IV.THE BROOK.
So this much of the mystery was explained.
These children had left their home a week before, purposing a little trip, that was to last only a few hours, to May’s wood, midway or thereabout between their starting-point and Bussey’s wood, where they were subsequently found dead. During all that week of vigorous and unwearied search by the police of Boston and Roxbury, joined in by that of the rural localities; while the sun shone so bright and peace seemed so perfect over and within that green glory, while hundreds of people as usual, suspecting nothing, came into and went out of old Bussey’s groves; these two dumb humanities lay,—the girl, with her poor fright-marked face towards the sky, appealing to it for testimony and redress, the brother prone to the earth by the sly little running stream, both stabbed over and over again,—for thirty-four times did that mad arm rise and fall,—their bodies rough with the clotted gore of their hideous wounds. The public stood awe-struck in the presence of this spectacle, and parents trembled when they saw such evidence of duty neglected in allowing these waifsto wander so far away from home. (Or were they accompanied, and by whom, when they went away?) For a time the junior members of families had to confine themselves to a more restricted sphere of locomotion, and the thought of murder haunting them drove them like curfew to their homes at dusk. The latitude heretofore extended to, or wrenched by, Young America underwent a revision, and the juvenile eagles and doves of the social roosts were forced to bend to the yoke of a new dispensation, the justification of which was found in the fate of those two hapless wanderers who had been found slaughtered in the woods of Bussey. Seldom, in the annals of crime, was there so great an excitement as was manifested, not only in Boston, but throughout the entire country, when the fate of the lost children was made known by the public press. In one week afterward the woods were daily crowded by people from the city and the suburbs, with parties from the distant towns, and I met one man, wandering about in a white state of nervousness, who said he had come from Maine to look at the localities. An artist of one of the New York illustrated papers, with whom I went over the woods, in company also with a policeman who had been detailed for the purpose of pointing out the spots to the man of wood-cuts, told me that in New York the murder of these children had caused a greater excitement than the killing of Mr. Lincoln. I could wellunderstand that,—for the one was in its chief features, a political event, while the other appealed to the commonest sensations of our nature, through the avenues of mystery. On one Sunday alone, I was told by one of the rural officers, that more than twelve hundred people, men, women, and children, had visited the blood-stained places of the murders.
One great misfortune was inevitable from this sudden and continued irruption, and that was the total extinction of any foot-track of the murderer, or any vestige of his garments which might have been torn from him in the struggles with the stronger girl, or the conjectured chase he made in pursuit of the fleeing boy; for strange it was, that the bodies were found separated by several hundred yards of distance, an interval of dense wood and shrubbery closing in in all directions.[1]The one, as I said before, was killed on the summit of the hill; the other, at its base. As strict an examination as it was possible to effect was instituted, by the police authorities, of all the paths leading to the two spots of deepest interest, of every brake and shaded place; andvery useless was it soon found to be in the vicinity of the death-scene of the girl,—for there the ground was dry and rocky; but where the boy was found the soil was moist, and had not the paths been constantly travelled over during that silent week and afterward, it was there that some clue might have been found, the footsteps of the assassin evident, kept there by that inscrutable and puzzling fatality that frequently attends on such events. The party of discovery, however, not having the police presence of mind at the moment when they came upon the desolate object, obliterated, by an unconscious complicity with the assassin, and demolished, in their eager rush, any marks he might have left; for at least to that body no one had approached, and the footmarks of the only living witness and actor must have kept company with the bloody corpse throughout that interval. Thus everything tended to shield the doer of the deed. The dry ground and flints around the girl; the very solitude of the boy’s last asylum, to whose protection he had fled with the breath of his pursuer hot upon him; the rain that fell afterward, and that fatal week’s concealment,—gave him ample time to perfect his plan of evasion; and well did the demon use his opportunities; for, up to this moment, the public is in possession of no clue by which he can be brought to the expiation, if human expiation be possible, of his unparalleled offence. Whatever may be known to themysterious agent of legal vindication, the keen-eyed chief, we cannot discover; possibly there is nothing to discover, though I do not agree to that; he may be waiting for one of those redressing incidents by which the chain of evidence is united,—incidents simple of themselves and reaching forward out of doubt and difficulty, and helping the law to a fulfilment of its intentions.
FOOTNOTES:[1]Since I finished writing my narrative, a friend has informed me, that, visiting the wood sometime after the discovery of the bodies, and while searching for the exact spot where Isabella Joyce was discovered, he picked up a portion of an old green coat, or some other habiliment, and carried it out in the road to his friend, who was waiting in the carriage the issue of his search, to show her, in joke, as a relic of the murderer’s dress. His friend instantly grew serious over the matter, and to this day believes it to have been worn by the man who did the murders.
[1]Since I finished writing my narrative, a friend has informed me, that, visiting the wood sometime after the discovery of the bodies, and while searching for the exact spot where Isabella Joyce was discovered, he picked up a portion of an old green coat, or some other habiliment, and carried it out in the road to his friend, who was waiting in the carriage the issue of his search, to show her, in joke, as a relic of the murderer’s dress. His friend instantly grew serious over the matter, and to this day believes it to have been worn by the man who did the murders.
[1]Since I finished writing my narrative, a friend has informed me, that, visiting the wood sometime after the discovery of the bodies, and while searching for the exact spot where Isabella Joyce was discovered, he picked up a portion of an old green coat, or some other habiliment, and carried it out in the road to his friend, who was waiting in the carriage the issue of his search, to show her, in joke, as a relic of the murderer’s dress. His friend instantly grew serious over the matter, and to this day believes it to have been worn by the man who did the murders.