Chapter XRetribution
Thesound of that piercing scream, and the sight of Silas Tunstall dropping lifeless to the ground, gave me such a shock that I stopped dead where I was, unable to stir hand or foot. For a moment longer, I saw, with starting eyes, the two ghostly figures circling uncertainly around the prostrate form, in the increasing gloom; then they stopped, drew together, and I heard a hasty consultation in muffled tones, which I seemed to recognize.
“Biffkins!” called Dick’s frightened voice, at last; “come here, will you, and get these things off us!”
He was tearing frantically at his white mufflings, and the other—Tom, of course—was dancing a kind of furious war-dance in the effort to get free. And both of them were so excited that they were getting more entangled every instant. I don’t believe I had ever really thought them ghosts; still, it was a relief to know that they were familiar flesh and blood. I ran to them with a glad cry, in a moment their ghostly cerements lay about their feet, and they stood disclosedas two very tousled and very frightened boys.
“Do you suppose he’s dead?” asked Tom, in a husky whisper, as they bent over the fallen man, who lay in a limp heap, enveloped in a finely-meshed fishing-net.
“I don’t know,” answered Dick, paler than I had ever seen him. “But I shouldn’t think people’d die that easy. It’s not natural!”
Tom had whipped out his knife and was cutting away the net, quite forgetful of the fact that it was one of his most precious treasures.
“See if you can feel his pulse,” he said; and Dick gingerly applied his fingers to Mr. Tunstall’s wrist.
“No,” he gasped, after a moment; “not a sign! Oh! oh!” and he stared down at his victim with eyes fairly starting from his head.
“So this was the great secret!” I began. I know it was ungenerous; but they had been very unkind, and revenge was my due. Besides, the memory of my profitless afternoon’s work was hot upon me—and of how I had watched and hoped—“So this—”
“Oh, cut it out, Biffkins!” broke in Dick, huskily. “Don’t rub it in! We—we can’tstand it. You’d better go and call someone—call mother—while we get him out of this thing,” and he began to tear savagely at the net.
“Mother hasn’t come home yet,” I said.
“My father’s at home,” suggested Tom, and without waiting to hear more, I was off along the path to the gate, and then out along the road toward the Chester house, the whole horror of the affair suddenly upon me. I burst up to the door, panting, breathless, and pulled the bell with a fury I was far from realizing. Mr. Chester himself flung the door open.
“Why, what’s the matter?” he cried, seeing my blanched face. “What has happened?”
“The boys,” I gasped incoherently, growing more frightened every minute, “tried to—scare—Silas Tunstall—and he—dropped dead!”
“Dropped dead!” he echoed, and I saw his face go white with sudden horror.
“And they want you to come at once, sir,” I concluded, getting my breath.
“Very well; lead the way,” he said, and he followed me down the path, his lips compressed.
My legs were beginning to tremble under me with fatigue and excitement, but I managed to keep on my feet until we reached the althea bush,and then, pointing mutely to the boys, I tumbled down upon the bench, utterly unable to take another step.
Mr. Chester bent over the prostrate man silently, and looked at him for an instant. Then he dropped to his knees, loosened the victim’s waistcoat and listened at his breast. The boys stood watching him with bated breath.
“One of you go and get some cold water,” he said, abruptly, looking up.
Dick was off like a flash, thankful, doubtless, for the chance to do something—and glad, too, perhaps, to escape from Mr. Chester’s accusing eyes.
“Now, help me straighten him out here, sir,” he said to his son, and in a moment they had Mr. Tunstall extended flat on his back. I shuddered as I looked at him, he seemed so limp and cold and lifeless.
Then Mr. Chester bent over him again and began to compress his ribs and allow them to expand, as I had read of doing for drowned persons. He chafed his hands and slapped them smartly and seemed to be pummelling him generally, but the gathering darkness prevented me from seeing very clearly. Dick soon came back withthe water, with which Mr. Chester bathed the unconscious man’s face and neck. I had forgotten my fatigue in the stress of the moment’s emotion, and instinctively had joined the two boys, who were kneeling beside their victim, peering down at his flaccid, bloodless countenance, in a very agony of apprehension.
The chafing and rubbing and bathing seemingly produced no effect, and as minute followed minute and no sign of life appeared, the fear that it had altogether fled deepened to certainty. The boys looked already like convicted murderers, and I could not help pitying them, in spite of the way they had treated me. Somehow my hand stole into Tom’s, and I was shocked to feel how cold and clammy it was. He felt the pressure of my fingers, and smiled at me wanly, and leaned over and whispered, “I’m sorry, Biffkins;” and thereupon all the anger I had felt against him melted quite away.
At last, Mr. Chester, despairing of gentler methods, caught up a double handful of water and dashed it violently into the unconscious face. For an instant, there was no response, then the eyelids slowly lifted and a deep sigh proceeded from the half-open mouth. A momentmore, and, rubbing his eyes confusedly, he sat up and looked about him.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded, anxiously. “Where am I?”
The difference of tone and accent from those he had used with me only a few minutes before fairly startled me. He had dropped his drawl, his nasal tone, his slip-shod enunciation. And his face had changed, too. It was thinner and more alert; and the ragged whiskers seemed absurdly out of place upon it.
“You’ve had a fainting-spell,” answered Mr. Chester, gently. “You will soon be all right again, I hope.”
A dark flush suffused Mr. Tunstall’s face, and he rose awkwardly to his feet.
“Oh, yes; I’ll soon be all right ag’in,” he said, with a weak attempt at a laugh. The drawl was back again—the nasal twang; but none of the others seemed to have noticed that he had used another tone a moment before. I began to fear him—to have a different conception of him—he was an enemy far more formidable than I had thought. Which was his natural tone, I wondered—and yet, on second thought, there could be no question as to that. His natural tone was the onehe had used when he first came to himself, before he fully realized where he was, before he had quite got his senses back.
“Have you had such attacks before?” asked Mr. Chester.
“Oh, yes; they ain’t nothin’. I has ’em every onct in a while. Didn’t say nothin’ foolish, I hope?” he added, and shot a quick, suspicious, threatening glance at us.
“No,” said Mr. Chester, “you didn’t say a word—you didn’t even breathe, so far as I could see.”
“Only a scream at the first,” I said.
“A scream?” repeated Mr. Tunstall. “What’d I scream fer?”
Then his eyes fell upon the tumbled white robes on the ground. He gazed at them an instant, then lifted his eyes and fixed them on the two boys, with a malevolence which made me shudder.
“Oh, yes,” he said, at last, in a low, hoarse voice. “I remember, now. I remember, now!”
“I’m sure, sir,” began Dick, but Mr. Tunstall silenced him with a fierce gesture.
“All right; all right,” he interrupted. “I don’t want to listen. Much obleeged fer yourtrouble,” he added to Mr. Chester. “I reckon I’ll be goin’ along home.”
“Do you think you’re strong enough?” asked Mr. Chester. “If you’re not, I can have my carriage—”
“No, no,” broke in the other, impatiently. “I’m all right, I tell ye,” and he slouched off across the garden.
We stood and watched him as he walked away, until the dusk hid him; then Mr. Chester turned to the boys with a stern light in his eyes.
“Now,” he said, “perhaps you two young gentlemen will be good enough to explain what you hoped to accomplish by this trick.”
“We were going to make him confess, sir,” answered Dick, in a subdued voice.
“Confess? Confess what?”
“Where the treasure is, sir. You know you said you thought he knew where it was, and then you told about coming on him that time dressed as a ghost; and we thought maybe if we dropped on him sudden in the dark in the same place, he might think we were for-sure ghosts—”
“One of us was going to pretend to be Mrs. Nelson,” supplemented Tom. “We thought we might frighten it out of him.”
“But, of course,” said Dick, miserably, “we hadn’t any idea it would turn out like that.”
For a moment, Mr. Chester continued to stare at them in astonishment; then a peculiar inward convulsion seized him, as though he wanted to sneeze and couldn’t. As I looked at their downcast faces, I felt very much like laughing, but I didn’t dare with Mr. Chester standing there.
“A brilliant scheme!” he commented, at last, in a voice which trembled a little. “May I ask which of you devised it?”
“It was I, sir,” answered Tom, guiltily.
“How did you know that Mr. Tunstall would be here this evening?” queried his father.
“We—we sent him a message by our boy, Jimmy.”
“A message?”
“Yes, sir—that he’d learn something to his advantage if he came out here this afternoon. We knew Mrs. Truman had gone to town.”
“He thought it was mother sent the message,” I remarked.
“And the message was a falsehood,” said Mr. Chester, sternly. “It was, of course, inevitable that they should tell a lie. Go on.”
“Well, Mr. Tunstall came,” said Tom, flushingdeeply at his father’s words. “We watched him come up the road and go up to the house and knock and try the front door. Then he wandered around a bit, and finally saw Cecil sitting on the bench there. She’d been digging some more.”
“Yes, and he frightened me nearly to death for a minute,” I said.
“It couldn’t have happened better,” said Dick. “He talked quite a while, and we had time to get all our trappings ready; and just as he turned to go, we threw Tom’s big seine over him and dropped off the wall. Before we had time to do any more, he had fainted—we thought he was dead.”
“And suppose he had been dead,” said Mr. Chester, “as he might easily have been, since his heart is probably diseased, do you know that at this moment both of you would be guilty of manslaughter? You hadn’t thought about that, of course?”
“No, sir,” answered both boys, together.
“Do you think your mother, Dick, would have been willing to pay such a price as that for this place?”
“No, sir,” burst out Dick; “nor I wouldn’t either. I—I don’t like the place any more—mother won’t either, when I tell her.”
“Oh, Dick!” I cried reproachfully.
Mr. Chester said nothing for a moment, but stood in deep thought.
“I will tell your mother myself,” he said, finally. “We mustn’t have her prejudiced against the place. But I hope this afternoon’s experience will teach both of you a lesson—I hope that neither of you will ever again try to startle anyone as you tried to startle Mr. Tunstall this afternoon. There is no kind of joke so dangerous. And, by the way, Cecil,” he went on, turning to me, “what was it you and Mr. Tunstall were talking about so long?”
“Why, I don’t just remember, sir,” I answered. “He told me about getting the message, and I told him I was sure it wasn’t from mother; and then we talked about the treasure, and he said to go ahead and hunt for it, that it wasn’t any of his business until the seventeenth of May, and that he was going to play fair.”
“Was that all?” he asked, looking at me keenly. “Try to think. Mr. Tunstall is a very clever man. A silly note like the one sent him wouldn’t have got him out here unless he had some very definite object in coming, and was hoping for an excuse to do so.”
“I don’t remember anything else, sir,” I said, making a desperate effort at recollection. “Oh, yes; he asked if I’d heard mother say anything about trying to break the will, and I told him that I had heard her tell you that she wouldn’t think of doing so—that if she couldn’t get the place the way grandaunt provided, she didn’t want it at all.”
Mr. Chester’s lips tightened, and he looked grimly at the boys.
“The note wasn’t such a lie, after all,” he said, in a voice very stern. “Mr. Tunstall has learned something very decidedly to his advantage.”