“I—I ain't well,” demurred the squire. “I've been sleepin' porely these last few nights. It's the heat,” he added quickly.
“Well, suh, you don't look very brash, and that's a fact,” said the constable; “but this here job ain't goin' to keep you long. You see it's in such shape—the body is—that there ain't no way of makin' out who the feller was nor whut killed him. There ain't nobody reported missin' in this county as we know of, either; so I jedge a verdict of a unknown person dead from unknown causes would be about the correct thing. And we kin git it all over mighty quick and put him underground right away, suh—if you'll go along now.”
“I'll go,” agreed the squire, almost quivering in his newborn eagerness. “I'll go right now.” He did not wait to get his coat or to notify his wife of the errand that was taking him. In his shirtsleeves he climbed into the buggy, and the constable turned his horse and clucked him into a trot. And now the squire asked the question that knocked at his lips demanding to be asked—the question the answer to which he yearned for and yet dreaded.
“How did they come to find—it?”
“Well, suh, that's a funny thing,” said the constable. “Early this mornin' Bristow's oldest boy—that one they call Buddy—he heared a cowbell over in the swamp and so he went to look; Bristow's got cows, as you know, and one or two of 'em is belled. And he kept on followin' after the sound of it till he got way down into the thickest part of them cypress slashes that's near the middle there; and right there he run acrost it—this body.
“But, suh, squire, it wasn't no cow at all. No, suh; it was a buzzard with a cowbell on his neck—that's whut it was. Yes, suh; that there same old Belled Buzzard he's come back agin and is hangin' round. They tell me he ain't been seen round here since the year of the yellow fever—I don't remember myself, but that's whut they tell me. The niggers over on the other side are right smartly worked up over it. They say—the niggers do—that when the Belled Buzzard comes it's a sign of bad luck for somebody, shore!”
The constable drove on, talking on, garrulous as a guinea hen. The squire didn't heed him. Hunched back in the buggy, he harkened only to those busy inner voices filling his mind with thundering portents. Even so, his ear was first to catch above the rattle of the buggy wheels the far-away, faint tonk-tonk! They were about half-way to Bristow's place then. He gave no sign, and it was perhaps half a minute before his companion heard it too.
The constable jerked the horse to a standstill and craned his neck over his shoulder.
“Well, by doctors!” he cried, “if there ain't the old scoundrel now, right here behind us! I kin see him plain as day—he's got an old cowbell hitched to his neck; and he's shy a couple of feathers out of one wing. By doctors, that's somethin' you won't see every day! In all my born days I ain't never seen the beat of that!”
Squire Gathers did not look; he only cowered back farther under the buggy top. In the pleasing excitement of the moment his companion took no heed, though, of anything except the Belled Buzzard.
“Is he followin' us?” asked the squire in a curiously flat, weighted voice.
“Which—him?” answered the constable, still stretching his neck. “No, he's gone now—gone off to the left—jest a-zoomin', like he'd done forgot somethin'.”
And Bristow's place was to the left! But there might still be time. To get the inquest over and the body underground—those were the main things. Ordinarily humane in his treatment of stock, Squire Gathers urged the constable to greater speed. The horse was lathered and his sides heaved wearily as they pounded across the bridge over the creek which was the outlet to the swamp and emerged from a patch of woods in sight of Bristow's farm buildings.
The house was set on a little hill among cleared fields and was in other respects much like the squire's own house except that it was smaller and not so well painted. There was a wide yard in front with shade trees and a lye hopper and a well-box, and a paling fence with a stile in it instead of a gate. At the rear, behind a clutter of outbuildings—a barn, a smokehouse and a corncrib—was a little peach orchard, and flanking the house on the right there was a good-sized cowyard, empty of stock at this hour, with feedracks ranged in a row against the fence. A two-year-old negro child, bareheaded and barefooted and wearing but a single garment, was grubbing busily in the dirt under one of these feedracks.
To the front fence a dozen or more riding horses were hitched, flicking their tails at the flies; and on the gallery men in their shirtsleeves were grouped. An old negro woman, with her head tied in a bandanna and a man's old slouch hat perched upon the bandanna, peeped out from behind a corner. There were gaunt hound dogs wandering about, sniffing uneasily.
Before the constable had the horse hitched the squire was out of the buggy and on his way up the footpath, going at a brisker step than the squire usually traveled. The men on the porch hailed him gravely and ceremoniously, as befitting an occasion of solemnity. Afterward some of them recalled the look in his eye; but at the moment they noted it—if they noted it at all—subconsciously.
For all his haste the squire, as was also remembered later, was almost the last to enter the door; and before he did enter he halted and searched the flawless sky as though for signs of rain. Then he hurried on after the others, who clumped single file along a narrow little hall, the bare, uncarpeted floor creaking loudly under their heavy farm shoes, and entered a good-sized room that had in it, among other things, a high-piled feather bed and a cottage organ—Bristow's best room, now to be placed at the disposal of the law's representatives for the inquest. The squire took the largest chair and drew it to the very center of the room, in front of a fireplace, where the grate was banked with withering asparagus ferns. The constable took his place formally at one side of the presiding official. The others sat or stood about where they could find room—all but six of them, whom the squire picked for his coroner's jury, and who backed themselves against the wall.
The squire showed haste. He drove the preliminaries forward with a sort of tremulous insistence. Bristow's wife brought a bucket of fresh drinking water and a gourd, and almost before she was out of the room and the door closed behind her the squire had sworn his jurors and was calling the first witness, who it seemed likely would also be the only witness—Bristow's oldest boy. The boy wriggled in confusion as he sat on a cane-bottomed chair facing the old magistrate. All there, barring one or two, had heard his story a dozen times already, but now it was to be repeated under oath; and so they bent their heads, listening as though it were a brand-new tale. All eyes were on him; none were fastened on the squire as he, too, gravely bent his head, listening—listening.
The witness began—but had no more than started when the squire gave a great, screeching howl and sprang from his chair and staggered backward, his eyes popped and the pouch under his chin quivering as though it had a separate life all its own. Startled, the constable made toward him and they struck together heavily and went down—both on their all fours—right in front of the fireplace.
The constable scrambled free and got upon his feet, in a squat of astonishment, with his head craned; but the squire stayed upon the floor, face downward, his feet flopping among the rustling asparagus greens—a picture of slavering animal fear. And now his gagging screech resolved itself into articulate speech.
“I done it!” they made out his shrieked words. “I done it! I own up—I killed him! He aimed fur to break up my home and I tolled him off into Niggerwool and killed him! There's a hole in his back if you'll look fur it. I done it—oh, I done it—and I'll tell everything jest like it happened if you'll jest keep that thing away from me! Oh, my Lawdy! Don't you hear it? It's a-comin' clos'ter and clos'ter—it's a-comin' after me! Keep it away–” His voice gave out and he buried his head in his hands and rolled upon the gaudy carpet.
And now they all heard what he had heard first—they heard the tonk-tonk-tonk of a cowbell, coming near and nearer toward them along the hallway without. It was as though the sound floated along. There was no creak of footsteps upon the loose, bare boards—and the bell jangled faster than it would dangling from a cow's neck. The sound came right to the door and Squire Gathers wallowed among the chair legs.
The door swung open. In the doorway stood a negro child, barefooted and naked except for a single garment, eyeing them with serious, rolling eyes—and, with all the strength of his two puny arms, proudly but solemnly tolling a small rusty cowbell he had found in the cowyard.
III
AN OCCURRENCE UP A SIDE STREET
“See if he's still there, will you?” said the man listlessly, as if knowing in advance what the answer would be.
The woman, who, like the man, was in her stocking feet, crossed the room, closing the door with all softness behind her. She felt her way silently through the darkness of a small hallway, putting first her ear and then her eye to a tiny cranny in some thick curtains at a front window.
She looked downward and outward upon one of those New York side streets that is precisely like forty other New York side streets: two unbroken lines of high-shouldered, narrow-chested brick-and-stone houses, rising in abrupt, straight cliffs; at the bottom of the canyon a narrow river of roadway with manholes and conduit covers dotting its channel intermittently like scattered stepping stones; and on either side wide, flat pavements, as though the stream had fallen to low-water mark and left bare its shallow banks. Daylight would have shown most of the houses boarded up, with diamond-shaped vents, like leering eyes, cut in the painted planking of the windows and doors; but now it was night time—eleven o'clock of a wet, hot, humid night of the late summer—and the street was buttoned down its length in the double-breasted fashion of a bandmaster's coat with twin rows of gas lamps evenly spaced. Under each small circle of lighted space the dripping, black asphalt had a slimy, slick look like the sides of a newly caught catfish. Elsewhere the whole vista lay all in close shadow, black as a cave mouth under every stoop front and blacker still in the hooded basement areas. Only, half a mile to the eastward a dim, distant flicker showed where Broadway ran, a broad, yellow streak down the spine of the city, and high above the broken skyline of eaves and cornices there rolled in cloudy waves the sullen red radiance, born of a million electrics and the flares from gas tanks and chimneys, which is only to be seen on such nights as this, giving to the heaven above New York that same color tone you find in an artist's conception of Babylon falling or Rome burning.
From where the woman stood at the window she could make out the round, white, mushroom top of a policeman's summer helmet as its wearer leaned back, half sheltered under the narrow portico of the stoop just below her; and she could see his uniform sleeve and his hand, covered with a white cotton glove, come up, carrying a handkerchief, and mop the hidden face under the helmet's brim. The squeak of his heavy shoes was plainly audible to her also. While she stayed there, watching and listening, two pedestrians—and only two—passed on her side of the street: a messenger boy in a glistening rubber poncho going west and a man under an umbrella going east. Each was hurrying along until he came just opposite her, and then, as though controlled by the same set of strings, each stopped short and looked up curiously at the blind, dark house and at the figure lounging in the doorway, then hurried on without a word, leaving the silent policeman fretfully mopping his moist face and tugging at the wilted collar about his neck.
After a minute or two at her peephole behind the window curtains above, the woman passed back through the door to the inner, middle room where the man sat.
“Still there,” she said lifelessly in the half whisper that she had come to use almost altogether these last few days; “still there and sure to stay there until another one just like him comes to take his place. What else did you expect?”
The man only nodded absently and went on peeling an overripe peach, striking out constantly, with the hand that held the knife, at the flies. They were green flies—huge, shiny-backed, buzzing, persistent vermin. There were a thousand of them; there seemed to be a million of them. They filled the shut-in room with their vile humming; they swarmed everywhere in the half light. They were thickest, though, in a corner at the back, where there was a closed, white door. Here a great knot of them, like an iridescent, shimmering jewel, was clustered about the keyhole. They scrolled the white enameled panels with intricate, shifting patterns, and in pairs and singly they promenaded busily on the white porcelain knob, giving it the appearance of being alive and having a motion of its own.
It was stiflingly hot and sticky in the room. The sweat rolled down the man's face as he peeled his peach and pared some half-rotted spots out of it. He protected it with a cupped palm as he bit into it. One huge green fly flipped nimbly under the fending hand and lit on the peach. With a savage little snarl of disgust and loathing the man shook the clinging insect off and with the knife carved away the place where its feet had touched the soft fruit. Then he went on munching, meanwhile furtively watching the woman. She was on the opposite side of a small center-table from him, with her face in her hands, shaking her head with a little shuddering motion whenever one of the flies settled on her close-cropped hair or brushed her bare neck.
He was a smallish man, with a suggestion of something dapper about him even in his present unkempt disorder; he might have been handsome, in a weakly effeminate way, had not Nature or some mishap given his face a twist that skewed it all to one side, drawing all of his features out of focus, like a reflection viewed in a flawed mirror. He was no heavier than the woman and hardly as tall. She, however, looked less than her real height, seeing that she was dressed, like a half-grown boy, in a soft-collared shirt open at the throat and a pair of loose trousers. She had large but rather regular features, pouting lips, a clear brown skin and full, prominent brown eyes; and one of them had a pronounced cast in it—an imperfection already made familiar by picture and printed description to sundry millions of newspaper readers. For this was Ella Gilmorris, the woman in the case of the Gilmorris murder, about which the continent of North America was now reading and talking. And the little man with the twisted face, who sat across from her, gnawing a peach stone clean, was the notorious “Doctor” Harris Devine, alias Vanderburg, her accomplice, and worth more now to society in his present untidy state than ever before at any one moment of his whole discreditable life, since for his capture the people of the state of New York stood willing to pay the sum of one thousand dollars, which tidy reward one of the afternoon papers had increased by another thousand.
Everywhere detectives—amateurs and the kind who work for hire—were seeking the pair who at this precise moment faced each other across a little center-table in the last place any searcher would have suspected or expected them to be—on the second floor of the house in which the late Cassius Gilmorris had been killed. This, then, was the situation: inside, these two fugitives, watchful, silent, their eyes red-rimmed for lack of sleep, their nerves raw and tingling as though rasped with files, each busy with certain private plans, each fighting off constantly the touch of the nasty scavenger flies that flickered and flitted iridescently about them; outside, in the steamy, hot drizzle, with his back to the locked and double-locked door, a leg-weary policeman, believing that he guarded a house all empty except for such evidences as yet remained of the Gilmorris murder.
It was one of those small, chancy things that so often disarrange the best laid plots of murderers that had dished their hope of a clean getaway and brought them back, at the last, to the starting point. If the plumber's helper, who was sent to cure a bathtub of leaking in the house next door, had not made a mistake and come to the wrong number; and if they, in the haste of flight, had not left an area door unfastened; and if this young plumbing apprentice, stumbling his way upstairs on the hunt for the misbehaving drain, had not opened the white enameled door and found inside there what he did find—if this small sequence of incidents had not occurred as it did and when it did, or if only it had been delayed another twenty-four hours, or even twelve, everything might have turned out differently. But fate, to call it by its fancy name—coincidence, to use its garden one—interfered, as it usually does in cases such as this. And so here they were.
The man had been on his way to the steamship office to get the tickets when an eruption of newsboys boiled out of Mail Street into Broadway, with extras on their arms, all shouting out certain words that sent him scurrying back in a panic to the small, obscure family hotel in the lower thirties where the woman waited. From that moment it was she, really, who took the initiative in all the efforts to break through the doubled and tripled lines that the police machinery looped about the five boroughs of the city.
At dark that evening “Mr. and Mrs. A. Thompson, of Jersey City,” a quiet couple who went closely muffled up, considering that it was August, and carrying heavy valises, took quarters at a dingy furnished room house on a miscalled avenue of Brooklyn not far from the Wall Street ferries and overlooking the East River waterfront from its bleary back windows. Two hours later a very different-looking pair issued quietly from a side entrance of this place and vanished swiftly down toward the docks. The thing was well devised and carried out well too; yet by morning the detectives, already ranging and quartering the town as bird-dogs quarter a brier-field, had caught up again and pieced together the broken ends of the trail; and, thanks to them and the newspapers, a good many thousand wide awake persons were on the lookout for a plump, brown-skinned young woman with a cast in her right eye, wearing a boy's disguise and accompanied by a slender little man carrying his head slightly to one side, who when last seen wore smoked glasses and had his face extensively bandaged, as though suffering from a toothache.
Then had followed days and nights of blind twisting and dodging and hiding, with the hunt growing warmer behind them all the time. Through this they were guided and at times aided by things printed in the very papers that worked the hardest to run them down. Once they ventured as far as the outer entrance of the great, new uptown terminal, and turned away, too far gone and sick with fear to dare run the gauntlet of the waiting room and the train-shed. Once—because they saw a made-up Central Office man in every lounging long-shoreman, and were not so far wrong either—they halted at the street end of one of the smaller piers and from there watched a grimy little foreign boat that carried no wireless masts and that might have taken them to any one of half a dozen obscure banana ports of South America—watched her while she hiccoughed out into midstream and straightened down the river for the open bay—watched her out of sight and then fled again to their newest hiding place in the lower East Side in a cold sweat, with the feeling that every casual eye glance from every chance passer-by carried suspicion and recognition in its flash, that every briskening footstep on the pavement behind them meant pursuit.
Once in that tormented journey there was a sudden jingle of metal, like rattling handcuffs, in the man's ear and a heavy hand fell detainingly on his shoulder—and he squeaked like a caught shore-bird and shrunk away from under the rough grips of a truckman who had yanked him clear of a lurching truck horse tangled in its own traces. Then, finally, had come a growing distrust for their latest landlord, a stolid Russian Jew who read no papers and knew no English, and saw in his pale pair of guests only an American lady and gentleman who kept much to their room and paid well in advance for everything; and after that, in the hot rainy night, the flight afoot across weary miles of soaking cross streets and up through ill-lighted, shabby avenues to the one place of refuge left open to them. They had learned from the newspapers, at once a guide and a bane, a friend and a dogging enemy, that the place was locked up, now that the police had got through searching it, and that the coroner's people held the keys. And the woman knew of a faulty catch on a rear cellar window, and so, in a fit of stark desperation bordering on lunacy, back they ran, like a pair of spent foxes circling to a burrow from which they have been smoked out.
Again it was the woman who picked for her companion the easiest path through the inky-black alley, and with her own hands she pulled down noiselessly the broken slats of the rotting wooden wall at the back of the house. And then, soon, they were inside, with the reeking heat of the boxed-up house and the knowledge that at any moment discovery might come bursting in upon them—inside with their busy thoughts and the busy green flies. How persistent the things were—shake them off a hundred times and back they came buzzing! And where had they all come from? There had been none of them about before, surely, and now their maddening, everlasting droning filled the ear. And what nasty creatures they were, forever cleaning their shiny wings and rubbing the ends of their forelegs together with the loathsome suggestion of little grave-diggers anointing their palms. To the woman, at least, these flies almost made bearable the realization that, at best, this stopping point could be only a temporary one, and that within a few hours a fresh start must somehow be made, with fresh dangers to face at every turning.
It was during this last hideous day of flight and terror that the thing which had been growing in the back part of the brain of each of them began to assume shape and a definite aspect. The man had the craftier mind, but the woman had a woman's intuition, and she already had read his thoughts while yet he had no clue to hers. For the primal instinct of self-preservation, blazing up high, had burned away the bond of bogus love that held them together while they were putting her drunkard of a husband out of the way, and now there only remained to tie them fast this partnership of a common guilt.
In these last few hours they had both come to know that together there was no chance of ultimate escape; traveling together the very disparity of their compared appearances marked them with a fatal and unmistakable conspicuousness, as though they were daubed with red paint from the same paint brush; staying together meant ruin—certain, sure. Now, then, separated and going singly, there might be a thin strand of hope. Yet the man felt that, parted a single hour from the woman, and she still alive, his wofully small prospect would diminish and shrink to the vanishing point—New York juries being most notoriously easy upon women murderers who give themselves up and turn state's evidence; and, by the same mistaken processes of judgment, notoriously hard upon their male accomplices—half a dozen such instances had been playing in flashes across his memory already.
Neither had so much as hinted at separating. The man didn't speak, because of a certain idea that had worked itself all out hours before within his side-flattened skull. The woman likewise had refrained from putting in words the suggestion that had been uppermost in her brain from the time they broke into the locked house. Some darting look of quick, malignant suspicion from him, some inner warning sense, held her mute at first; and later, as the newborn hate and dread of him grew and mastered her and she began to canvass ways and means to a certain end, she stayed mute still.
Whatever was to be done must be done quietly, without a struggle—the least sound might arouse the policeman at the door below. One thing was in her favor—she knew he was not armed; he had the contempt and the fear of a tried and proved poisoner for cruder lethal tools.
It was characteristic also of the difference between these two that Devine should have had his plan stage-set and put to motion long before the woman dreamed of acting. It was all within his orderly scheme of the thing proposed that he, a shrinking coward, should have set his squirrel teeth hard and risked detection twice in that night: once to buy a basket of overripe fruit from a dripping Italian at a sidewalk stand, taking care to get some peaches—he just must have a peach, he had explained to her; and once again when he entered a dark little store on Second Avenue, where liquors were sold in their original packages, and bought from a sleepy, stupid clerk two bottles of a cheap domestic champagne—“to give us the strength for making a fresh start,” he told her glibly, as an excuse for taking this second risk. So, then, with the third essential already resting at the bottom of an inner waistcoat pocket, he was prepared; and he had been waiting for his opportunity from the moment when they crept in through the basement window and felt their way along, she resolutely leading, to the windowless, shrouded middle room here on the second floor.
How she hated him, feared him too! He could munch his peaches and uncork his warm, cheap wine in this very room, with that bathroom just yonder and these flies all about. From under her fingers, interlaced over her forehead, her eyes roved past him, searching the littered room for the twentieth time in the hour, looking, seeking—and suddenly they fell on something—a crushed and rumpled hat of her own, a milliner's masterpiece, laden with florid plumage, lying almost behind him on a couch end where some prying detective had dropped it, with a big, round black button shining dully from the midst of its damaged tulle crown. She knew that button well. It was the imitation-jet head of a hatpin—a steel hatpin—that was ten inches long and maybe longer.
She looked and looked at the round, dull knob, like a mystic held by a hypnotist's crystal ball, and she began to breathe a little faster; she could feel her resolution tighten within her like a turning screw.
Beneath her brows, heavy and thick for a woman's, her eyes flitted back to the man. With the careful affectation of doing nothing at all, a theatricalism that she detected instantly, but for which she could guess no reason, he was cutting away at the damp, close-gnawed seed of the peach, trying apparently to fashion some little trinket—a toy basket, possibly—from it. His fingers moved deftly over its slick, wet surface. He had already poured out some of the champagne. One of the pint bottles stood empty, with the distorted button-headed cork lying beside it, and in two glasses the yellow wine was fast going flat and dead in that stifling heat. It still spat up a few little bubbles to the surface, as though minute creatures were drowning in it down below. The man was sweating more than ever, so that, under the single, low-turned gas jet, his crooked face had a greasy shine to it. A church clock down in the next block struck twelve slowly. The sleepless flies buzzed evilly.
“Look out again, won't you?” he said for perhaps the tenth time in two hours. “There's a chance, you know, that he might be gone—just a bare chance. And be sure you close the door into the hall behind you,” he added as if by an afterthought. “You left it ajar once—this light might show through the window draperies.”
At his bidding she rose more willingly than at any time before. To reach the door she passed within a foot of the end of the couch, and watching over her shoulder at his hunched-up back she paused there for the smallest fraction of time. The damaged picture hat slid off on the floor with a soft little thud, but he never turned around.
The instant, though, that the hall door closed behind her the man's hands became briskly active. He fumbled in an inner pocket of his unbuttoned waistcoat; then his right hand, holding a small cylindrical vial of a colorless liquid, passed swiftly over one of the two glasses of slaking champagne and hovered there a second. A few tiny globules fell dimpling into the top of the yellow wine, then vanished; a heavy reek, like the smell of crushed peach kernels, spread through the whole room. In the same motion almost he recorked the little bottle, stowed it out of sight, and with a quick, wrenching thrust that bent the small blade of his penknife in its socket he split the peach seed in two lengthwise and with his thumb-nail bruised the small brown kernel lying snugly within. He dropped the knife and the halved seed and began sipping at the undoctored glass of champagne, not forgetting even then to wave his fingers above it to keep the winged green tormentors out.
The door at the front reopened and the woman came in. Her thoughts were not upon smells, but instinctively she sniffed at the thick scent on the poisoned air.
“I accidentally split this peach seed open,” he said quickly, with an elaborate explanatory air. “Stenches up the whole place, don't it? Come, take that other glass of champagne—it will do you good to–”
Perhaps it was some subtle sixth sense that warned him; perhaps the lightning-quick realization that she had moved right alongside him, poised and set to strike. At any rate he started to fling up his head—too late! The needle point of the jet-headed hatpin entered exactly at the outer corner of his right eye and passed backward for nearly its full length into his brain—smoothly, painlessly, swiftly. He gave a little surprised gasp, almost like a sob, and lolled his head back against the chair rest, like a man who has grown suddenly tired. The hand that held the champagne glass relaxed naturally and the glass turned over on its side with a small tinkling sound and spilled its thin contents on the table.