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The Stillwater Tragedy

T >> Thomas Bailey Aldrich >> The Stillwater Tragedy




"I might have said something of the sort," Stevens admitted
reluctantly, after a pause. "His driving round at daybreak with an
empty cart did have an ugly look at first."

"Indade, then."

"Not to anybody who knew Tom Blufton," interrupted Samuel Piggott,
Blufton's brother-in-law. "The boy hasn't a bad streak in him. It was
an outrage. Might as well have suspected Parson Langly or Father
O'Meara."

"If this kind of thing goes on," remarked a man in the corner with
a patch over one eye, "both of them reverend gents will be hauled up,
I shouldn't wonder."

"That's so, Mr. Peters," responded Durgin. "If my respectability
didn't save me, who's safe?"

"Durgin is talking about his respectability! He's joking."

"Look here, Dexter," said Durgin, turning quickly on the speaker,
"when I want to joke, I talk about your intelligence."

"What kind of man is Taggett, anyhow?" asked Piggott. "You saw
him, Durgin."

"I believe he was at Justice Beemis's office the day Blufton and I
was there; but I didn't make him out in the crowd. Shouldn't know him
from Adam."

"Stillwater's a healthy place for tramps jest about this time,"
suggested somebody. "Three on 'em snaked in to-day."

"I think, gentlemen, that Mr. Taggett is on the right track
there," observed Mr. Snelling, in the act of mixing another Old
Holland for Mr. Peters. "Not too sweet, you said? I feel it in my
bones that it was a tramp, and that Mr. Taggett will bring him yet."

"He won't find him on the highway yonder," said a tgall, swarthy
man named Torrini, an Italian. Nationalities clash in Stillwater.
"That tramp is a thousand miles from here."

"So he is if he has any brains under his hat," returned Snelling.
"But they're on the lookout for him. The minute he pawns anything,
he's gone."

"Can't put up greenbacks or gold, can he? He didn't take nothing
else," interposed Bishop, the veterinary surgeon.

"Now jewelry nor nothing?"

"There wasn't none, as I understand it," said Bishop, "except a
silver watch. That was all snug under the old man's piller."

"Wanter know!" ejaculated Jonathan Beers.

"I opine, Mr. Craggie," said the school-master, standing in the
inner room with a rolled-up file of the Daily Advertiser in his hand,
"that the person who--who removed our worthy townsman will never be
discovered."

"I shouldn't like to go quite so far as that, sir," answered Mr.
Craggie, with that diplomatic suavity which leads to postmasterships
and seats in the General Court, and has even been known to oil a dull
fellow's way into Congress. "I cannot take quite so hopeless a view
of it. There are difficulties, but they must be overcome, Mr.
Pinkham, and I think they will be."

"Indeed, I hope so," returned the school-master. "But there are
cases--are there not?--in which the--the problem, if I may so
designate it, has never been elucidated, and the persons who
undertook it have been obliged to go to the foot, so to speak."

"Ah, yes, there are such cases, certainly. There was the Burdell
mystery in New York, and, later, the Nathan affair--By the way, I've
satisfactory theories of my own touching both. The police were
baffled, and remain so. But, my _dear_ sir, observe for a moment
the difference."

Mr. Pinkham rested one finger on the edge of a little round table,
and leaned forward in a respectful attitude to observe the
difference.

"Those crimes were committed in a vast metropolis affording a
thousand chances for escape, as well as offering a thousand
temptations to the lawless. But we are a limited community. We have
no professional murderers among us. The deed which has stirred
society to its utmost depths was plainly done by some wayfaring
amateur. Remorse has already arrived upon him, if the police haven't.
For the time being he escapes; but he is bound to betray himself
sooner or later. If the right steps are taken,--and I have myself the
greatest confidence in Mr. Taggett,--the guilty party can scarcely
fail to be brought to the bar of justice, if he doesn't bring himself
there."

"Indeed, indeed, I hope so," repeated Mr. Pinkham.

"The investigation is being carried on very closely."

"Too closely," suggested the school-master.

"Oh dear, no," murmured Mr. Craggie. "The strictest secrecy is
necessary in affairs of this delicate nature. If Tom, Dick, and Harry
were taken behind the scenes," he added, with the air of one wishing
to say too much, "the bottom would drop out of everything."

Mr. Pinkham shrunk from commenting on a disaster like that, and
relapsed into silence. Mr. Craggie, with his thumbs in the arm-holes
of his waistcoat, and his legs crossed in an easy, senatorial
fashion, leaned back in the chair and smiled blandly.

"I don't suppose there's nothing new, boys!" exclaimed a fat,
florid man, bustling in good-naturedly at the public entrance, and
leaving a straight wet trail on the sanded floor from the threshold
to the polished mahogany counter. Mr. Wilson was a local humorist of
the Falstaffian stripe, though not so much witty in himself as the
cause of wit in others.

"No, Jimmy, there isn't anything new," responded Dexter.

"I suppose you didn't hear that the ole man done somethin'
handsome for me in his last will and testyment."

"No, Jemmy, I don't think he has made any provision whatever for
an almshouse."

"Sorry to hear that, Dexter," said Willson, absorbedly chasing a
bit of lemon peel in his glass with the spoon handle, "for there
isn't room for us all up at the town-farm. How's your grandmother?
Finds it tol'rably comfortable?"

They are a primitive, candid people in their hours of unlaced
social intercourse in Stillwater. This delicate _tu quoque_ was
so far from wounding Dexter that he replied carelessly,--

"Well, only so so. The old woman complains of too much
chicken-sallid, and hot-house grapes all the year round."

"Mr. Shackford must have left a large property," observed Mr.
Ward, of the firm of Ward & Lock, glancing up from the columns of the
Stillwater Gazette. The remark was addressed to Lawyer Perkins, who
had just joined the group in the reading-room.

"Fairly large," replied that gentleman crisply.

"Any public bequests?"

"None to speak of."

Mr. Craggie smiled vaguely.

"You see," said Lawyer Perkins, "there's a will and no will,--that
is to say, the fragments of what is supposed to be a will were found,
and we are trying to put the pieces together. It is doubtful if we
can do it; it is doubtful if we can decipher it after we have done
it; and if we decipher it it is a question whether the document is
valid or not."

"That is a masterly exposition of the dilemma, Mr. Perkins," said
the school-master warmly.

Mr. Perkins had spoken in his court-room tone of voice, with one
hand thrust into his frilled shirt-bosom. He removed this hand for a
second, as he gravely bowed to Mr. Pinkham.

"Nothing could be clearer," said Mr. Ward. "In case the paper is
worthless, what then? I am not asking you in your professional
capacity," he added hastily; for Lawyer Perkins had been known to
send in a bill on as slight a provocation as Mr. Ward's.

"That's a point. The next of kin has his claims."

"My friend Shackford, of course," broke in Mr. Craggie. "Admirable
young man!--one of my warmest supporters."

"He is the only heir at law so far as we know," said Mr. Perkins.

"Oh," said Mr. Craggie, reflecting. "The late Mr. Shackford might
have had a family in Timbuctoo or the Sandwich Islands."

"That's another point."

"The fact would be a deuced unpleasant point for young Shackford
to run against," said Mr. Ward.

"Exactly."

"If Mr. Lemuel Shackford," remarked Coroner Whidden, softly
joining the conversation to which he had been listening in his
timorous, apologetic manner, "had chanced, in the course of his early
sea-faring days, to form any ties of an unhappy complexion"--

"Complexion is good," murmured Mr. Craggie. "Some Hawaiian lady!"

--"perhaps that would be a branch of the case worth investigating
in connection with the homicide. A discarded wife, or a disowned son,
burning with a sense of wrong"--

"Really, Mr. Whidden!" interrupted Lawyer Perkins witheringly, "it
is bad enough for my client to lose his life, without having his
reputation filched away from him."

"I--I will explain! I was merely supposing"--

"The law never supposes, sir!"

This threw Mr. Whidden into great mental confusion. As coroner was
he not an integral part of the law, and when, in his official
character, he supposed anything was not that a legal supposition? But
was he in his official character now, sitting with a glass of
lemonade at his elbow in the reading-room of the Stillwater hotel?
Was he, or was he not, a coroner all the time? Mr. Whidden stroked an
isolated tuft of hair growing low on the middle of his forehead, and
glared mildly at Mr. Perkins.

"Young Shackford has gone to New York, I understand," said Mr.
Ward, breaking the silence.

Mr. Perkins nodded. "Went this morning to look after the
real-estate interests there. It will probably keep him a couple of
weeks,--the longer the better. He was of no use here. Lemuel's death
was a great shock to him, or rather the manner of it was."

"That shocked every one. They were first cousin's weren't they?"
Mr. Ward was a comparatively new resident in Stillwater.

"First cousins," replied Lawyer Perkins; "but they were never very
intimate, you know."

"I imagine nobody was ever very intimate with Mr. Shackford."

"My client was somewhat peculiar in his friendships."

This was stating it charitably, for Mr. Perkins knew, and every
one present knew, that Lemuel Shackford had not had the shadow of a
friend in Stillwater, unless it was his cousin Richard.

A cloud of mist and rain was blown into the bar-room as the street
door stood open for a second to admit a dripping figure from the
outside darkness.

_"What's_ blowed down?" asked Durgin, turning round on his
stool and sending up a ring of smoke which uncurled itself with
difficulty in the dense atmosphere.

"It's only some of Jeff Stavers's nonsense."

"No nonsense at all," said the new-comer, as he shook the heavy
beads of rain from his felt hat. "I was passing by Welch's
Court--it's as black as pitch out, fellows--when slap went something
against my shoulder; something like wet wings. Well, I was scared.
It's a bat, says I. But the thing didn't fly off; it was still
clawing at my shoulder. I put up my hand, and I'll be shot if it
wasn't the foremast, jib-sheet and all, of the old weather-cock on
the north gable of the Shackford house! Here you are!" and the
speaker tossed the broken mast, with the mimic sails dangling from
it, into Durgin's lap.

A dead silence followed, for there wa felt to be something weirdly
significant in the incident.

"That's kinder omernous," said Mr. Peters, interrogatively.

"Ominous of what?" asked Durgin, lifting the wet mass from his
knees and dropping it on the floor.

"Well, sorter queer, then."

"Where does the queer come in?" inquired Stevens, gravelly. "I
don't know; but I'm hit by it."

"Come, boys, don't crowd a feller," said Mr. Peters, getting
restive. "I don't take the contract to explain the thing. But it does
seem some way droll that the old schooner should be wrecked so soon
after what has happened to the old skipper. If you don't see it, or
sense it, I don't insist. What's yours, Denyven?"

The person addressed as Denyven promptly replied, with a fine
sonorous English accent, "a mug of 'alf an' 'alf,--with a head on it,
Snelling."

At the same moment Mr. Craggie, in the inner room was saying to
the school-master,--

"I must really take issue with you there, Mr. Pinkham. I admit
there's a good deal in spiritualism which we haven't got at yet; the
science is in its infancy; it is still attached to the bosom of
speculation. It is a beautiful science, that of psychological
phenomena, and the spiritualists will yet become an influential class
of"--Mr. Craggie was going to say voters, but glided over
it--"persons. I believe in clairvoyance myself to a large extent.
Before my appointment to the post-office I had it very strong. I've
no doubt that in the far future this mysterious factor will be made
great use of in criminal cases; but at present I should resort to it
only in the last extremity,--the very last extremity, Mr. Pinkham!"

"Oh, of course," said the school-master deprecatingly. "I threw it
out only as the merest suggestion. I shouldn't think of--of--you
understand me?"

"Is it beyond the dreams of probability," said Mr. Craggie,
appealing to Lawyer Perkins, "that clairvoyants may eventually be
introduced into cases in our courts?"

"They are now," said Mr. Perkins, with a snort,--"the police bring
'em it."

Mr. Craggie finished the remainder of his glass of sherry in
silence, and presently rose to go. Coroner Whidden and Mr. Ward had
already gone. The guests in the public room were thinning out; a
gloom, indefinable and shapeless like the night, seemed to have
fallen upon the few that lingered. At a somewhat earlier hour tdhan
usual the gas was shut off in the Stillwater hotel.

In the lonely house in Welch's Court a light was still burning.






IV





A sorely perplexed man sat there, bending over his papers by the
lamp-light. Mr. Taggett had established himself at the Shackford
house on his arrival, preferring it to the hotel, where he would have
been subjected to the curiosity of the guests and to endless
annoyances. Up to this moment, perhaps not a dozen persons in the
place had had more than a passing glimpse of him. He was a very busy
man, working at his desk from morning until night, and then taking
only a brief walk, for exercise in some unfrequented street. His
meals were sent in from the hotel to the Shackford house, where the
constables reported to him, and where he held protracted conferences
with Justice Beemis, Coroner Whidden, Lawyer Perkins, and a few
others, and declined to be interviewed by the local editor.

To the outside eye that weather-stained, faded old house appeared
a throbbing seat of esoteric intelligence. It was as if a hundred
invisible magnetic threads converged to a focus under that roof and
incessantly clicked ouit the most startling information,--information
which was never by any chance allowed to pass beyond the charmed
circle. The pile of letters which the mail brought to Mr. Taggett
every morning--chiefly anonymous suggestions, and offers of
assistance from lunatics in remote cities--was enough in itself to
expasperate a community.

Covertly at first, and then openly, Stillwater began seriously to
question Mr. Taggett's method of working up the case. The Gazette, in
a double-leaded leader, went so far as to compare him to a bird with
fine feathers and no song, and to suggest that perhaps the bird might
have sung if the inducement offered had been more substantial. A
singer of Mr. Taggett's plumage was not to be taught by such chaff as
five hundred dollars. Having killed his man, the editor proceeded to
remark that he would suspend judgment until next week.

As if to make perfect the bird comparison, Mr. Taggett, after
keeping the public in suspense for six days and nights, abruptly flew
away, with all the little shreds and straws of evidence he had picked
up, to build his speculative nest elsewhere.

The defection of Mr. Taggett caused a mild panic among a certain
portion of the inhabitants, who were not reassured by the statement
in the Gazette that the case would now be placed in the proper
hands,--the hand so the county constabulary. "Within a few days,"
said the editor in conclusion, "the matter will undoubtedly be
cleared up. At present we cannot say more;" and it would have puzzled
him very much to do so.

A week passed, and no fresh light was thrown upon the catastrophe,
nor did anything occur to rattle the usual surface of life in the
village. A man--it was Torrini, the Italian--got hurt in Dana's iron
foundry; one of Blufton's twin girls died; and Mr. Slocum took on a
new hand from out of town. That was all. Stillwater was the
Stillwater of a year ago, with always the exception of that shadow
lying upon it, and the fact that small boys who had kindling to get
in were careful to get it in before nightfall. It would appear that
the late Mr. Shackford had acquired a habit of lingering around
wood-plies after dark, and also of stealing into bed-chambers, where
little children were obliged to draw the sheets over their heads in
order not to see him.

The action of the county constabulary had proved quite as
mysterious and quite as barren of result as Mr. Taggett's had been.
They had worn his mantle of secrecy, and arrested the tramps over
again.

Another week dragged by, and the editorial prediction seemed as
far as ever from fulfillment. But on the afternoon which closed that
fortnight a very singular thing did happen. Mr. Slocum was sitting
alone in his office, which occupied the whole of a small building at
the right of the main gate to the marble works. When the door behind
him softly opened and a young man, whose dress covered with
stone-dust indicated his vocation, appeared on the threshold. He
hesitated a second, and then stepped into the room. Mr. Slocum turned
round with a swift, apprehensive air.

"You gave me a start! I believe I haven't any nerves left. Well?"

"Mr. Slocum, I have found the man."

The proprietor of the marble yard half rose from the desk in his
agitation.

"Who is it?" he asked beneath his breath.

The same doubt or irresolution which had checked the workman at
the threshold seemed again to have taken possession of him. It was
fully a moment before he gained the mastery over himself; but the
mastery was complete; for he leaned forward gravely, almost coldly,
and pronounced two words. A quick pallor overspread Mr. Slocum's
features.

"Good God!" he exclaimed, sinking back into the chair. "Are you
mad?"






V





The humblest painter of real life, if he could have his desire,
would select a picturesque background for his figures; but events
have an inexorable fashion for choosing their own landscape. In the
present instance it is reluctantly conceded that there are few uglier
or more commonplace towns in New England than Stillwater,--a
straggling, overgrown village, with whose rural aspects are curiously
blended something of the grimness and squalor of certain shabby city
neighborhoods. Being of comparatively recent date, the place has none
of those colonial associations which, like sprigs of lavender in an
old chest of drawers, are a saving grace to other quite as dreary
nooks and corners.

Here and there at what is termed the West End is a neat brick
mansion with garden attached, where nature asserts herself in dahlias
and china-asters; but the houses are mostly frame houses that have
taken a prevailing dingy tint from the breath of the tall chimneys
which dominate the village. The sidewalks in the more aristocratic
quarter are covered with a thin, elastic paste of asphalte, worn down
to the gravel in patches, and emitting in the heat of the day an
astringent, bituminous odor. The population is chiefly of the rougher
sort, such as breeds in the shadow of foundries and factories, and if
the Protestant pastor and the fatherly Catholic priest, whose
respective lots are cast there, have sometimes the sense of being
missionaries dropped in the midst of a purely savage community, the
delusion is not wholly unreasonable.

The irregular heaps of scoria that have accumulated in the
vicinity of the iron works give the place an illusive air of
antiquity; bit it is neither ancient nor picturesque. The oldest and
most pictorial thing in Stillwater is probably the marble yard,
around three sides of which the village may be said to have sprouted
up rankly, bearing here and there an industrial blossom in the shape
of an iron-mill or a cardigan-jacket manufactory. Rowland Slocum, a
man of considerable refinement, great kindness of heart, and no
force, inherited the yard from his father, and a the period this
narrative opens (the summer of 187-) was its sole proprietor and
nominal manager, the actual manager being Richard Shackford, a
prospective partner in the business and the betrothed of Mr. Slocum's
daughter Margaret.

Forty years ago every tenth person in Stillwater was either a
Shackford or a Slocum. Twenty years later both names were nearly
extinct there. That fatality which seems to attend certain New
England families had stripped every leaf but two from the Shackford
branch. These were Lemuel Shackford, then about forty-six, and
Richard Shackford, aged four. Lemuel Shackford had laid up a
competency as ship-master in the New York and Calcutta trade, and in
1852 had returned to his native village, where he found his name and
stock represented only by little Dick, a very cheerful orphan, who
stared complacently with big blue eyes at fate, and made mud-pies in
the lane whenever he could elude the vigilance of the kindly old
woman who had taken him under her roof. This atom of humanity, by
some strange miscalculation of nature, was his cousin.

The strict devotion to his personal interests which had enabled
Mr. Shackford to acquire a fortune thus early caused him to look
askance at a penniless young kinsman with stockings down at heel, and
a straw hat three sizes too large for him set on the back of his
head. But Mr. Shackford was ashamed to leave little Dick a burden
upon the hands of a poor woman of no relationship whatever to the
child; so little Dick was transferred to that dejected house which
has already been described, and was then known as the Sloper house.

Here, for three of four years, Dick grew up, as neglected as a
weed, and every inch as happy. It should be mentioned that for the
first year or so a shock-headed Cicely from the town-farm had
apparently been hired not to take care of him. But Dick asked nothing
better than to be left to his own devices, which, moreover, were
innocent enough. He would sit all day in the lane at the front gate
pottering with a bit of twig or a case-knife in the soft clay. From
time to time passers-by observed that the child was not making
mud-pies, but tracing figures, comic or grotesque as might happen,
and always quite wonderful for their lack of resemblance to anything
human. That patch of reddish-brown clay was his sole resource, his
slate, his drawing-book, and woe to anybody who chanced to walk over
little Dick's arabesques. Patient and gentle in his acceptance of the
world's rebuffs, this he would not endure. He was afraid of Mr.
Shackford, yet one day, when the preoccupied man happened to trample
on a newly executed hieroglyphic, the child rose to his feet white
with rage, his fingers clenched, and such a blue fire flashing in the
eyes that Mr. Shackford drew back aghast.

"Why, it's a little devil!"

While Shackford junior was amusing himself with his primitive
bas-reliefs, Shackford senior amused himself with his lawsuits. From
the hour when he returned to the town until the end of his days Mr.
Shackford was up to his neck in legal difficulties. Now he resisted a
betterment assessment, and fought the town; now he secured an
injunction on the Miantowona Iron Works, and fought the corporation.
He was understood to have a perpetual case in equity before the
Marine Court in New York, to which city he made frequent and
unannounced journeys. His immediate neighbors stood in terror of him.
He was like a duelist, on the alert to twist the slightest thing into
a _casus belli_. The law was his rapier, his recreation, and he
was willing to bleed for it.

Meanwhile that fairy world of which every baby becomes a Columbus
so soon as it is able to walk remained an undiscovered continent to
little Dick. Grim life looked in upon him as he lay in the cradle.
The common joys of childhood were a sealed volume to him. A single
incident of those years lights up the whole situation. A vague rumor
had been blown to Dick of a practice of hanging up stockings at
Christmas. It struck his materialistic mind as a rather senseless
thing to do; but nevertheless he resolved to try it one Christmas
Eve. He lay awake a long while in the frosty darkness, skeptically
waiting for something remarkable to happen; once he crawled out of
the cot-bed and groped his way to the chimney place. The next morning
he was scarcely disappointed at finding nothing in the piteous little
stocking, except the original holes.

The years that stole silently over the heads of the old man and
the young child in Welch's Court brought a period of wild prosperity
to Stillwater. The breath of war blew the forges to a white heat, and
the baffling problem of the mediæval alchemists was solved. The baser
metals were transmuted into gold. A disastrous, prosperous time, with
the air rent periodically by the cries of newsboys as battles were
fought, and by the roll of the drum in the busy streets as fresh
recruits were wanted. Glory and death to the Southward, and at the
North pale women in black.

All which interested Dick mighty little. After he had learned to
read at the district school, he escaped into another world. Two
lights were now generally seen burning of a night in the Shackford
house: one on the ground-floor where Mr. Shackford sat mouthing his
contracts and mortgages, and weaving his webs like a great, lean,
gray spider; and the other in the north gable, where Dick hung over a
tattered copy of Robinson Crusoe by the flicker of the candle-ends
which he had captured during the day.

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