VI.THE FLAT BRIDGE.
So one week had passed since the committal of the murders and the discovery of the bodies,—and the bodies lying in a wood so frequently, indeed so constantly and largely visited. One would have supposed that they would have been discovered half an hour after the deeds were done; but, to understand why it was so long concealed, you must visit the wood itself in the leafy month of June, and then you will find out what a hiding-place it can be turned into. Now the spot where the boy was found was a few feet from the little stream frequently mentioned, and this stream was spanned by a flat bridge just enough elevated from the surface of the water to allow it to flow freely underneath. This bridge led over to a half-obliterated path that you could with a little care follow until it brought you to the regular path that led from the lower bridge, and which I before observed conducted you to the rock where the girl was found, and farther on to a spot which I am soon to speak of. This lower part of the forest is composed of open spaces filled with low shrubbery, small and close-growing pines, and by thebrook-way with densely thick alders. There is a wall running west from the brook, dividing the property of my host from that of Mr. Motley. Mr. Motley’s property, along the wall to the north-west, is composed of a wood of great beauty. The path to which I have alluded connects with the main county road that circles Bussey’s wood to the east, and it was by this path that my host was in the habit of returning from his daily city business, sometimes a little after sunset, but generally not earlier than nine at night, and frequently later. Relative to this circumstance I have hereafter something of an extraordinary character to make mention of; so it may as well be remembered.
The low, flat bridge was about fifty feet from the corner of the dividing line, and less that distance from the scene of one of the murders. Near to it ran the path my friend had to pursue on his return at night. In my walks, before the murders, I had passed over this bridge almost daily, and afterward, during the sealed week, I had not interrupted my habit, though probably I did not go that route as often as before, for the weather was getting intensely hot, and kept me to the woods nearer the house. In these walks, however frequent or seldom, I was accompanied by old Jack; and though the body of the boy, at one part of the track, lay not more than ten or fifteen feet away on our left, hidden in the shrubbery, the dog never attemptedto approach it. I remembered afterward, when everything was revealed, that as soon as we got over the bridge, he would walk quietly at my heels, keeping as close to me as possible; but when I had advanced to the denser wood, that clothed the base of the hill, he was all alive, plunging in every direction, and opening with a courageous vigor upon the up-tree, defying squirrels. I blamed him much for his reticence; for I felt assured that both he and his namesake had, before that, perhaps on the very day of the deed, gone into that dense mass and gazed upon the slain. Be it as it might, his manner changed completely whenever we passed by that red resting-place.
On the morning of the murders—the 12th of June—I had prepared myself for sketching (I have that gift, moderately to be sure, but yet with wonderful kindness extended to me by a beneficent Providence), intending to make a memorandum in oil colors of a group of rocks a hundred yards or so beyond (eastward) the murder-rock, and to which I have already referred. These gray rocks, that I intended to sketch, can be seen from the road leading up to the hill, by which you reach, from the direction of the railroad, the outer scarp of the ridge behind which the girl was found. And this is the route by which the children may have reached the wood.
As the sun rose higher in the heavens the heatincreased in proportionate intensity, and when I was ready to start, say about half-past ten o’clock, I was glad to second the persuasions of my friends not to venture out in such seething weather. Probably it was providential, or possibly a great error, that I did not accomplish my original design. To reach my objective point—the picturesque rocks which had so fascinated my sense of the beautiful—I would have been obliged to follow the path, first over the low bridge, and subsequently within six or seven feet of the spot where the body of Isabella Joyce was first seen. Now, it is a well-ascertained fact, that the children left their home by the cars sometime about eleven o’clock on that morning. Their intention was simply to go to May’s wood, nearer to Boston than Bussey’s. What induced them to change their purpose, and advance as far as the latter, ispartiallya mystery; and though I have a well-digested theory upon that very important—indeed, all-important—point, I must withhold it; for well I know that if he is alive, one of the first persons to read this narrative, on its publication, will be the murderer himself, and I cannot afford to give him farther chance to plot explanations and arrange evasion by any word of mine. Leaving home at about eleven, in three-quarters of an hour, or less, they could reach Bussey’s wood (for I take it for granted they did not tarry at May’s wood, persuaded bysome oneto go farther off from Boston),say, about twelve o’clock. Give them time to gather leaves and wreathe them, as they did,—a wreath being found around the boy’s hat, and portions of wreaths about the murder-rock, where the girl had evidently been employed in such amusement,—and we reach half-past twelve, or perhaps a little later; and that is the time I have fixed as the epoch; for after that, whatever of garlands were woven, were made by hands we cannot see, but only hope to see. Now, had I not changed my intention to sketch that forenoon, I would have passed by the path beyond which, hidden by the woody screen, the girl was afterward sitting, and also grazed the spot whither the boy had fled, or been thrown; but it would have been before they had entered the wood; but I would have been at work at the moment of the killing, or, mayhap, passing within a few feet of the place where Isabella Joyce was murdered, or, after being murdered, concealed.
If, in passing at the moment when the deed was in the act of accomplishment, and I had heard a cry ever so feeble, I would, unquestionably, have proceeded to inquire into its cause; and had I come upon the brute, and been at the instant in possession of as much pluck as I had weapon,—an iron-clasped, well-seasoned, heavy camp-stool,—he would have fared badly; for, once up, my arm is one of very admirable development, and my temper not the best calculated for easy martyrdom,and I might have saved her life at least, and in doing which, an incident might have happened which the fiend would not have had time to remember—in the flesh. Or, if I had not passed at that exact exigency of time, but was engaged in my sketching, I possibly might have been startled by her outcry for mercy from him, or appeal to others, and by the manhood that is systematized, for the defence of the weak and wronged, in this six-foot carcass of mine, I would have gone with utter ferocity to the rescue; but with what success crowning my enterprise, is only known to the Great Inscrutable. However, had the murderer accomplished his bloody purpose on the girl, and was following the boy, and I had passed downward to the level bridge, I might have seen that supplemental tragedy, or arrested it, and taken the culprit red-handed in his course. I would, under any of these circumstances, have been more happy in my life, had I been the means of saving two other lives, or even one, though I question much if it would not have been at the expense of another life as yet unclaimed by the gibbet.
Barring all these contingencies, and taking it for granted that I had passed in and out of the wood without detecting anything of those terrible occurrences, it might have fared ill with me in the subsequent phases of the affair, for there was a strict investigation made as to who was in that wood during that day; and beyonda question, as I would not have attempted to conceal the fact of my presence, my friends of the police would have laid their justifiable hands upon me, and placed me in the black category of the suspected. In mentioning this idea since to my friend the logician of judicial mystery, the tall chief of the force, he assured me that I would not have been interfered with, as I did not come in the least within the principles of his theory of the murder. But that did not exempt me, as I shall proceed to state.