As my only drawing experience consisted in portraying specimens, it had no artistic pretensions whatever.
He seemed pleased, adopted the plan in an instant, then began to write down the names of his guests so that I could prepare an invitation for each. Most of them, I observed, lived in great cities to the North, New York and Boston particularly, and one or two of the men were more or less nationally known. The first half dozen names came easy. Then he paused, frowning.
“I wish I knew what to do about this bird,” he muttered, as much to himself as to me. “Killdare, I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of him—Major Kenneth Dell?”
I shook my head. “Not that I remember.”
“Well, I haven’t either—yet I suppose he’s a good sportsman. In the last few weeks he’s got close to my best friend, Bill Van Hope, and Bill asked me to ask him down for this shoot. Says he’s a distinguished man, the best of fellows, and is simply wild to try Floridan game. Oh, I’ll put him down. If Bill recommends him he must be the goods.”
He completed the list in a moment, then his duties calling him elsewhere, he left me in the study to prepare the invitations. And the hour turned out fortunately for me, after all. Thinking that the room was empty, Edith Nealman came back to her desk.
All the gold in Jason’s chest could not have bought a more lovely picture than she made, standing framed in the doorway. She was dressed in a spotless cotton middy-suit, and the red scarf at her throat brought out to perfection the light in her eyes and the high color in her cheeks. Then she came in and inspected the invitations.
There was no occasion for me to leave at once. We talked a while, on everything under the sun, and every minute something that was like delight kept growing within me. She’d been up against the world, this girl that chattered so gayly in the big, easy office-chair. She had known poverty, a veritable struggle for existence; yet they hadn’t hardened her in the least. No one I had ever met had possessed a sweeter, truer outlook, an unfeigned friendliness and comradeship for every decent thing that lived. Maybe you’d call it a childish simplicity, but I didn’t stop to consider what it was. I only knew that she was the prettiest and the sweetest girl I’d ever seen, and I was going to spend every moment possible in her presence.
Oh, but I loved to hear her laugh! I kept my brain busy thinking up things to say to her, that might waken that rippling sound of silver bells! I liked to see her eyes grow serious, and her lips half-pout as some delightful, fanciful thought played hide-and-seek in her mind. She had imagination, this niece of Grover Nealman. Perhaps, after all, it was the secret of her charm. I didn’t doubt for a moment but that she read romantic novels by the score, but I, for one, wouldn’t hold the fact against her.
We talked over the legend of Jason’s chest; and I was a little surprised at her devoted interest in it. Evidently the savage tale had gone straight home to her imagination. Whether she put the least credence in it I couldn’t tell.
It came about, in the twilight hour, that we walked together down to the craggy shore of the lagoon. Then we stood and watched the light dying on the blue-green water.
Once more the tide was rolling in. The waves beat with a startling fury over and against the rock wall, and in the half-light the white stones looked like the foam-covered fangs of a mighty sea-monster, raging at our intrusion. The water swept through the little crevices in the wall, and the cool spray, refreshing after the tropic day, swept against our faces.
The gray sand stretched down to the desolate sea. A plover uttered his disconsolate, wailing cry far out to sea. Some dark heron or bittern rose croaking from beside the lagoon, then flapped awkwardly away. I felt the girl’s hand on my arm as she drew closer to my side.
A worthy place—this manor house of Nealman. Vague thoughts, not quite in keeping with the ordered dimensions of life, had hold of my mind. Presently the girl’s grip tightened, and she pointed toward the lagoon.
I saw her face before I followed her gesture. I didn’t get the idea that she was frightened. Rather she was smiling, quietly, and her eyes glistened.
Seventy yards out, and perhaps fifteen yards back from the Bridge, great bubbles were bursting upward through the blue-green troubled waters. Some mysterious action of the currents, stirred by the tides, was the unquestioned cause; yet both of us were stirred by the same fancy. It was as if some great, air-breathing sea-monster was exhaling beneath the waves.
The next two weeks sped by as if with one rise and fall of the tides. I spent the time in locating the various fields of game: the tall holly-trees where the wild turkeys roosted, the sloughs where the bass were gamest, and marked down the cover of the partridge. In the meantime I collected specimens for the university.
It came about that I didn’t always go out alone. The best time of all to study wild-life is in late twilight and the first hours of dawn—and at such times Edith was unemployed. Many the still, late evenings when we stood together on the shore and watched the curlews in their strange, aerial minuet that no naturalist has even been able to explain; many the dewey morning that we watched the first sun’s rays probe through the mossy forest. She had an instinctive love for the outdoors, and her agile young body had seemingly fibers of steel. At least she could follow me wherever I wanted to go.
Once we came upon the Floridan deer, feeding in a natural woods-meadow, and once a gigantic manatee, the most rare of large American mammals, flopped in the mud of the Ochakee River. We knew that incredible confusion and bustle made by the wild turkeys when they flew to the tree-tops to roost; and she learned to whistle the partridge out from their thickets.
Of course we developed a fine companionship. I learned of her early life, a struggle against poverty that had been about to overwhelm her when her uncle had come to her aid; and presently I was telling her all of my own dreams and ambitions. She was wholly sympathetic with my aim to continue my university work for a higher degree; then to spend my life in scientific research. I described some of the expeditions that I had in mind but which seemed so impossible of fulfillment—the exploration of the great “back country” of Borneo, a journey across that mysterious island, Sumatra, the penetration of certain unknown realms of Tibet.
“But they take thousands of dollars—and I haven’t got ’em,” I told her quietly.
She looked out to sea a long time. “I wish I could find Jason’s treasure for you,” she answered at last.
I was used to Edith’s humor, and I looked up expecting to see the familiar laughter in her eyes. But the luster in those deep, blue orbs was not that of mirth. Fancies as beautiful as she was herself were sweeping her away....
Most of the guests arrived on the same train at the little town of Ochakee, and motored over to Kastle Krags. A half dozen in all had accepted Nealman’s invitation. I saw them when they got out of their cars.
Of course I straightened their names out later. At the time I only studied their faces—just as I’d study a new specimen, found in the forest. And when Edith and I compared notes afterward we found that our first impression was the same—that all six were strikingly similar in type.
They might just as well have been brothers, chips off the same block. When Nealman stood among them it seemed as if he might change names with any one of them, and hardly any one could tell the difference. There was nothing distinguishing about their clothes—all were well-dressed, either in white or tweeds; their skins had that healthy firmness and good color that is seen so often in men that are free from financial worry; their hair was cut alike; their linen was similarly immaculate; their accent was practically the same. Finally they were about the same age—none of them very young, none further than the first phases of middle-age.
Lemuel Marten was of course the most distinguished man in the party. Born rich, he had pushed his father’s enterprises into many lands and across distant seas, and his name was known, more or less, to all financiers in the nation. His face was perhaps firmer than the rest—his voice was more commanding and insistent. He was, perhaps, fifty years of age, stoutly built, with crinkling black hair and vivid, gray eyes. From time to time he stroked nervously a trim, perfectly kept iron-gray mustache.
Hal Fargo had been a polo-player in his day. Certain litheness and suppleness of motion still lingered in his body. His face was darkly brown, and white teeth gleamed pleasantly when he spoke. A pronounced bald spot was the only clew of advancing years. He was of medium height, slender, evidently a man of great personal magnetism and charm.
Joe Nopp was quite opposite, physically—rather portly, perhaps less dignified than most of his friends. I put down Nopp as a dead shot, and later I found I had guessed right. For all his plump, florid cheeks and his thick, white hands, he had an eye true as a surveyor’s instrument, nerves cold and strong as a steel chain. He was a man to be relied upon in a crisis. And both Edith and I liked him better than any of the others.
Lucius Pescini was an aristocrat of the accepted type—slender, tall, unmistakably distinguished. His hair was such a dark shade of brown that it invariably passed as black, he had eyes no less dark, sparkling under dark brows, and his small mustache and perfectly trimmed beard was in vivid contrast to a rather pale skin.
Of Major Kenneth Dell I had never heard. He had been an officer in the late war, and now he was Bill Van Hope’s friend, although not yet acquainted with Nealman. The two men met cordially, and Van Hope stood above them, the tallest man in the company by far, beaming friendship upon them both. Dell was of medium size, sturdily built, garbed with exceptionally good taste in imported flannels. He also had gray, vivid eyes, under rather fine brows, gray hair perfectly cut, a slow smile and quiet ways. Solely because he was a man of endless patience I expected him to distinguish himself with rod and reel.
Bill Van Hope, Nealman’s friend of whom I had heard so much, was not only tall, but broad and powerful. He had kind eyes and a happy smile—altogether as good a type of millionaire-sportsman as any one would care to know. Nealman introduced him to me, and his handshake was firm and cordial.
Nealman took them all into the great manor house: I went with Nealman’s chauffeur to see about the handling of their luggage. This was at half-past four of a sunlit day in September. I didn’t see any of the guests again until just before the dinner hour, when a matter of a broken fly-tip had brought me into the manor house. Thereupon occurred one of a series of incidents that made my stay at Kastle Krags the most momentous three weeks of my life.
It was only a little thing—this experience in Nealman’s study. But coming events cast their shadows before—and certainly it was a shadow, dim and inscrutable though it was, of what the night held in store. I had passed Florey the butler, gray and sphynx-like in the hallway, spoke to him as ever, and turned through the library door. And my first impression was that some other guest had arrived in my absence.
A man was standing, smoking, by the window. I supposed at once that he was an absolute stranger. There was not a single familiar image, not the least impulse to my memory. I started to speak, and beg his pardon, and inquire for Nealman. But the words didn’t come out. I was suddenly and inexplicably startled into silence.
It is the rare man who can analyze his own mental processes. Of all the sensations that throng the human mind there is none so lawless, so sporadic in its comings and departure, so utterly illogical as fear—and great surprise is only a sister of fear. I can’t explain why I was startled. There was no reason whatever for being so. I must go further—I was not only startled, but shaken too. It has come about that through the exigencies of the hunting trail I have been obliged to face a charging jaguar—in a jungle of Western Mexico—yet with nerves holding true. My nerves didn’t hold true now—and I couldn’t tell why. They jumped unnecessarily and quivered under the skin.
I did know the man beside the window after all. He was Major Kenneth Dell that I had observed particularly closely—due to having heard of him before—when he had first dismounted from the car. The thing that startled me was that in the hour and a half or so since I had seen him his appearance had undergone an amazing change.
It took several long seconds to win back some measure of common sense. Then I knew that, through some trick of nerves, I had merely attached a thousand times too much importance to a wholly trivial incident. In all probability the change in Dell’s appearance was simply an effect of light and shadow, wrought by the window in front of which he stood.
But for the instant his face simply had not seemed his own. Its color had been gone—indeed it had seemed absolutely bloodless. His eyes had been vivid holes in his white face, his features were drawn out of all semblance to his own, the facial lines were graven deep. His lips looked loose, as with one whose muscle-control is breaking.
But my impression had only an instant’s life. Either the man drew himself together at my stare, or my own vision got back to normal. He was himself again—the same, suave, genial sportsman I had seen dismount from the car. He answered my inquiry, and I turned through the library door.
If I had seen true, there could be but one explanation: that Major Dell had undergone some violent nervous shock since he had entered the door of the manor house of Kastle Krags.
After the dinner hour Nealman came for me, in the room just off the hall from his own that he had designated for my use. I’d never seen him in quite so gay a humor. His eyes sparkled; happiness rippled in his voice. His tone was more companionable too, lacking that faint but unmistakable air of patronage it had always previously held. He had never forgotten, until now, that he was the employer, I the employee. Now his accent and manner was one of equality, and he addressed me much as he had addressed his wealthy guests.
He had been drinking; but he was not in the least intoxicated. Perhaps he had been stimulated, very slightly. He wore a dinner coat with white trousers.
“Killdare, I want you to come downstairs,” he said. “Some of my friends want to talk to you about shootin’ and fishin’. They’re keen to know what their prospects are.”
“I’d like to,” I answered. “But I’ll have to come as I am. I haven’t a dinner coat——”
“Of course come as you are.”
His arm touched mine, and he headed me down the hallway to the stairs. Then we walked side by side down the big, wide stairway to the big living-room.
Already I heard the sound of the guests’ laughter. As I went further the hall seemed simply ringing with it. There could be no further doubt of the success of Nealman’s party. Evidently his distinguished guests had thrown all dignity to the winds, entering full into the spirit of play.
The glimpse of the big living-room only verified this first impression. The guests were evidently in that wonderful mood of merriment that is the delight and ambition of all hosts, but which is so rarely obtained. Most men know the doubtful temper of a mob. Few had failed to observe that the same psychology extends to the simplest social gatherings. How often stiffness and formality haunt the drawing-room or dining-table, where only merriment should rule! How many times the social spirit wholly fails to manifest itself. To-night, evidently, conditions were just right, and hilarity ruled at Kastle Krags.
As I came in Joe Nopp—the portly man with the clear, gray eyes—was telling some sort of an anecdote, and his listeners were simply shouting with laughter. Major Dell and Bill Van Hope were shooting craps on the floor, ten cents a throw, carrying on a ridiculous conversation with the dice. A big phonograph was shouting a negro song from the corner.
There was a slight lull, however, when Nealman and I came in. Van Hope spoke to me first—he was the only one of the guests I had met—and the others turned toward me with the good manners of their kind. In a moment Nealman had introduced me to Joe Nopp’s listeners and, an instant later, to Major Dell.
“Mr. Killdare is down here doing some work in zoology for his university,” Nealman explained, “and he’s agreed to show you chaps where to find game and fish. He knows this country from A to Izzard.”
I held the center of the floor, for a while, as I answered their questions; and I can say truly I had never met, on the whole, a better-bred and more friendly company of men. They wanted to know all about the game in the region, what flies or lures the bass were taking, as to the prevalence of diamond-backs, and if the tarpon were striking beyond the natural rock wall. In their eagerness they were like boys.
“You’ll talk better with a shot of something good,” Nealman told me at last, producing a quart bottle. “Have a little Cuban cheer.”
The bottle contained old Scotch, and its appearance put an end to all serious discussion. From thence on the mood of the gathering was ever lighter, ever happier; and I merely sat and looked on.
“The question ain’t,” Hal Fargo said of me with considerable emphasis, “whether he knows where the turkeys are, but whether or not he knows his college song!”
I pretended ignorance, but soon Van Hope and Nealman were singing “A Cow’s Best Friend” at the top of their voices, while Nopp tried to drown them out with “Fill ’em up for Williams.”
Even now it could not be said that any of the group were intoxicated. Fargo was certainly the nearest; his cheeks were flushed and his speech had that reckless accent that goes so often with the first stages of drunkenness. The distinguished Pescini was only animated and fanciful, Van Hope and Marten perhaps slightly stimulated. For all the charm of their conversation I couldn’t see that Nopp or Major Dell were receiving the slightest exhilaration from their drinks.
But the spirit of revelry was ever higher. These men were on a holiday, they had left their business cares a thousand miles to the north, mostly they were tried companions. None of us was aware of the passing of time. I saw at once that my presence was not objectionable to the party, so I lingered long after the purpose for which I had been brought among them had been fulfilled—purely for the sake of entertainment. I had never seen a frolic of millionaires before, and needless to say I enjoyed every moment of it.
In the later hours of night the revellers ranged further over the house. Joe Nopp was in the billiard room exhibiting fancy shots and pretending to receive the plaudits of a great multitude; Pescini and Van Hope were in conversation on the veranda, and Fargo was wholly absent and unaccounted for. I had missed Marten, the financier, for a moment; but his reappearance was the signal for a fresh rush to the living-room.
The whole party met him with a yell. In the few moments of his absence he had wrought a startling change in his appearance. Over his shoulders he had thrown a gayly colored Indian blanket, completely hiding his trim dinner coat. He had tied a red cloth over his head and waxed the points of his iron-gray mustache until they stood stiff and erect, giving an appearance of mock ferocity to his face. A silver key-ring and his own gold signet dangled from his ears, tied on with invisible black thread. And to cap the climax he carried a long, wicked-looking carving-knife between his teeth.
Of course he was Godfrey Jason himself—the same character I had portrayed in the invitations. Fargo made him do a Spanish dance to the clang of an invisible tambourine.
Some of the gathering scattered out again, after his dramatic appearance, drifting off on various enterprises and as the hour neared midnight only four of us were left in the drawing-room. Marten stood in the center, still in his ridiculous costume. Van Hope, Nealman, Pescini and myself were grouped about him. And it might have been that in the song that followed Pescini too slipped away. I know that I didn’t see him immediately thereafter.
With a little urging Marten was induced to sing Samuel Hall—a stirring old ballad that quite fitted his costume. He had a pleasant baritone, he sung the song with indescribable spirit and enthusiasm, and it was decidedly worth hearing. Indeed it was the very peak of the evening—a moment that to the assembled guests must have almost paid them for the long journey.
“For I shot a man in bed, man in bed—
For I shot a man in bed, and I left him there for dead,
With a bullet through his head—
Damn your eyes!”
But the song halted abruptly. Whether he was at the middle of the verse, a pause after a stanza, or even in the middle of a chord I do not know. On this point no one will ever have exact knowledge. Marten stopped singing because something screamed, shrilly and horribly, out toward the lagoon.
The picture that followed is like a photograph, printed indelibly on my mind. Marten paused, his lips half open, a strange, blank look of amazement on his face. Nealman stared at me like a witless man, but I saw by his look that he was groping for an explanation. Van Hope stood peculiarly braced, his heavy hands open, beads of perspiration on his temples. Whether Pescini was still with us I do not know. I tried to remember later, but without ever coming to a conclusion. He had been standing behind me, at first, so I couldn’t have seen him anyway. I believed, however, without knowing why, that he walked into the hall at the beginning of the song.
The sound we had heard, so sharp and clear out of the night, so penetrating above the mock-ferocious words of the song, was utterly beyond the ken of all of us. It was a living voice; beyond that no definite analysis could be made. Sounds do not imprint themselves so deeply upon the memory as do visual images, yet the remembrance of it, in all its overtones and gradations, is still inordinately vivid; and I have no doubt but that such is the case with every man that heard it.
It was a high, rather sharp, full-lunged utterance, not in the least subdued. It had the unrestrained, unguarded tone of an instinctive utterance, rather than a conscious one—a cry that leaped to the lips in some great extremity or crisis. Yet it went further. Every man of us that heard it felt instinctively that its tone was of fear and agony unimagined, beyond the pale of our ordered lives.
“My God, what’s that?” Van Hope asked. Van Hope was the type of man that yields quickly to his impulses.
None of us answered him for a moment. Then Nealman turned, rather slowly. “It sounded like the devil, didn’t it?” he said. “But it likely wasn’t anything. I’ve heard some devilish cries in the couple of weeks I’ve been here—bitterns and owls and things like that. Might have been a panther in the woods.”
Marten smiled slowly, rather contemptuously. “You’ll have to do better than that, Nealman. That wasn’t a panther. Also—it wasn’t an owl. We’d better investigate.”
“Yes—I think we had better. But you don’t know what hellish sounds some of these swamp-creatures can make. We’ll all be laughing in a minute.”
His tone was rather ragged, for all his reassuring words, and we knew he was as shaken as the rest of us. A door opened into the hall—evidently some of the other guests were already seeking the explanation of that fearful sound.
It seemed to all of us that hardly an instant had elapsed since the sound. Indeed it still rang in our ears. All that had been said had scarcely taken a breath. We rushed out, seemingly at once, into the velvet darkness. The moon was incredibly vivid in the sky.
We passed into a rose-garden, under great, arching trees, and now we could see the silver glint of the moon on the lagoon. The tide was going out and the waters lay like glass.
Through the rifts in the trees we could see further—the stretching sands, gray in the moonlight, the blue-black mysterious seas beyond. What forms the crags took, in that eerie light! There was little of reality left about them.
We heard some one pushing through the shrubbery ahead of us, and he stopped for us to come up. I recognized the dark beard and mustache of Pescini. “What was it?” he asked. Excitement had brought out a deep-buried accent, native to some South European land. “Was it further on?”
“I think so,” Nealman answered. “Down by the lagoon.”
He joined us, and we pushed on, but we spread out as we neared the shore of the lagoon. Some one’s shadow whipped by me, and I turned to find Major Dell.
The man was severely shaken. “My God, wasn’t that awful!” he exclaimed. “Who is it—you, Killdare?” He stared into my face, and his own looked white and masque-like in the moonlight. Then all of us began to search, up and down the shore of the lagoon.
In the moonlight our shadows leaped, met one another, blended and raced away; and our voices rang strangely as we called back and forth. But the search was not long. Van Hope suddenly exclaimed sharply—an audible inhalation of breath, rather than an oath—and we saw him bending over, only his head and shoulders revealed in the moonlight. He stood just beside the craggy margin of the lagoon.
“What is it?” some one asked him, out of the gloom.
“Come here and see,” Van Hope replied—rather quietly, I thought. In a moment we had formed a little circle.
A dead man lay at our feet, mostly obscured in the shadow of the crags of the lagoon. We simply stood in silence, looking down. We knew that he was dead just as surely as we knew that we ourselves were living men. It was not that the light was good; that there was scarcely any light at all. We knew it, I suppose, from the huddled position of his form.
Joe Nopp scratched a match. He held it perfectly steadily. The first thing it showed to me was a gray face and gray hair, and a stain that was not gray, but rather ominously dark, on the torn, white front of the man’s evening shirt. Nealman peered closely.
“It’s my butler, Florey,” he said.
There was nothing in particular to say or do. We simply stood looking down, that huddled body from which life had been struck as if by a meteor, in the center. From time to time we looked up from it to stare out over the ensilvered waters of the lagoon.
We all shared this same inclination—to look away into the misty distance, past the lagoon, past the gray shore, into the sea so mysterious and still. The tide was running out now, so there was no tumult of breaking waves on the Bridge. At intervals, and at a great distance, we could hear the high-pitched shriek of plover.
Of course the mood lasted just an instant. It was as if we had all been stricken silent and lifeless, unable to speak, unable to act, with only the power left to look and to wonder and to dream. I suppose the finding of that huddled body, under those conditions, was a severe nervous shock to us all. Joe Nopp, he of the true eye and the steady nerve, was the first to get back on an every-day footing with life.
“It’s a fiendish crime,” he said in the stillness. He spoke rather slowly, without particular emphasis. “Of all the people to murder—that gray, inoffensive little butler of yours! Nealman, let’s get busy. Maybe we can catch the devil yet.”
Nealman came to himself with a start. “Sure, Joe. Tell us what to do. We need a directing head at a time like this.”
Nealman had dropped his accent. He spoke tersely, more like a man in the street than the aristocrat he had come to believe himself to be.
“The first thing is to get word into town—Ochakee, you call it. Get hold of the constable, or any other authority, and tell him to notify the sheriff.”
“Ochakee’s the county seat—we can reach the sheriff himself.”
“Good. Tell him to take steps to guard all roads for suspicious characters. Get out posses, if they would help. Get the coroner and all the official help we can get out here.” He turned to me, with a whip-like, emphatic movement. “Killdare, you might help us here. You likely know the roads. Tell us what to do.”
“You’ve said what to do,” I told him. “There’s not enough white men in this part of the country to make a posse—and a posse couldn’t find any one that wanted to hide in the cypress swamps. The thing to do—is to cut off the murderer’s escape and starve him out. Nealman, isn’t yours the only road——”
“As far as I know——”
“The marshes are almost impassible to the left, and on the other side is the river. If we can keep him from getting as far as Nixon’s——”
“Who’s Nixon——”
“Next planter up the road, five miles up. Get a phone to him right away. Young Nixon will watch all night and stop any one who tries to pass. The sheriff can put a man there to-morrow. Let’s find a phone.”
Hal Fargo, seemingly as cold as a blade, started to bend over the body for further examination of the wound, but two of the men caught his arm.
“Don’t touch him, Hal,” Major Dell advised, quietly. “The less we track up the spot and muss things up the better. The detective’ll have a better chance for thumb prints, and things like that.”
“You’re right, Dell,” the man agreed. “And now let’s get to a phone.”
“Good.” It was Joe Nopp’s cool, self-reliant voice again. “In the meantime, have any of you got a gun?”
Lemuel Marten alone responded—he carried a little automatic pistol in the pocket of his dinner coat. “Here,” he said. He drew the thing out, and it made blue fire in the moonlight in his hand.
“Then, Marten, you head a hunt through these grounds. The murderer might still be hiding in the shrubbery. Stop every one—shoot ’em if they don’t stop. Now Nealman, Van Hope, Killdare—where’s the phone?”
Nopp, Nealman, and myself started for the house; Fargo, Major Dell, and Pescini and Van Hope followed Marten into the more shadowed parts of the gardens and lawns. Before ever we reached the house we heard their excited shouts but we paused only an instant. “They can handle him if they’ve got him,” Nopp said. “We’d better go and do our work.”
We divided in the hall. Nopp and I went to the phone, Nealman and Van Hope, at Nopp’s suggestion, to round up all the servants. “Keep ’em in one room, and watch ’em,” Nopp advised. “We’ll like enough find the murderer among them—some domestic jealousy, or something like that. Don’t give any of ’em a chance to get away or to destroy evidence.”
I telephoned to Nixon’s first. The sleepy, country Central rang long and often, and at last a drowsy voice answered the ring.
“This Charley Nixon?” I asked.
“Yes.” He awakened vividly at the sound of his own name.
“This is Ned Killdare—I met you on the way out. I’m at Nealman’s—Kastle Krags. A man has been murdered here, just a few minutes ago! I want you to watch the road with your dogs—that strip between the river and marsh, and not let any one go through from this way. Can you handle it?”
Charley Nixon had borne arms in France, his father had ridden with the Clansmen of long ago, and his answer was clear and unhesitating over the wire. “Any one who tries to get by me will be S. O. L.,” he said.
A moment later I reached the coroner at Ochakee. He promised he could start for the scene at once, in his car, bringing the sheriff or his deputy, and that he would take all the precautions he could to cut off the murderer’s escape. Then Nopp and I returned to the living-room.
It was an unforgettable picture—that scene in the big living-room where Nealman’s guests had been so merry a few minutes before. A bottle of whiskey still stood on the table in the center, half-filled glasses, in which the ice had not yet melted, stood beside it and on the window-sills and smoking stands. Little, unwavering filaments of blue smoke streamed up from half-burned cigarettes. In the places of the revelers stood a group of sobbing, terrified negroes.
We were not native southerners, accustomed to seeing the black people in their paroxysms of fear, and the sight went straight home to all of us. These were the “cotton field niggers” of which old-time planters speak, slaves to the blackest superstitions that ever cursed the tribes of the Congo, and the night’s crime had gone hard with them. Their faces were gray, rather than black, the whites of their eyes were plainly visible, and they made a confused babble of sound. The women, particularly, were sobbing and praying alternately; most of the men were either stuttering or apoplectic with sheer terror. Some of them cowered, shrieking, as we opened the door.
“Shut up that noise,” Nopp demanded. A dead silence followed his words. “No one is going to hurt you as long as you stay in here and shut up. Where’s the boss.”
One of them pointed, rather feebly, to the next room. And I took the instant’s interval to reach the side of some one that sat, alone and silent, in a big chair in the chimney-corner.
It was Edith Nealman, and she had been rounded up with the rest of the house employees. Her bare feet were in slippers, and she wore a long dressing-gown over her night-dress. Her hair hung in two golden braids over her shoulders.
I was glad to see that the terror of the blacks had not passed, in the least degree, to her. Of course she was pale and shaken, her eyes were wide, but her voice when she spoke was subdued and calm, and there was not the slightest trace of hysteria about her. “It’s a dreadful thing, isn’t it?” she said. “Poor little Florey—who’d want to murder him!”
“Nobody knows—but we’re going to get him, anyway,” I promised rashly. And what transpired thereafter did not come out in the inquest.
It was only a little thing, but it meant teeming worlds to me. One of her hands groped out to mine, and I pressed it in reassurance.
Besides the native southern blacks that acted as gardeners and chambermaids and table hands about the place, Nealman had rounded up his mulatto chauffeur. Mrs. Gentry, his white housekeeper, sat a little to one side of the group of negroes.
In a moment Nealman and Van Hope rejoined us, and we turned once more through the still hall that had been Florey’s particular domain. An instant later we were out on the moonlit driveway.
“I wonder if those birds will have sense enough to stay away from the body,” Nopp said gruffly. “It would be easy to mess up and destroy every bit of evidence——”
“Major Dell warned them,” I said. “I think they’ll remember.”
“Nevertheless, I think we’d better post a guard over it.” He paused, eyeing an approaching figure. It was Marten, and he was almost out of breath.
“Any luck?” Nealman asked.
“Nothing.” Marten paused, fighting for breath. “Something stirred over in the thicket—we chased it down and tried to round it up. I guess it wasn’t anything—certainly if it had been a man we’d scared it out. Have you a dog?”
“Haven’t shipped my dogs down here yet, but coons and such things come out of the woods every once in a while. Where are your men——”
“They’ll round up here in a minute. We’ve been beating through the grounds.”
In a moment Major Dell and Fargo approached us from opposite sides of the garden, and once more we headed down toward the lagoon. A voice called after us, and Pescini caught up.
“No trace of anything?” he asked.
“Not a trace,” some one replied.
We walked with ever-decreasing pace, a rather uncertain group, down toward the crags of the shore. All of us, I think, were busy with our own thoughts. All of us paused, at last, forty yards from the scene of the tragedy.
“There’s really nothing further we can do,” Nopp said. “If the murderer is among the servants we’ve got him—you found ’em all, didn’t you, Nealman?”
“All of ’em. No suspicious circumstances.”
“Good. If he is some outsider, we’ll round him up. I rather think the former—it’s too early to make a guess. But I think we’d better appoint a guard over the body—to keep any curious persons from coming near and tramping out footprints, and so on. There’s apt to be a crowd of the curious here to-morrow.”
All of us nodded. Lemuel Marten whispered an oath.
Nopp turned to him. “Would you mind taking that post to-night, Marten?” he asked. Because he already knew the man’s answer, he turned to us. “Lem’s the best man for the post,” he explained. “You chaps know we’ll all have to give an account of our actions to-night. It’s customary at such times. And you know that Lem was busy singing his pirate song when the thing occurred.”
“That’s an unnecessary point, Joe,” Marten answered. “None of us will be in the least suspected. This poor chap—that none of us knew. However, I’ll gladly enough act as guard.”
“You’ve still got your gun?”
“I made Pescini carry it. He’s a shot.”
Pescini handed him back the weapon, and Marten walked on across the lawn to his post. The rest of us waited an instant in the road, talking quietly to one another, and two or three of the men were getting out their cigarettes. It was our first breathing-spell. Then we started slowly back toward the house.
But we halted at the sound of Marten’s voice. “Wait a minute, will you?” he called.
It is hard to explain why we all stopped in our tracks. Van Hope, whom I had never suspected of nerves, let his cigarette fall to the ground, a red streak. The voice out of the gloom was wholly quiet, subdued, perfectly calm, seemingly nothing to waken alarm or even especial interest. Perhaps what held us and startled us was the realization of an effort of will behind those commonplace, unruffled tones.
“What is it, Lem?” Nopp asked.
There was an instant’s interval of unfathomable silence. “I wish you’d come here,” Marten replied. “I’m a little balled up—as to where I am. These trees and shrubs are so near alike. I can’t exactly find—the place.”
Nopp did get there, but he didn’t go alone. All of us turned, half-running. And for a vague, bewildered, half-remembered moment we searched frantically up and down the craggy shore of the lagoon.
Then in the moonlight I saw Nopp and Nealman come together, and Nopp seized the other’s arms.
“My God, Grover!” he said hoarsely. “The body has disappeared!”
There was no further possibility of a mistake. Marten’s inability to find the body could not be further attributed to a mere confusion as to its correct location. In the few minutes we had been phoning and while the remainder of the guests had been searching for the murderer, the body of the murdered man had vanished from the shore of the lagoon. Nor had any mysterious over-sweeping of the water carried it away. We found, easily enough, the place where it had lain, and we knew it by the crushed vegetation and an ominous stain on the earth.
For a moment we all stood speechless, almost motionless, gazing down on the place where the body had been. The guest’s faces all looked oddly white in the moonlight. Then I heard Nealman and Nopp talking in a subdued voice at my side.
“You see what it means,” Nealman said. “The murderer came back to the body—that’s the only explanation! That means he’s still on the grounds—perhaps within a few hundred yards.”
“But what did he do with the thing? I wish I did know what it meant. It makes no sense. But there’s nothing we can do——”
His words blurred in my consciousness, and I suddenly ceased to hear him. The reason was simply that my own thoughts were now too busy to admit external impressions. If there was one thing needed in this affair it was careful investigation and research—the very key and basis of my own life’s work. I was a scientist—at least I had gone a distance into scientific work—and scientific methods were needed now. Why shouldn’t I direct the same method that made me a successful naturalist into the unraveling of this mystery?
Science has explored the lightless mysteries of the deep, has measured the stars and traced the comets through the heavens: there was no cause to believe it couldn’t conquer now. I was of a branch of science that mainly studied externals, my methods were simply accurate observation, tireless investigation, and logical deduction—the methods of all naturalists the world over; and they were just what was needed here.
Presently I forgot the shaken men about me and began really to observe. First, I tried to fix in my mind the exact way the body had lain. It had been curiously huddled, lying rather on the right side—and the torn, stained shirt-front had been plainly visible. Its location was not far above high-tide mark, at the edge of the lawns—and because the craggy margin of the lagoon was rather precipitous at that place, not more than twenty feet from the water’s edge at low tide.
It was impossible even to hazard a guess what kind of a weapon had inflicted the death wound. But it had not been a clean, stabbing wound to the heart. The wound itself must have been a long gash downward along the breast, for the shirt and waistcoat had been curiously ripped and torn. And possibly the weapon might be found in the grass where the body had lain.
I quietly moved back and forth among the group of men, searching for the gleam of moonlight upon a knife blade. It didn’t reveal itself, however, and there seemed no course but to wait for daylight. But as I was about to give up the search my eye caught the glimpse of something white, half-hidden in the grass in the direction of the house.
I quietly picked it up, saw that it was a folded piece of heavy paper or parchment, and slipped it into my pocket. Then I rejoined the little crowd of guests.
“Good Lord, what can we do...?” Pescini was saying excitedly. “The lake can’t be dragged until to-morrow. There’s no use to post guards around this big house—the thickets are so heavy that any one could steal through almost any place. We’ve got the road guarded—and the officers won’t come till to-morrow. It’s true that a couple of us could stand guard here——”
“I don’t see what good it would do,” Nopp replied. “The murderer would have no cause to come back again. I suggest we go to the house and get what rest we can. We may have to make some posses in the morning.”
In the privacy of my own room I took from my pocket the paper I had found. It proved to be of heavy parchment, whitened by time; and I felt at once I was running on a true scent.
There could be little doubt as to the age of the document. The ink was fading, the handwriting itself was in the style of long ago. The fact that the script was scratchy and uncertain, indicated that a man of meager education had written it. It was, however, perfectly legible. I judged that the date of the missive was at least ten or twenty years prior to the civil war.
Across the top of the page were written the words, referring evidently to the script beneath, “Sworn by the Book.” At the very bottom was the cryptic phrase “int F. T.” And the following, mysterious column lay between: