Part 4

THE FLAT BRIDGE.

So one week had passed since the committal of the murders and the discovery of the bodies,—and the bodies lying in a wood so frequently, indeed so constantly and largely visited. One would have supposed that they would have been discovered half an hour after the deeds were done; but, to understand why it was so long concealed, you must visit the wood itself in the leafy month of June, and then you will find out what a hiding-place it can be turned into. Now the spot where the boy was found was a few feet from the little stream frequently mentioned, and this stream was spanned by a flat bridge just enough elevated from the surface of the water to allow it to flow freely underneath. This bridge led over to a half-obliterated path that you could with a little care follow until it brought you to the regular path that led from the lower bridge, and which I before observed conducted you to the rock where the girl was found, and farther on to a spot which I am soon to speak of. This lower part of the forest is composed of open spaces filled with low shrubbery, small and close-growing pines, and by the brook-way with densely thick alders. There is a wall running west from the brook, dividing the property of my host from that of Mr. Motley. Mr. Motley’s property, along the wall to the north-west, is composed of a wood of great beauty. The path to which I have alluded connects with the main county road that circles Bussey’s wood to the east, and it was by this path that my host was in the habit of returning from his daily city business, sometimes a little after sunset, but generally not earlier than nine at night, and frequently later. Relative to this circumstance I have hereafter something of an extraordinary character to make mention of; so it may as well be remembered.

The low, flat bridge was about fifty feet from the corner of the dividing line, and less that distance from the scene of one of the murders. Near to it ran the path my friend had to pursue on his return at night. In my walks, before the murders, I had passed over this bridge almost daily, and afterward, during the sealed week, I had not interrupted my habit, though probably I did not go that route as often as before, for the weather was getting intensely hot, and kept me to the woods nearer the house. In these walks, however frequent or seldom, I was accompanied by old Jack; and though the body of the boy, at one part of the track, lay not more than ten or fifteen feet away on our left, hidden in the shrubbery, the dog never attempted to approach it. I remembered afterward, when everything was revealed, that as soon as we got over the bridge, he would walk quietly at my heels, keeping as close to me as possible; but when I had advanced to the denser wood, that clothed the base of the hill, he was all alive, plunging in every direction, and opening with a courageous vigor upon the up-tree, defying squirrels. I blamed him much for his reticence; for I felt assured that both he and his namesake had, before that, perhaps on the very day of the deed, gone into that dense mass and gazed upon the slain. Be it as it might, his manner changed completely whenever we passed by that red resting-place.

On the morning of the murders—the 12th of June—I had prepared myself for sketching (I have that gift, moderately to be sure, but yet with wonderful kindness extended to me by a beneficent Providence), intending to make a memorandum in oil colors of a group of rocks a hundred yards or so beyond (eastward) the murder-rock, and to which I have already referred. These gray rocks, that I intended to sketch, can be seen from the road leading up to the hill, by which you reach, from the direction of the railroad, the outer scarp of the ridge behind which the girl was found. And this is the route by which the children may have reached the wood.

As the sun rose higher in the heavens the heat increased in proportionate intensity, and when I was ready to start, say about half-past ten o’clock, I was glad to second the persuasions of my friends not to venture out in such seething weather. Probably it was providential, or possibly a great error, that I did not accomplish my original design. To reach my objective point—the picturesque rocks which had so fascinated my sense of the beautiful—I would have been obliged to follow the path, first over the low bridge, and subsequently within six or seven feet of the spot where the body of Isabella Joyce was first seen. Now, it is a well-ascertained fact, that the children left their home by the cars sometime about eleven o’clock on that morning. Their intention was simply to go to May’s wood, nearer to Boston than Bussey’s. What induced them to change their purpose, and advance as far as the latter, is partially a mystery; and though I have a well-digested theory upon that very important—indeed, all-important—point, I must withhold it; for well I know that if he is alive, one of the first persons to read this narrative, on its publication, will be the murderer himself, and I cannot afford to give him farther chance to plot explanations and arrange evasion by any word of mine. Leaving home at about eleven, in three-quarters of an hour, or less, they could reach Bussey’s wood (for I take it for granted they did not tarry at May’s wood, persuaded by some one to go farther off from Boston), say, about twelve o’clock. Give them time to gather leaves and wreathe them, as they did,—a wreath being found around the boy’s hat, and portions of wreaths about the murder-rock, where the girl had evidently been employed in such amusement,—and we reach half-past twelve, or perhaps a little later; and that is the time I have fixed as the epoch; for after that, whatever of garlands were woven, were made by hands we cannot see, but only hope to see. Now, had I not changed my intention to sketch that forenoon, I would have passed by the path beyond which, hidden by the woody screen, the girl was afterward sitting, and also grazed the spot whither the boy had fled, or been thrown; but it would have been before they had entered the wood; but I would have been at work at the moment of the killing, or, mayhap, passing within a few feet of the place where Isabella Joyce was murdered, or, after being murdered, concealed.

If, in passing at the moment when the deed was in the act of accomplishment, and I had heard a cry ever so feeble, I would, unquestionably, have proceeded to inquire into its cause; and had I come upon the brute, and been at the instant in possession of as much pluck as I had weapon,—an iron-clasped, well-seasoned, heavy camp-stool,—he would have fared badly; for, once up, my arm is one of very admirable development, and my temper not the best calculated for easy martyrdom, and I might have saved her life at least, and in doing which, an incident might have happened which the fiend would not have had time to remember—in the flesh. Or, if I had not passed at that exact exigency of time, but was engaged in my sketching, I possibly might have been startled by her outcry for mercy from him, or appeal to others, and by the manhood that is systematized, for the defence of the weak and wronged, in this six-foot carcass of mine, I would have gone with utter ferocity to the rescue; but with what success crowning my enterprise, is only known to the Great Inscrutable. However, had the murderer accomplished his bloody purpose on the girl, and was following the boy, and I had passed downward to the level bridge, I might have seen that supplemental tragedy, or arrested it, and taken the culprit red-handed in his course. I would, under any of these circumstances, have been more happy in my life, had I been the means of saving two other lives, or even one, though I question much if it would not have been at the expense of another life as yet unclaimed by the gibbet.

Barring all these contingencies, and taking it for granted that I had passed in and out of the wood without detecting anything of those terrible occurrences, it might have fared ill with me in the subsequent phases of the affair, for there was a strict investigation made as to who was in that wood during that day; and beyond a question, as I would not have attempted to conceal the fact of my presence, my friends of the police would have laid their justifiable hands upon me, and placed me in the black category of the suspected. In mentioning this idea since to my friend the logician of judicial mystery, the tall chief of the force, he assured me that I would not have been interfered with, as I did not come in the least within the principles of his theory of the murder. But that did not exempt me, as I shall proceed to state.

VII.

SUSPECTED.

Keeping in view the fact of the week’s concealment, my reader will readily understand that I had no inducement to change my usual habits, so far as the woods were concerned, and I consequently kept up my visitations; but as the heat was growing daily more severe, I did not stroll far from the house, but confined myself in the main to the wood that reaches from the brook to the westward road in our front. I avoided thus pretty much my former walks, which included all that space lying between the flat bridge and the old gray rocks it had been my intention to make a memorandum of. Now and then, when the heat of the day had subsided, I went as far down as the stream; for exceedingly cool and pleasant was it there, and quiet, too, in the shady evenings. Sometimes I took my sketching apparatus, but oftener went without it; but it seems that, however I might go, I was not to do so without creating a terrible suspicion.

The search, prompted by public duty, or instigated by private curiosity, had apparently worn itself out, when, upon a sweet morning, some two weeks after the discovery of the bodies, I stepped out of the front door, and saw, sitting under a shady tree in the stable-yard, holding converse with my host’s father, a member of the polician fraternity. Naturally enough, thought I, this vigilant is wandering round to see what he can pick up of stray hints and suggestions that may lead to the discovery of the criminal, and the obtaining of the large rewards that had been tendered by public and private liberality. I recognized the policeman at once, having often rode in the car on Tremont Street which he conducted. Circumstances then induced quite an acquaintance of great kindness between us. He had been left for dead after one of the great battles in the Chickahominy, slaughtered by four or five bullets of the Southern rifles, but picked up and cured, and fated in after days to have the high prerogative of being put upon my track as one of, if not the bloody villain of all, concerned in the killing of the Joyce children.

I went over to where the two were chatting under the bee-laden lime-tree, and, after hand-shaking with the ex-dead soldier-policeman, I helped to keep up the conversation, which flowed naturally upon the subject of the universal curiosity. He smiled a very peculiar smile when he saw me coming to him, and the farmer smiled, too; but that passed in my mind for nothing more than the fact of his meeting with an old friend. Ah! little did I think, while I smoked my pipe and gossiped so sociably with that placid friend of justice, that it was especially to find who the tall, dark stranger was, who, with a bowie-knife in hand, and great firing of his revolver, roved those haunted woods of Bussey. I did not know until he had shaken hands and gone away; when the farmer told me that the policeman had come to inquire who it was that was living with the family, and what my habits were, and where I was on the day of the murders, etc. My coming out of the house had interrupted this diabolical inquisition, and, upon seeing me, they both had looked at each other and exchanged a knowing smile, which, interpreted into English, could be spelled out thus: “Oh, I know him!” on the part of the policeman; and “You’re sold this time,” on the part of the farmer. The fact was that a youth, with his head full of ghosts and shrieking children, had seen me in the vicinage woods before and after the murders, and, frightened at my pallette knife and my ball practice, had hastened to the station at Jamaica Plains and made report of the terrible bandit and assassin. My friend of the police has often since laughed with me over the adventure, and I have almost grown to look upon myself as a gentleman of rather a forbidding and ferocious cut, and feel prepared to let myself out to some of my friends at the Studio Building as a model for any species of brigand, of Italy or Wall Street; or, if it be not treason to say so, of State Street, Boston. There is something, after all, in being remarkable. However, it so happened that in one way or another I became a satellite to the sanguinary meteor that had swept over those woods, and, had I allowed it, I would have grown into a morbid mass of melodramatic idiosyncrasy. But the worst had not come yet.

VIII.

THE MURDER-ROCK.

In the mean time, the inquest had been convened, and their verdict of murder, with the words, “Done by some one unknown,” blazoned to the world, and stating that twenty-eight stabs had been planted in the body of the girl, and also announcing a grievously erroneous theory of the deed. The wounds upon the girl were chiefly in the back, as if the first assault had been made while she was stooping over her work, her wreath, perhaps; but afterward, as she despairingly confronted her assailant, the remaining stabs were given, while she could yet see the rapid lifting and falling of his arm. It is not an assured belief in the police theory of the deed, that she was killed upon the spot where she was discovered; and what specific reasons they have on that point, I cannot readily get hold of, unless it be based upon the fact that, had she been attacked only a few paces from a frequented road, her cries would have exposed the culprit to the risk of detection, and of that he naturally would have considered; and in that view the theory has some force, for it certainly was a better place in which to conceal the body dead, than attack it living. All around this spot, the trees, as I have previously described, grew densely, and a new visitor could easily lose his way, so that the deed may have been perpetrated in the wood, and the corpse drawn to the concealing formation of the rocks, as they were away from the path, and not very likely to be visited. However near the truth may be the theory of the police, there was evidence discovered at the time the body was revealed of a struggle, and a violent one, at that very spot among the rocks. There was a sapling bent and broken at the westward end of the rock, and its breaking was recent,—not done by any strong current of air, for there had been none, and if there had been, no wind would break that pliant stem and leave the vulnerable trees untouched. Had nothing of importance happened at this very spot, we would have to look for an explanation somewhere else, if we deemed it of importance. It evidently had been broken within a few days. Was it broken by some one who had visited the spot ere it was invaded by the two strangers on that Sunday when the body was discovered? That is hardly possible, for if it had been so, the body would have been seen, and the fact disclosed at once of her murder. Was it broken in the struggle that ensued between the murderer and his victim? How could she break so tough a bough? Why should he? But at all events, there it was, some four feet from her body. I saw it, and testify to its being there, and to the fracture being of recent date. It might have been broken by the man as he ascended from the road to the rock, for it stood where he might grasp it in his ascent; but that could hardly be; and there was no need to break it to give passage to her body if it was drawn from the spot where she fell, farther off. It was evidence of something that had happened, but a testimony of nothing that could properly and naturally attach itself to the murder. Cattle could not have done it, for they never were permitted in these woods, though a lad, who guarded a drove down on the pasture lands below the hill, was examined upon the idea that a madman had committed the deed in his frenzy, and he happened to be not of the sound order of brains. He was exempted from further suspicion, as well he might be.

The spot on which she lay was the convexity of an abrupt whale-backed rock, running some fifteen feet east and west, and guarding any object at its base from the sight of persons passing along the road. Crumbled flints abounded thereabout, and a hard and cruel bed it was for a sleeper, dead or alive. When I first visited it there were no marks of so terrific a scene as must have been enacted in her killing, save the doubtful sapling that lay broken and prostrate; but above the spot where her piteous head had fallen, some pious visitor had placed a cross, with a card affixed, that informed the public of the name of the poor sufferer, and a prayer in her behalf.

One week after the discovery of the body of the boy, the thick coppice and bushes that had concealed him were stripped away as memorials of the incident, and the ground about trampled by more than a thousand people; while the slimy mud oozed up as if eager to suck in more of the ghastly nutriment that had flown so freely in the first and final struggle of his death.

IX.

SUSPICION.

As a matter of course, several arrests were made after the delivery of the verdict by the coroner, and rumor plied her busy trade with an increased variety of tones. Our rural neighborhood rose at once into the importance of a public spectacle; and full-orbed curiosity roved the highways, questioning all kinds of people with all kinds of interrogatories.

There is always a plentiful supply of ready-made murderers in almost every well and long-established settlement,—men who look cross and act cross; who come home at mysterious hours and in mysterious ways, with slouched hats and shabby shirt-collars; who are not often if ever seen in church; suspicious fellows; just the sort of fellows to be talked about whenever anything bad has happened; but, perhaps, after all said and done, as good as their neighbors, indeed, sometimes better than the gossips who prate so lavishly about them. But they serve a purpose; and to that purpose some of them were put at once; and they bore it, and will have to bear it again. It is pretty much a matter of clothing. One day the whole thing was out,—the murderer was known. A neighbor’s farm-hand had fallen in with another neighbor’s farm-hand, steering his ox-cart upon some errand of slothful industry, and from the ox-driver he had learned that the said driver, on the noon of the murder-day, had met the boy and girl (boy and girl described) on the road between Mr. Motley’s house on the hill and the blood-stained rock, and soon afterward he was overtaken by, or he met, a swarthy man with a black mustache, heated and in haste, pursuing the same line of travel on which he had met the children. Yes, he could identify that man. He looked eager and fierce, with his dark skin and twisted moustache; and those were the real children, and he their murderer. He had seen the lambs, and he had looked upon the wolf. This story bore the semblance of possibility; and we were all prepared to hear of an arrest and identification. By night, however, the narrative had undergone some modification, but not losing in the vigor and picturesqueness of the original drawing,—rather otherwise. I immediately sought out the author of the bulletin, intending, if there was any substance in it after thorough investigation, to report the facts without delay to the proper authority.

True, the clodpoll had seen two children on that road; but it turned out, on cross-examination, that he saw them on the day after the murder; but the portrait of the eager and mysterious swarth, with his curled mustache, had been inserted by the more imaginative brain of the man who repeated the intelligence. So all that card-castle of discovery fell to pieces. Then, again, a gallant and bullet-maimed officer was put under the ban; and wonderful items grew into robust legends, that would have delighted the immortal Sylvanus Cobb, Senior. The bloody tunic of the man of Mars had been washed by the terror-stricken nymph of soap-suds, and she was, inasmuch as she had “talked” of that red evidence, forthwith discharged from the wash-tub of the family. This belief in the guilt of the maimed officer took such emphasis of accusation as to enforce from his friends a proof that he was, on the day of the murder, far away in a Virginia city, engaged, among other things, in writing his name in a lady’s album. One evening, after the Sunday’s discovery,—it might have been ten days,—as I was riding up the hill that led to Mr. Motley’s mansion gateway, and when I had reached the summit, I came upon a young man standing a little off the main road. He stood there but a moment; but in that moment I saw that his eyes swept in that section of his view which embraced the accursed trees of Bussey’s blood-dyed hill, but with no look of white affright in them; and then, with his one arm swinging,—the other maimed in some battle-field of the South,—he went onward to the gate. That was the officer who had with one arm committed those dual murders, even while he wrote his name in the album of a lady in the old city down in the Southern country.

From such things does the monster Gossip make up a verdict, driving in shame the innocent to a defence, while giving to the one of guilt the benefit of an arrested search, or a postponed accusation. Driven from this stronghold of suspicion, away went greedy Accusation down among the shanties of the Irish workmen, along the line of the railroad; but nothing there was brought to light beyond the existence of pigs, poverty, and all the other poetries of Hibernian habitations.

In the midst of this confusion of assertion and contradiction, of hope and disappointment, a luckless house-painter, of a religions turn of mind, and a taste perhaps of fluidical enjoyment, fell into the hands of the inquisitors, and, at the time, it must be confessed, with some circumstances attendant on his movements and position that gave color to the theory of his criminality. At his house the boy and girl had boarded last; from his house they started on their terrible adventure; and it was said that he was engaged on that day to do some work at or about May’s wood; and so they linked him with the two pools of blood out in the shades of the fearful woods. There was a judicial examination; but naught came out of it to warrant his detention, and so he was sent about his business rejoicing, with a clear skirt, and a eulogistic letter from the clergyman of his parish. The incident seemed rather to have worked to the advantage of the window-sash artist; and, in the full enjoyment of his acquittal, and the continued performance of his grave religious duties, this history must leave him.

And yet another. A young fellow was arrested, and lodged in the county jail at Dedham, of whom there was not the slightest doubt of his being the man. When arrested, it was proved that he had been absent from work on the fatal day; that his hands were scratched, and his clothes spotted with blood; and that he had been drunk on that night, driven, it was religiously and philosophically construed, into that beastly condition by the reproaches of his conscience. Ah, he was the very man! He looked, in his dimness of drunk and tatterdemalionism of garb, like a real Simon-pure unadulterated murderer. The rope was ready, and the coming carpenter dreamed of a gallows on which he was to swing. But the rope had not yet been twisted, and the carpenter had only dreamed; for it was established as follows of his biography: He had been absent from work because he had no work to attend to; he had been drunk because he loved bad whiskey and good company; he was scratched and blood-tinted because his valor and his bottle had led him, at an ill-reputed tavern, some two or three miles up the road, to attempt the vindication or assertion of his philosophic, philanthropic, political, or religious opinions and dogmas, by quotations from the library of his fists and muscles. So he, too, got out of the clutches of the law, and stands, or staggers, now, ready at any moment to be arrested upon the same grounds for any similar offence, or other offence, that his neighbors may think him fit for.

There was one other case of suspicion, but no arrest; and as it illustrates the uncertainty of circumstantial evidence somewhat, and is a little singular, I will relate it. A young fellow of variegated habits worked in a large rifle establishment near one of the city limits, distant from the scene of the murders some four or five miles. One of his habits was to rove into the suburbs, seeking his recreation according to his fancy. This fact was a strong circumstance against him; for at that time the theory of the twofold character of the crime had not been relinquished. Up to the period of the murders, this youth was the life of the establishment where he was employed, full of tricks, and jokes, and happy, ceaseless good-humor. On the morning of the 12th of June, he was absent at roll-call; but at one o’clock in the afternoon he was there and answered to his name. Whatever had happened, a great change had come over him. He was no more the jubilant and frolicsome madcap of the day before, but sullen to moroseness, and his face was strongly sunburnt, and altogether his whole appearance and behavior indicated a transformation as singular as it was sudden. When questioned, he admitted that he had been in the woods somewhere, but would speak no more upon the subject. In search of any, the slightest clue to the discovery of the mystery, the police soon came into the possession of these facts, and suspicion fell darkly around him. Upon farther inquiry, it appeared that he had converted two files into poniards,—one he had given to a friend, the other he had kept. The day afterward, while the police were making these investigations, and keeping him, as they thought, unconscious of the fact, he disappeared, and has not been heard of from that day to this. One of the dirks when applied to the wounds fitted exactly. I have seen the one he had given to his comrade, now in the desk of the chief. A long, ugly weapon it is, sharp at the point, and double-edged, equal to a bowie-knife ere yet it has arrived at the point of complete perfection of destruction.

But he was not the man. Why he fled we may conjecture. Doubtless he had heard of the advance of the authorities upon his steps, and feeling that appearances were against him on the first blush of the investigation, and not being logically disposed to examine into the importance of minutes and hours wherein lay his absolute defence, he fled affrighted at his dangerous position. He was innocent, because he answered his name at one o’clock. Had he done those murders he never could have reached his workshop at that hour unless he had hired the magic of a necromancer, or been mounted on the fleetest horse that ever won a race; for the murders were accomplished soon after one o’clock. Had he not answered to his name at the hour mentioned, he would have been arrested, though still he would not have been guilty. It was another man who did those deeds.

WAS IT A GHOST?