IX.SUSPICION.
As a matter of course, several arrests were made after the delivery of the verdict by the coroner, and rumor plied her busy trade with an increased variety of tones. Our rural neighborhood rose at once into the importance of a public spectacle; and full-orbed curiosity roved the highways, questioning all kinds of people with all kinds of interrogatories.
There is always a plentiful supply of ready-made murderers in almost every well and long-established settlement,—men who look cross and act cross; who come home at mysterious hours and in mysterious ways, with slouched hats and shabby shirt-collars; who are not often if ever seen in church; suspicious fellows; just the sort of fellows to be talked about whenever anything bad has happened; but, perhaps, after all said and done, as good as their neighbors, indeed, sometimes better than the gossips who prate so lavishly about them. But they serve a purpose; and to that purpose some of them were put at once; and they bore it, and will have to bear it again. It is pretty much a matter of clothing. One day the whole thing was out,—the murderer was known. Aneighbor’s farm-hand had fallen in with another neighbor’s farm-hand, steering his ox-cart upon some errand of slothful industry, and from the ox-driver he had learned that the said driver, on the noon of the murder-day, had met the boy and girl (boy and girl described) on the road between Mr. Motley’s house on the hill and the blood-stained rock, and soon afterward he was overtaken by, or he met, a swarthy man with a black mustache, heated and in haste, pursuing the same line of travel on which he had met the children. Yes, he could identify that man. He looked eager and fierce, with his dark skin and twisted moustache; and those were the real children, and he their murderer. He had seen the lambs, and he had looked upon the wolf. This story bore the semblance of possibility; and we were all prepared to hear of an arrest and identification. By night, however, the narrative had undergone some modification, but not losing in the vigor and picturesqueness of the original drawing,—rather otherwise. I immediately sought out the author of the bulletin, intending, if there was any substance in it after thorough investigation, to report the facts without delay to the proper authority.
True, the clodpoll had seen two children on that road; but it turned out, on cross-examination, that he saw them on the day after the murder; but the portrait of the eager and mysterious swarth, with his curledmustache, had been inserted by the more imaginative brain of the man who repeated the intelligence. So all that card-castle of discovery fell to pieces. Then, again, a gallant and bullet-maimed officer was put under the ban; and wonderful items grew into robust legends, that would have delighted the immortal Sylvanus Cobb, Senior. The bloody tunic of the man of Mars had been washed by the terror-stricken nymph of soap-suds, and she was, inasmuch as she had “talked” of that red evidence, forthwith discharged from the wash-tub of the family. This belief in the guilt of the maimed officer took such emphasis of accusation as to enforce from his friends a proof that he was, on the day of the murder, far away in a Virginia city, engaged, among other things, in writing his name in a lady’s album. One evening, after the Sunday’s discovery,—it might have been ten days,—as I was riding up the hill that led to Mr. Motley’s mansion gateway, and when I had reached the summit, I came upon a young man standing a little off the main road. He stood there but a moment; but in that moment I saw that his eyes swept in that section of his view which embraced the accursed trees of Bussey’s blood-dyed hill, but with no look of white affright in them; and then, with his one arm swinging,—the other maimed in some battle-field of the South,—he went onward to the gate. That was the officer who had with one arm committed those dual murders, even while hewrote his name in the album of a lady in the old city down in the Southern country.
From such things does the monster Gossip make up a verdict, driving in shame the innocent to a defence, while giving to the one of guilt the benefit of an arrested search, or a postponed accusation. Driven from this stronghold of suspicion, away went greedy Accusation down among the shanties of the Irish workmen, along the line of the railroad; but nothing there was brought to light beyond the existence of pigs, poverty, and all the other poetries of Hibernian habitations.
In the midst of this confusion of assertion and contradiction, of hope and disappointment, a luckless house-painter, of a religions turn of mind, and a taste perhaps of fluidical enjoyment, fell into the hands of the inquisitors, and, at the time, it must be confessed, with some circumstances attendant on his movements and position that gave color to the theory of his criminality. At his house the boy and girl had boarded last; from his house they started on their terrible adventure; and it was said that he was engaged on that day to do some work at or about May’s wood; and so they linked him with the two pools of blood out in the shades of the fearful woods. There was a judicial examination; but naught came out of it to warrant his detention, and so he was sent about his business rejoicing, with a clear skirt, and a eulogistic letter from the clergyman of his parish. Theincident seemed rather to have worked to the advantage of the window-sash artist; and, in the full enjoyment of his acquittal, and the continued performance of his grave religious duties, this history must leave him.
And yet another. A young fellow was arrested, and lodged in the county jail at Dedham, of whom there was not the slightest doubt of his being the man. When arrested, it was proved that he had been absent from work on the fatal day; that his hands were scratched, and his clothes spotted with blood; and that he had been drunk on that night, driven, it was religiously and philosophically construed, into that beastly condition by the reproaches of his conscience. Ah, he was the very man! He looked, in his dimness of drunk and tatterdemalionism of garb, like a real Simon-pure unadulterated murderer. The rope was ready, and the coming carpenter dreamed of a gallows on which he was to swing. But the rope had not yet been twisted, and the carpenter had only dreamed; for it was established as follows of his biography: He had been absent from work because he had no work to attend to; he had been drunk because he loved bad whiskey and good company; he was scratched and blood-tinted because his valor and his bottle had led him, at an ill-reputed tavern, some two or three miles up the road, to attempt the vindication or assertion of his philosophic, philanthropic, political, or religious opinions and dogmas, byquotations from the library of his fists and muscles. So he, too, got out of the clutches of the law, and stands, or staggers, now, ready at any moment to be arrested upon the same grounds for any similar offence, or other offence, that his neighbors may think him fit for.
There was one other case of suspicion, but no arrest; and as it illustrates the uncertainty of circumstantial evidence somewhat, and is a little singular, I will relate it. A young fellow of variegated habits worked in a large rifle establishment near one of the city limits, distant from the scene of the murders some four or five miles. One of his habits was to rove into the suburbs, seeking his recreation according to his fancy. This fact was a strong circumstance against him; for at that time the theory of the twofold character of the crime had not been relinquished. Up to the period of the murders, this youth was the life of the establishment where he was employed, full of tricks, and jokes, and happy, ceaseless good-humor. On the morning of the 12th of June, he was absent at roll-call; but atone o’clock in the afternoon he was there and answered to his name. Whatever had happened, a great change had come over him. He was no more the jubilant and frolicsome madcap of the day before, but sullen to moroseness, and his face was strongly sunburnt, and altogether his whole appearance and behavior indicated a transformation as singular as it was sudden. Whenquestioned, he admitted that he had been in the woods somewhere, but would speak no more upon the subject. In search of any, the slightest clue to the discovery of the mystery, the police soon came into the possession of these facts, and suspicion fell darkly around him. Upon farther inquiry, it appeared that he had converted two files into poniards,—one he had given to a friend, the other he had kept. The day afterward, while the police were making these investigations, and keeping him, as they thought, unconscious of the fact, he disappeared, and has not been heard of from that day to this. One of the dirks when applied to the wounds fitted exactly. I have seen the one he had given to his comrade, now in the desk of the chief. A long, ugly weapon it is, sharp at the point, and double-edged, equal to a bowie-knife ere yet it has arrived at the point of complete perfection of destruction.
But he was not the man.Why he fled we may conjecture. Doubtless he had heard of the advance of the authorities upon his steps, and feeling that appearances were against him on the first blush of the investigation, and not being logically disposed to examine into the importance of minutes and hours wherein lay his absolute defence, he fled affrighted at his dangerous position. He was innocent, because he answered his name atone o’clock. Had he done those murders he never could have reached his workshop at that hour unless he hadhired the magic of a necromancer, or been mounted on the fleetest horse that ever won a race; for the murders were accomplished soon after one o’clock. Had he not answered to his name at the hour mentioned, he would have been arrested, though still he would not have been guilty.It was another man who did those deeds.