couldn’t have been Oldbeg——”
“Yet the public mind is impressed with Oldbeg’s guilt and, if I mistake not, the jury is as well.”
“You overlook the fact that nothing regarding these papers has appeared in the testimony.”
McManus looked up suddenly as the fact was recalled to him.
“That’s so,” he said. “We’ve discussed them so much that I had entirely lost sight of the fact. Of course, that’ll free Oldbeg when it is brought out in testimony.”
“If it is brought out,” Trafford said.
“But surely,” McManus urged; “you will not let so important a matter pass—let alone the fact that it is the cause of injustice to Oldbeg, who surely has suffered enough already.”
“Mr. McManus,” said Trafford solemnly; “I’m at work to find the murderer of Mr. Wing. That’s the one purpose I have before me, and it is what the best interests of the public demand. If Oldbeg or another suffers unjustly for the moment, it is that the guilty man may suffer in the end. I’m sorry for Oldbeg, but I’m not responsible for the turn matters have taken. At present, the parties who are interested in these papers believe I have them, and the work I’m doing requires them to continue so to believe. I don’t conceive it to be my duty to produce at the inquest testimony that will undeceive them.”
“Aren’t you taking a tremendous responsibility?” McManus asked.
“It’s my business to take responsibility. I’ve taken it often to the extent of risking my life—I may do so again; but when there’s a murderer at large and I’m set to find him, I don’t stop because my life is endangered or because another is put to inconvenience. If Oldbeg’s held for the murder, it’ll be inconvenient for him, but not so inconvenient as it would be for me to be murdered because I’m on the track of the right man.”
“And you are on the track of the right man?” McManus demanded.
“I’ve been on his track from the moment I entered that library and knew that it had been searched by the man who fired the fatal bullet. I’ve been on his track from that day to this, and I shall keep on it until I catch up with him or he kills me; but as surely as that last happens, he’ll swing. It isn’t given to any man to commit murder twice and cover his tracks. If I go down, it’ll end in his going up.”
“But really, Mr. Trafford, you take this thing more seriously than I imagined. You’re not in earnest in this talk of an attempt to murder you!”
“So much in earnest that I never go out without thinking I may not come back.”
“But why?”
“Because already one attempt has been made.”
“You astound me!” McManus exclaimed. “I agreed at the start to co-operate with you so long as you had the case in hand, but, certainly, I’m entitled to know something! Why do you say it’s because you are supposed to have the papers? Might it not be simply to shield the murderer? You leavethe thing in a cloud that is”—he seemed searching for a word—“disturbing.”
Trafford, however, refused to say more; but after McManus left, he sat for a few moments as if asking himself if he had done wisely, and then rousing up muttered:
“We’ll see how far that’ll carry!”