Footprints

CHAPTER XVII

I

Wednesday, October, 17, 1900.

Dear Judy: When I wrote to you, day before yesterday, I thought that I was through with this letter writing. I wrote, then, in the rôle of Mr. Wise-guy, scorning you and the rest of the family for not serenely knowing that one of the Quilters was a murdering cur. Scorning even Grandfather; or, if not quite as brash as that, accusing him of senility for using that brave old mind of his to reach for the truth. No use of my trying it; no use of my loyalty to the family being stronger than the absence of footprints in the snow. I was going on nineteen years old, wasn’t I? Why shouldn’t I be the only wise, honest one in the group? Even poor old Olympe did better than I. She tried to think of an explanation. It was no good, and she was ashamed of it. But she tried, and hoped that Lucy’s clear little mind might help with it. Not smart-aleck Neal. He knew. There is no good in raving, Judy. But, gosh, I am so sick of myself that I feel exactly as I did that time when Whatof and I got in a mix-up with the skunk.

No, we haven’t found the murderer. But something happened last night that proves, about as clearly as anything but finding him and hearing his confession could prove, that not one of the family was involved in the dirty business. Go on, Judy dear, crow! You can’t crow any louder than I wish I had a right to.

Here is the story: Yesterday afternoon Uncle Phineas left, again, for Portland. This may seem sort of queer to you; but it isn’t. I can’t explain it, right now. It is a secret that Uncle Phineas and I have had together for a long time. But next week, at the latest, he hopes to be able to tell the family. As yet he hasn’t told even Grandfather or Olympe.

I was sorry he couldn’t see his way clear to confiding in Olympe, because his going right away again hurt her feelings like everything. He couldn’t take her with him on account of our being so hard up for ready money, just now. Uncle Phineas shares Dr. Joe’s room in Portland. If he had taken Olympe they would have had to go to a hotel, and we couldn’t afford it. All this, then, to explain why Olympe returned to her bed, to stay, after Uncle Phineas left yesterday afternoon.

At six-thirty Aunt Gracia was going to send Olympe’s supper tray up to her by Lucy, but I carried it instead. I am darn glad that I did, for now I know what I know. She seemed so forlorn that I sat down and talked to her while she ate her supper.

She was not in a sunny humour. She has been a bit miffed with me, for one thing, ever since I questioned her about the gun. Too, she was all cut up about Uncle Phineas’s leaving her alone again, as she said, “at a time like this.” She has fully determined that he goes solely and wholly because he cannot bear to be on the place while “that young person,” as she calls Irene, is here.

I didn’t stay with her any longer than seemed necessary. When she had eaten her supper, she asked me to search her room before I left her alone in it. To humour her, I made a thorough job of it. I looked under the bed and the sofa, in the closet, behind the curtains, and I even opened her old Flemish chest and stirred through it. She asked me, next, to put her wrapper handy, so that she could slip into it when she got up to lock the door after me. I told her that someone would be coming up, directly after supper, to keep her company and then she’d have to get out of bed and unlock the door again. She said that she would not stay a moment alone in the house unless she were certain that every window and door was locked. (I grinned to myself. One of her windows was three inches down from the top, right then, as Uncle Phineas always has it when he is at home. I had left it like that because I thought the fresh air would be good for her headache. That stuffy, purple and brown, verbena and liniment atmosphere that always pervades Olympe’s room would give me a headache at any time.) She said, also, that she was in no humour for company this evening. You know Olympe’s “Tired, ill, and old” speech—or perhaps you don’t. It seems to me that has been devised since you left. At any rate, she was unfit for companionship. She was, as soon as I left her, going to take some of the drops Dr. Joe had given her. She hoped, merely hoped, for a little sleep. So, if I would please, ask the others to walk quietly when they came through the hall on the way to bed?

I promised to deliver the message, took her tray and went into the hall. I put it on the stand, and went into the bathroom to clean up a bit. As I walked through the hall I noticed—I am certain of this—that all the doors were standing ajar except the attic door, your door, and the door to Father’s room. When I came out of the bathroom, I picked up the tray and went downstairs, using the back stairway.

The folks were sitting down to supper when I went into the dining room. I apologized to Grandfather for being late. Dong Lee came in with a tray of muffins, and hung around to hear them praised. Aunt Gracia and Lucy remarked on their excellence. Chris asked how Olympe was feeling. I answered, and delivered her message about quiet in the hall. Irene produced a none too gentle remark concerning Olympe’s deafness. Chris, as usual—one does sort of have to feel sorry for Chris at times—tried to cover it with an observation about the mantel clock’s being slow. Aunt Gracia thought not, and asked Grandfather for the correct time. Grandfather took out his watch, opened it, said that it was two minutes after seven——

Just at that moment, with every last one of us right there around the dining table, the sound of a gunshot crashed through the house. It was precisely and exactly one too many shots for most of us.

II

The next thing I knew, I was running up the back stairs, listening to a beast growling in my own throat. Since running down the hall, straight to Olympe’s room, was the sensible thing to have done, I can’t understand why I did it, then; but I did. I was the first one to reach her door. It was open. I ran into her room. She was in bed. Her night lamp was lighted on the table beside her. She is all right, Judy; don’t be frightened. She is as sound as she ever was, untouched by anything worse than a bad scare.

But I did not know it when I ran to her. The others, who came crowding in, didn’t know it, either. I thought that, like Father, she had been shot and killed. I thought it so certainly that, when I touched her she felt cold; and, for one wild, red second, I saw soaking blood. I am stopping to tell you this in order to show you what sort of tricks my mind and senses will play on me. It is a lesson about trusting either of them too far. Even yet, I find myself thinking that Olympe is dead, and I have to stop and remember painstakingly that she is not.

I heard Aunt Gracia’s voice declaring that Olympe was not hurt. I heard the words, but for all the meaning they conveyed she might have been reciting the multiplication tables. The experience has surely taught me much concerning cowardice. How can a fellow be blamed for anything when fear, through no volition of his, throttles him and robs him of all his faculties? Not, you understand, that I was afraid the fellow was going to pop out from somewhere and shoot me; such a thought never entered my mind, then. I wasn’t afraid, either, that he was going to appear and shoot some one of the others. I was afraid of what had happened, I suppose—if you can find sense in that—and not at all of what might happen. I am not starring myself for any of this; but I am not blaming myself. I couldn’t help it any more than I could help it if a boat capsized and chucked me into rapids that I hadn’t strength to swim.

The first inkling of my intelligence returned when I heard Irene croak something about Uncle Thaddeus. I turned to look at Grandfather, just in time to see him loosen his hold on the foot of the bed and slip down into a heap on the floor.

Again, don’t be frightened. Grandfather is all right now—or, at least, as nearly all right as he could be after having had a second shock of the sort. He won’t stay in bed; and he is declaring that it was all nonsense for us to have sent for Dr. Joe. Just the same, I’ll be glad to see Dr. Joe put in an appearance here. He’s antiseptic, that’s what he is. I wish to the Lord he had been here during the fracas yesterday evening.

I am not needing to tell you what seeing Grandfather go under did to us. Even Dong Lee, who had come up with the others, went clear balmy—pushing us away from Grandfather, or trying to, and chattering. Olympe revived, and contributed more than her share to the bedlam. I’ll not attempt to describe it; I couldn’t, anyway. But when I tell you that, after we’d got Grandfather to the sofa he lay there, looking as if he were dead, and that we could not get his heartbeats, and thought that he was dead, or dying, you will understand why we were not attending to anyone or anything else. You’ll understand why, until Grandfather’s ruddiness began to seep back into his cheeks, and his eyes were opened and he was talking to us, reassuring us, we did not give a damn if a whole regiment of murderers were marching, slowly, away from the house. They’d had time to, right enough. It was half-past seven before Chris began his declamation about this being the same thing over again, and his rhetorical questions about what were we doing, and where was the murderer, and so forth—all pyrotechnical rather than practical.

Grandfather, by this time, was sitting up on the sofa with one arm around Lucy and one around Aunt Gracia, both of whom, unromantically, were hiccoughing convulsively. As I looked at them, I had a bright idea. They—all of us—needed police protection.

I stated this idea, and, also, that I was going right then to ride to Quilterville and get Gus Wildoch and a deputy or two. I started off on the run. Grandfather called to me.

“My boy,” he said, when I had come back into Olympe’s room, “you said that you were going to tell the sheriff what had happened here. Do you know what has happened here? Does anyone know? I do not.”

If I looked as I felt, I looked like two fools.

“We heard a revolver shot,” Grandfather said. “We came to this room and found that Olympe had, again, fainted. The similarity of this circumstance with that of tragedy proved too much for my strength, I am ashamed to say. Olympe, my dear, did you happen to discharge a revolver by mistake?”

Olympe pulled herself up higher on her pillows, drew her pretty old-rose wrapper about her shoulders, perked up her famous chin, and made it known to all present that she had never yet fired a revolver on any account, either by mistake or purposely, and that, she trusted she never should. In the midst of death, as it were, Olympe is a gentlewoman. She had just passed through a most terrible experience, and still she found space to resent with dignity what she considered an implication of rowdyism from Grandfather.

Grandfather apologized, and asked her if she had any memory at all of anything that had happened before she had fainted.

I believe that we all thought she wouldn’t have. Thank the Lord she did have! It took her a long time to tell it, but what she told was this:

Right after I left her she had got out of bed and locked her door. She had gone immediately back to bed. She was lying there, annoyed because she had forgotten to take her drops while she had been up. She reached for her wrapper, on the foot of her bed, preparatory to rising again, and, just as she did so, she heard a noise at the cupola window—the one I had purposely left open from the top. She turned, and looked across the room toward it. She saw a man, wearing a bright red mask, slowly pushing open her window. She tried to scream, but her throat had closed. She tried to move. She could not. She said that the sensation was precisely the same as one experiences during nightmares. She closed her eyes. She made an effort for prayer. She felt that she was suffocating. She could hear the window being raised slowly, inch by inch. Something, she said, seemed to break in her mind. She thought, “This is what death means.” That was the last thing she knew until she opened her eyes and saw us all gathered around Grandfather on the sofa. She thought that the man in the red mask had come into her room and killed Grandfather.

That was all she could tell us. She had not heard the shot fired. It was enough to tell Gus. A man, wearing a red mask, had climbed to the porch roof and into Olympe’s room, through her window. He had fired one shot, and had escaped.

I asked Grandfather if I might go, now, to Quilterville. He said for me to use my own judgment.

Here’s a hot one on me, Judy. While I was saddling Tuesday’s Child, I had a queer feeling, which I did not entirely recognize. About a quarter of a mile down the road, it introduced itself to me. I was scared. Rather definitely scared, and this time for my own skin. The moon was not up, yet, and there were enough clouds to keep the starlight from being showy. I took the short cut through the oaks, and every falling leaf or creaking branch was the guy in the red mask taking aim at me. Out in the open again, he bounded ahead of me like a pebble skipped over water. And once, disguised as a ball of tumbleweed, he rose up and slew me. For the first time it occurred to me that something more potent than Irene’s yelping might have kept Chris from starting off, alone, to Quilterville the night Father was killed.

My fear wasn’t based on altogether faulty reasoning. The man had forty minutes’ head start on me. If he needed a better start than that, and didn’t want the county people on his trail for a while, the smartest thing he could have done would have been to pop me off on the way. Number Twenty-six, eastbound, goes through Quilterville at three o’clock in the morning. If he had been planning to catch it, he wouldn’t have wanted any advance notices. Evidently, though, he had not made any such plans (I think we have given him too much credit for smart planning), because I got into town sound in wind and limb.

Gus Wildoch had gone to bed; and, since he’d had a few drinks too many before he had got there, he was rather nasty. Seemed to think that Q 2 was entirely too troublesome. Also, he appeared to be annoyed because Olympe had not been killed, and unable to discover why I had wakened him for any other reason. When he further discovered that, so far as I knew, we had not been robbed, he washed his hands of the whole circumstance until morning.

I rode over to Al Raddy’s and got him to come down and open up the station so that I could send a telegram to Dr. Joe. Then I borrowed Al’s gun and rode home again. I was well over my scare by the time I’d got back to the ranch, but I can’t say the same for Chris.

He indulged in one of his beautiful tempers when he let me in through the front door and saw that I had come alone. We had a sweet passage, in which he said my failure to bring help was about what he might have expected from me. I made some would-be clever retorts, and was getting pretty hot, when I saw that Chris was using his rage to cover his fright. I came off my perch and asked him whether they had made any alarming discoveries while I had been gone. His reply was worthy of Olympe.

“Alarming enough,” Chris said, “to make us certain that no one’s life is safe on this place until we find the man who is, apparently, bent on destroying the Quilter family.”

III

After I had left the ranch to go to Quilterville, Grandfather, Chris, and Aunt Gracia had made another thorough investigation of the house.

The bedroom doors were all locked again on the outside, as they had been locked on the night that Father was killed. Again, too, the same doors had been left unlocked—that is, the attic and the bathroom doors. Father’s door, this time, had been locked, and Olympe’s locked door had been unlocked and left open. (That door unlocked would seem to indicate that the fellow had rushed out of it into the hall. But, there is this: the instant we heard the shot, all of us, except Irene and Chris who came up the front stairway, ran straight up the back stairway and into the upper hall. Would he have run out to meet us? Olympe’s door is at the far end of the hall from the attic door.) The seven keys were on Olympe’s bedside table, as they had been on Father’s bedside table.

The rope, the same old clothes-line, which had been returned to the attic, was on the floor in Olympe’s room. It was not tied around the leg of the bed, nor around anything. It was lying there, in a loose coil, near the foot of the bed.

The bullet from the gun had gone into the wall, about three feet above Olympe’s pillows. Evidently, he had aimed at her; but his shot had gone wild.

Nothing was out of place in Olympe’s room. Exactly as it had been in Father’s room—not a chair seemed to have been moved, not a drawer opened.

Lying on the floor, directly beneath the open cupola window, was a mask, large enough to cover a man’s entire face, cut roughly out of bright red satin. So, in spite of my surety, it would seem, now, that undoubtedly “red mask” were the words that Father had said to Irene before he died.

Now, to see what we can do with all this. First, the locked doors: There could be, has been, endless speculation about those locked doors. But, finally, they seem to come to but two hypotheses. Either the fellow is up to something of which, as yet, not one of us has begun to get an inkling; or else he is a raving maniac, and his very lack of purpose is what is throwing us all so completely off the scent, and also what is saving him.

I am strong for the second theory—that this is the work of a maniac. A smart man might have locked us all in our rooms that first night. No man, in his senses, would have run the risk of being out in the hall long enough to lock all the doors of the vacant rooms last evening. He had had to collect the keys from the inside of the doors again, and he had had to do it after he had come into Olympe’s room through the window. If he knew anything, he must have known that no one was in any of those rooms he so carefully locked. But he repeated, exactly, his first performance; even to leaving the bathroom and attic doors unlocked, and the door of his victim’s room standing open.

From first to last, that rope business has seemed the work of a lunatic. This final move of lugging the thing into Olympe’s room, and leaving it there, unattached to anything, is the crowning lunacy.

It doesn’t take a maniac, I suppose, to miss his aim. But firing as high as three feet above his mark, when Olympe was lying there unconscious and motionless, seems rather wild for sanity.

Nothing being disturbed in either room appears to establish the fact that the fellow’s one motive is cold-blooded murder. As Aunt Gracia said at the inquest, we could grant that Father might have had an enemy. But unless we decide that this man has made up his mind to wipe out the entire Quilter family, which, of course, could be the decision of only a maniac, we cannot conceive of Olympe’s having the same enemy—or any enemy, for that matter.

The mask is made of bright red satin. It is about twelve inches long and ten inches wide. It has two small holes cut for the eyes. It has strings, cut from the same satin, knotted into the sides. The strings were tied together in the back, as they had been when he was wearing it. He must then have pulled it off over his head and dropped it, by mistake we assume, just before he got out of the window.

With the exception of Chris, we all believe, I think, that he did get out of the window this time. It was a darn risky business, running along that sloping roof to the rain spout, and getting hold of the spout, under the eaves, on a night as dark as last night was. I shouldn’t care to try it in the daytime. But this guy must be something of a circus performer, because he not only had to get off the roof, but he had also to get on it by means of the rain spout. Chris and I have gone carefully over the porch possibilities. The spout seems to be the one thing he could have used to climb on. The old trellis, at the south end, has completely rotted and fallen to pieces.

Perhaps here I would better give another line or two about the search that Grandfather, Aunt Gracia, and Chris made of the house. They went about it systematically. They did not forget the roof this time. The three outside doors were all locked on the inside, as is usual now. Every window downstairs was locked on the inside. The cellar doors were locked. Chris and I made another thorough search of the place after I got home last night. No one could have been hiding in the house.

This is what Chris thinks queers my maniac contention: He insists that it would take a keen mind to do exactly the same thing, twice, and outwit us each time. Of course, any fool who was willing to risk his neck could have made a clean getaway last night. After the snow melted, we had another freeze, and the ground is so hard that we can’t stamp our own footprints down into it. Escape, then, last night—discounting again the distance from the porch roof to the ground, and the dangers of the rain spout as a ladder—would have been simple enough. We know, though, that he did not get away across the roof that first night. We know that the snow was unmarked by any sort of print. Consequently, Chris thinks that the fellow worked again last night whatever foxy scheme he worked the first time. That is so reasonable that I am more than half ashamed of myself for not agreeing. The rope, the locked doors, and the red mask prove, surely, that it was the same man both times.

The others are beginning to wonder, now, if we might have been mistaken about footprints that first night; if we might have overlooked a single line of them. Lucy, with her ingenious mind, has suggested that he might have got away on stilts! I know that there were no footprints. We have to stick to what we do know, or we shall never get anywhere. Since the man did not get out of the house that Monday night, he must have stayed in the house. Until last night, I have been certain that, since he did not stay in hiding in the house he stayed, as Aunt Gracia said, not in hiding. Or, to put it brashly, he was one of us.

Last night every single one of us was in the dining room, sitting around the table. Dong Lee was serving us. That settles it. It could not have been one of us. Consequently, he did stay in hiding in the house.

All this seems to grant him super-brains and sanity. But I believe it is quite as reasonable to grant him a madman’s cunning and a fool’s luck. When we find out what he did, where he went that first night, I’ll bet ten acres of Q 2 that we’ll not find any deep scheming, any genius job at the bottom of it. I’ll bet the same ten acres that we’ll find something so simple that a child might have devised it, so transparent that we’ve all looked straight through it without seeing it. I feel, somehow, certain that the entire thing is right before us for us to look at—if only we knew how to look. How to look seems to be the question now rather than where to look. You know what a wizard Aunt Gracia is when it comes to finding lost articles; and how she always says it is because she never hunts, but always thinks. It is thinking, now, and not peering under beds or into apple bins, that is going to land us where we need to be. In spite of my smartness, I have been trying to do some thinking that includes the trapdoor in the attic; but I haven’t had a sensible result, as yet.

Both times we have given the fellow a good many minutes to use as he pleased. But, since we are more or less civilized beings, not entirely inured to tragedy, I suppose it is not wholly to our discredit that our first impulses, on occasions of this sort, should be for something other than an immediate pursuit of the criminal.

Gus and his brothers do not subscribe to such sentimentality. They arrived, fully panoplied, about nine this morning and were at once overcome with disgust to think we had given attention to Olympe and Grandfather last night before we had started hue and cry. Nor did Chris’s contention that he had gone straight to the window in Olympe’s room, last night, and looked out of it, and seen nothing (the man could have got to the cover of the lower porch by that time), help much.

“Sure, I know,” Gus said. “Looking out of windows is all right. But how long did you folks hang around and talk things over this time, before you men thought of going out after the —— —— who did the killing?”

Later, he relented to the extent of admitting that, since he represented law and order in Quilter County, he supposed he’d try to do what he could. He added, however, that considering all the circumstances, and the time that had elapsed, he didn’t think we had a right to expect him to do much.

Aunt Gracia suggested that she thought he should depute at least two men to guard our house for a time.

Gus said, “Would you want them deputies to stay inside the house or outside the house, Miss Quilter?”

Whether or not he was trying to be funny, I don’t know. I don’t much care. It is relief, I guess. Now, since we all know that not one of us could have had a hand in this, it doesn’t seem to matter, greatly, what other people think.

The Wildochs had a talk with all of us—Grandfather was the spokesman, of course—first thing. Then they milled about the place for an hour or two, and made a great show of examining Olympe’s room. She is still in bed, so we curbed their enthusiasms for detail as much as we could; postponing, for instance, the minutia of digging the bullet out of the wall. When they finally left, Gus said that he would see what he could do about sending a couple of the boys out for a few days. No one has come, as yet, so he must have seen that he could do nothing.

Don’t, for the Lord’s sake, Judy, go worrying about our safety. Unlike Gus, we are able to do several things. Chris and I are both staying up to-night, for all night. The happy practice of feeding Whatof and Keeper in the kitchen shed has been discontinued. The house is locked from cellar to attic. We are getting our fresh air from the fireplace flues, and our strength is as—and so forth. No kidding, it makes a difference.

I guess this tells it all for to-night. Except sorry, and so on, for that fool letter I wrote to you yesterday. And, Judy, don’t forget about sending for Lucy, pronto. If we do get the money from Father’s insurance, I am going to try to think of some scheme for getting Grandfather away for at least a few weeks. Lucy and Grandfather are the only ones here whom I am worried much about. The others seem to be coming through pretty well. Olympe, I am sure, will be all right as soon as Uncle Phineas gets home. Thank fortune, when he comes this time, he’ll be able to stay.

Your loving brother,

Neal.