VII.SUSPECTED.
Keeping in view the fact of the week’s concealment, my reader will readily understand that I had no inducement to change my usual habits, so far as the woods were concerned, and I consequently kept up my visitations; but as the heat was growing daily more severe, I did not stroll far from the house, but confined myself in the main to the wood that reaches from the brook to the westward road in our front. I avoided thus pretty much my former walks, which included all that space lying between the flat bridge and the old gray rocks it had been my intention to make a memorandum of. Now and then, when the heat of the day had subsided, I went as far down as the stream; for exceedingly cool and pleasant was it there, and quiet, too, in the shady evenings. Sometimes I took my sketching apparatus, but oftener went without it; but it seems that, however I might go, I was not to do so without creating a terrible suspicion.
The search, prompted by public duty, or instigated by private curiosity, had apparently worn itself out, when, upon a sweet morning, some two weeks after thediscovery of the bodies, I stepped out of the front door, and saw, sitting under a shady tree in the stable-yard, holding converse with my host’s father, a member of the polician fraternity. Naturally enough, thought I, this vigilant is wandering round to see what he can pick up of stray hints and suggestions that may lead to the discovery of the criminal, and the obtaining of the large rewards that had been tendered by public and private liberality. I recognized the policeman at once, having often rode in the car on Tremont Street which he conducted. Circumstances then induced quite an acquaintance of great kindness between us. He had been left for dead after one of the great battles in the Chickahominy, slaughtered by four or five bullets of the Southern rifles, but picked up and cured, and fated in after days to have the high prerogative of being put upon my track as one of, if not the bloody villain of all, concerned in the killing of the Joyce children.
I went over to where the two were chatting under the bee-laden lime-tree, and, after hand-shaking with the ex-dead soldier-policeman, I helped to keep up the conversation, which flowed naturally upon the subject of the universal curiosity. He smiled a very peculiar smile when he saw me coming to him, and the farmer smiled, too; but that passed in my mind for nothing more than the fact of his meeting with an old friend. Ah! little did I think, while I smoked my pipeand gossiped so sociably with that placid friend of justice, that it was especially to find who the tall, dark stranger was, who, with a bowie-knife in hand, and great firing of his revolver, roved those haunted woods of Bussey. I did not know until he had shaken hands and gone away; when the farmer told me that the policeman had come to inquire who it was that was living with the family, and what my habits were, and where I was on the day of the murders, etc. My coming out of the house had interrupted this diabolical inquisition, and, upon seeing me, they both had looked at each other and exchanged a knowing smile, which, interpreted into English, could be spelled out thus: “Oh, I know him!” on the part of the policeman; and “You’re sold this time,” on the part of the farmer. The fact was that a youth, with his head full of ghosts and shrieking children, had seen me in the vicinage woods before and after the murders, and, frightened at my pallette knife and my ball practice, had hastened to the station at Jamaica Plains and made report of the terrible bandit and assassin. My friend of the police has often since laughed with me over the adventure, and I have almost grown to look upon myself as a gentleman of rather a forbidding and ferocious cut, and feel prepared to let myself out to some of my friends at the Studio Building as a model for any species of brigand, of Italy or Wall Street; or, if it be not treasonto say so, of State Street, Boston. There is something, after all, in being remarkable. However, it so happened that in one way or another I became a satellite to the sanguinary meteor that had swept over those woods, and, had I allowed it, I would have grown into a morbid mass of melodramatic idiosyncrasy. But the worst had not come yet.