XIV.MY PLAN OF PUNISHMENT.
And this is my plan:
Chain him to the rock on which he took her life,—one chain to each wrist, one chain to each ankle, and an iron hoop locked around his waist, and this, too, fastened to the rock. Lay him on the spot where she was found. Then leave him to himself and to the scenery which he has disfigured so fearfully; but watch that no demon out of the Davenport or Eddy witchcraft or mancraft boxes help him to unloose those shackles. Lay him with his face to the avenging skies, and place food within his reach, but so arrange it that it rests only on the spots over which the red current of her life had ebbed. Let him alone with the night, and the night will give him such a tangled and convulsed spasm of horror as will make his very soul shriek aloud for two almost impossible things, yet awhile, death or the Lord’s pardon. And there he should remain until every hair of his head had become white, and every black spot of his soul livid. Perhaps the spirit that confronted me in silence and in peace might come to him and watch him,—watch him till the dawn broke and the eyes ofthe bright heavens took its place to look at him. And after that let the authorities handle him as they pleased.
The reader will observe that in this project of mine I follow out the classic ideas of the most elegant peoples and refined poets of the world, who insisted before all things else that the dramatic unities should be attended to. In that respect my plan would be without a flaw.
And now, if I am asked for my theory of the murders, my answer would be, that it might not be politic to give it publicity. This much, however, I will say, reserving the more probable theory for future emergencies. There is a link wanting at this time that must be found before any progress can be made to a conclusive judgment. The children left their temporary home intending to return in time for the boy to attend his afternoon school. Their objective point, as I said before, was May’s wood. This question then arises: What occurred to make the girl, the senior, change her mind and go farther away from home,—to Bussey’s wood? Going there would change her original programme, relative to the boy. Did some one meet them as if by accident,—some one whom they knew,—and did that person induce her to continue to Bussey’s wood? Were there any evidences that they stopped at all at May’s wood? But what inducement could he use to get her to Bussey’s wood? The mother might have been the inducement. They knew she was employed at Quincy, nearer toBussey’s than to May’s wood. They might have been told that she would meet them at the former, and it would be a pleasant surprise. Another question presents itself: What could have been the motive to get her to secluded, distant Bussey? I answer, self-defence. Self-defence against two children? Yes. The girl was an intelligent, observant girl, and she may have been cognizant of some crime, the revelation of which would have brought ruin and punishment upon the perpetrator; or the perpetrator might, in his consciousness of the possibility of her having discovered him, come to the resolution to dispose forever of any chance of her being a witness against him. They were poor children, and had only money enough to go and come from May’s wood; and yet that money was found upon the girl. Consequently, she had not been at any expense in getting to Bussey’s wood by the cars.The murderer paid their fare!After reaching the thick shades around the rock, and giving her time to become confident of his integrity and friendship,—so much so as to be sufficiently at ease to commence the weaving of leaf chaplets, waiting the promised interview with her mother,—he sent the boy down to the brook for water, and where he was subsequently found. Then he turned upon the girl; for if the boy had been near by, his cries could not have failed to arouse assistance, for there were men working within three hundred yards of the place whereher body was discovered. He must have brought about a separation between the children, and at that spot; for he could not have murdered them together, and there, in that broad sunlight, with the swirl of the mower’s scythes down in the near meadow evident to his ear, carried the body of the boy to the brook at the foot of the hill, and thrown it among the alders. He killed the girl as soon as the boy was out of sight, and then he followed the little fellow to the place where he had sent him, and slaughtered him in the gloom of those thick bushes.
Now, who was that man whom she would have exposed? With whose acts could she have by locality and association of daily life become acquainted? Was he from Lynn, or its vicinity,—where she had been living before she came to Boston? Or was the discovery, or the imagined discovery, of a crime made in Boston, and of some one living in Boston? The girl was simply murdered,—no duplex crime,—attacked while she was sitting with leaves and wreaths in her lap, and the first blows were delivered upon her back and sides, and after that in front and in great confusion. The boy was killed, not because he saw the murder done upon his sister, but because he could have told who it was that accompanied them from Boston, or joined them at May’s wood, where they were expected, or anywhere along the first part of that terrible journey. There wasno other motive for his death. If the man had not been seen by the boy, and known personally to the boy, he would have been alive now. Consequently it was some one who was intimate with those children and who could not allow the boy to live any more than he could allow the girl to live. It was a double self-defence.
Then who was that man? I think he lives; I think that he walks these streets daily. I think that some of us at some time or other have sat beside him in the cars going to and fro the city roads. I think that now, as I sit here writing, he is sitting somewhere hereabouts with his face dropped over upon his clenched hands, looking at that dark rock out there in the woods and wondering if he will yet reach the end of his life by the common methods of disease. I think that he often passes by the police station, with a frightened look in his eyes, and turns a corner quickly when one of the big police guards stalks like a blue-coated and silver-plated Nemesis toward him. I see him, in my mind’s eye, when he meets a girl and boy upon the sidewalk,—how he stares at them with a fixed gaze, wondering how those two whom he killed out yonder, in the old woods, are looking now!—and, when this book is advertised, I can watch him wondering what it is like; and then I trace him in his stealthy and frightened step to the bookstore to buy it; and, when he turns these leaves and comes to this sentence, I hear him curse me, and know that he wouldlike to have his hand upon my throat for recalling the memory of his deed. But I tell him that he will not escape. He may pretend to pray when others pray, to hide his wicked past in the garb of piety; he may mutter his wrath on all of us who seek him for his punishment; he may fly now the advancing steps of justice: but, as he flies, the feet of justice may become inactive, while it sends over every railroad and steamboat line of travel, by every wire that vibrates to all the remotest places of retreat, the command of his arrest. Wherever he is now, and wherever he may be then, he is doomed; and at this instant he knows it and feels it so in every fibre of his accursed carcass, even to those blood-stained hands beneath whose nails there yet remains the red record of his crime. I have given one theory, without in the least asserting it to be the correct one; but it is as good a theory as the public can get hold of outside of that mysterious room in the City Hall wherein the tall chief of police weaves his webs.
There being nothing else but murder in the girl’s death, we must seek for some motive that could have driven that man to so terrible a necessity. What other than the one I have suggested? Was it monomania for human blood? That could have been gratified among a denser population than he would be likely to find in Bussey’s wood. And monomania of that kind is not common, nor is it of sudden growth, striking and slakingbut once. It seeks its victim anywhere, without plot and without care of consequences, anywhere and everywhere. It is a madness that has no fear and is destitute of prudence. But here was deliberate, deep-plotted murder. It required skill to induce the girl to go farther away from home and her pledged duty to her brother. The filial sense was invoked as paramount to the fraternal. It required skill to separate the children. It was done. Does all that look as if the man was crazed for blood, or blind by drink? I think there was neither here. I cannot give my other theory; for, if it did not detect in this case, it might suggest an excellent method of repeating just such another crime, should any such be in contemplation. The enemy of society and law studies the tactics of justice, and frequently the plan of detection, if penetrated by the culprit, becomes his surest chart of escape. There may, after all,—but I don’t think so,—have been two persons engaged in this series of murders; and in that light read the short recital that follows, and perhaps, when the mystery shall be resolved by judicial precision, you may turn back to this singular incident and compare it with the concluding scenes of the catastrophes I have been treating of. If truth be stranger than fiction, then the marvels of the veritable make larger drafts upon our credulity than the fabrications of the imaginist, and there can be no harm done if we prepare ourselves for revelations that in timemay be made to us, and whose mysticism, enlightened by the practical test of law, will stand forever in the dry tomes of jurisprudence, subduing the impertinence of our dogmatical self-conceit, and establishing the fact that truth is a principle that can traverse the air, as well as walk arm in arm with us in our daily habits. This is the incident.
Dr. Binn relates in his book, published some years ago, the following:—
“A young and beautiful quadroon girl named Duncan, and residing in Jamaica, West Indies, was murdered in a retired spota few paces from the public highway. [Such was the case in the murder of Isabella Joyce.] Upon discovery of the deed, and investigation by the coroner, a reward, amounting to a large sum of money [similar in the Joyce case], was offered for the detection of the guilty party, but without avail. A year passed over with no light from the judicial lantern illumining the black mystery of the deed, and the case was in process of lapsing into oblivion, when two negroes named Pendrill and Chitty were arrested for some minor thefts and lodged in prison. One was placed in the Kingston penitentiary and the other in Falmouth jail. The distance between these two places was eighty miles. It must be borne in mind that these two men were ignorant of their mutual arrest and confinement, though as it turned out afterward were well acquaintedwith each other. In the course of their imprisonment they became restless and talked in their sleep, and then conversations were addressed to a young girl who, it would seem, stood by and upbraided them with her murder. They would then entreat her to go away. This happened so frequently as to lead to inquiries which resulted in the conviction of those two haunted men, of the murder that had so long baffled the detection of justice.