Chapter I: Part 1

The Hermit of Turkey Hollow

The Story of an Alibi

Being an Exploit of Ephraim Tutt Attorney & Counselor at Law

By Arthur Train

New York Charles Scribner’s Sons 1921

[Copyright]

Copyright, 1921, by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Copyright, 1921, by The Curtis Publishing Co.

[Dedication]

To Dean Kirkham Worcester.

[Epigraph]

“O my grandfather’s clock was too high for the shelf, So it stood ninety years on the floor. It was taller by half than the old man himself, Though it weighed not a pennyweight more. It was bought on the morn of the day he was born, And was always his treasure and pride, But it--stopped--short--never to go again---- When--the old--man--died.”

Contents

Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter IV

The Hermit of Turkey Hollow

Alibi.

“Alibi (al’-i-bi) n. 1. In law, a plea of having been elsewhere at the time an offense is alleged to have been committed. Hence.--a. The fact or state of having been elsewhere at the time specified; as, “he attempted to prove an alibi.”--Cent. Dict.

“If it (alibi) appeared to be founded in truth, it is the best negative evidence that can be offered. It is really positive evidence which in the nature of things necessarily implieth a negative.” Foster, J. Crown Law, 3rd Ed. p. 368 (1762).

“If any one fact necessary to the conclusion is wholly inconsistent with the hypothesis of the guilt of the accused, it breaks the chain of circumstantial evidence, upon which the inference depends; and, however plausible or apparently conclusive the other circumstances may be, the charge must fail. Of this character is the defense usually called an alibi; that is, that the accused was elsewhere at the time of the offense is alleged to have been committed. If this is true, it being impossible that the accused could be in two places at the same time, it is a fact inconsistent with that sought to be proved, and excludes its possibility,” Shaw, C.J., in Commonwealth _vs._ Webster, 5 Cush. 299, 318 (1850).

The Hermit of Turkey Hollow

I

“All the same,” affirmed “Skinny the Tramp,” “some one o’ these days them bugs’ll wiggle themselves off’n their pins--an’ do for ye!”

The “Hermit of Turkey Hollow” laughed derisively as he paused in pinning a large gray moth against the wall of the shanty.

“That’s all bunk!” he asserted with a show of bravado which, however, concealed a certain uneasiness. “When a thing’s dead--it’s dead! And that’s the end of it!” he added, pushing in the pin firmly until the moth, giving a final flutter, remained motionless.

Skinny shook his head.

“No, it ain’t!” said he with conviction. “Nuthin’ ever really dies--or, if it does, that ain’t the end of it by any manner o’ means! Your body kin die--like a cocoon--but somethin’ goes on after--like the butterfly.”

The Hermit threw a nervous glance in the direction of the moth, and then, evidently reassured, nonchalantly removed a piece of cut plug from his trousers pocket, bit off an end and held it out to the tramp, who bisected the remainder.

“But the butterfly dies--” concluded the Hermit decisively, “and then that’s the end of it--for good an’ all!”

Skinny wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked round the smelly little shanty, the sides of which were decorated with a heterogeneous collection of defunct beetles, moths and butterflies.

“The butterfly don’t die--no more’n the cocoon!” declared he. “Nuthin’ dies. The moth flies away out o’ the cocoon, and then--when the moth dies--somethin’ flies away out o’ the moth.”

“But you can’t see nuthin’,” remarked the Hermit with significance.

“I don’t know whether ye can or not!” replied the tramp noncommittally. “Some says ye can an’ some says ye can’t. Some claim they’ve photographed the human soul!”

“What do them as claim ye can see it say it’s like?” inquired the Hermit in a tone of incredulity, in which nevertheless were mingled awe and curiosity.

“Mostly like a butterfly--somethin’ with wings--so’s it kin fly, I s’pose.”

“Huh!” retorted the Hermit. “Just pure bull! That moth, now--how can you say it ain’t dead?”

Skinny’s jaws relinquished their extreme vigor of motion, as he leaned forward earnestly towards the Hermit.

“Listen, Bo!” he adjured him. “You think you know all about bugs, an’ worms, an’ snakes, an’ yerbs, an’ trees, an’ weather. An’ I reckon you do, too! But you don’t ponder none compared to me. I don’t do nuthin’ but think, ’cause I ain’t got nuthin’ else to do. I lie an’ meditate most all the time. And I hear things--and sense ’em. Sometimes I sit harkenin’ all night long. I know a lot more’n most folks about things you can’t see.”

“I don’t say you don’t, Skinny!” admitted the Hermit politely. “I don’t deny it!”

“There’s two worlds,” affirmed the tramp. “One you kin see an’ smell an’ touch and one that you ordinarily can’t--right alongside t’other. But sometimes--dependin’ on circumstances--you can catch a glimpse of what’s goin’ on there--see ’em an’ hear ’em. You’ve seen ghosts!”

“Sure, I’ve seen ghosts. Everybody’s seen ’em!” readily assented his companion.

“Well,” continued the tramp, “everythin’ has a ghost--walkin’ right along beside it all the time--only it’s in that other world--the one you don’t see.”

“But things don’t have ghosts!” declared the Hermit. “A thing must have been alive sometime to have a ghost.”

“Everything’s alive!” asserted the tramp. “Rocks an’ trees an’ flowers an’ water an’ fire an’ bugs an’ beasts as well as folks,--an’ they all have ghosts an’ none of ’em ever die. An’ they all have a right to live in the world they’re in until they naturally pass on into the other. Now, when they go--maybe they go one way, maybe another; but they all do go; and some folks claim to have seen ’em. An’ mostly they go with wings--flyin’--shaped like a moth or somethin’ like that.”

The Hermit spat disdainfully through the open doorway.

“Huh!” he remarked with sarcasm. “An’ I s’pose,--you’d say,--when I die I’ll go flyin’ away like a big gray moth?”

“Like as not!” returned Skinny cheerfully. “Like as not! You got to go somehow, ain’t ye?”

“All bull!” repeated the Hermit. “You’re just a nut!”

“Just the same!” returned Skinny the Tramp, “leavin’ out entirely me bein’ a nut, I wouldn’t kill anythin’ that’s alive an’ can feel--for money! I hate even to put an axe to a tree an’ see the sap ooze out. How do we know it ain’t sufferin’? An’ when it comes to live things--I’d be skeert!”

He let his eyes wander over the shanty walls thickly populated with tiny corpses and shuddered slightly.

“Yus! I’d be skeert to live in this house! Sometime they’ll have their vengeance!--An’--just as I said,--one o’ these days, they’ll come wigglin’ off’n them pins an’--do fer ye!”

“An’ then,” mocked the Hermit of Turkey Hollow, “I’ll flutter off out the winder like I was a moth! Bull, Skinny! All bull!”

* * * * * *

As may be inferred from the foregoing conversation the Hermit of Turkey Hollow lived in the world of Fact, while Skinny the Tramp dwelt in that of Faith,--which is to say, of Truth. Yet, as odd sticks, there was little to choose between them. As being a house dweller--and not a mere vagrant open to all the insidious imputations of vagabondage--the Hermit may of the two have been entitled to greater social recognition, but being a recluse, although something of a curiosity and hence in the nature of a local asset,--he was practically negligible as a factor in the life of the neighborhood. Skinny the Tramp, on the other hand, was a sociable sort of being who lived in the open, not because he loved his fellows less but because he loved nature more.

Turkey Hollow lies three miles to the north and east of the thriving town of Pottsville in the Mohawk Valley of the Empire State, surrounded by low hills still thickly covered with second growth timber; in spots, especially where Chasm Brook flows down into the westerly end of Turtle Pond, wet and marshy; and elsewhere filled with a tangled growth of Getchel birch, swamp maple, and alder, save for the acre or so of cleared upland above the lake where stands the Hermit’s now deserted shanty.

On the whole, the original turkeys having for several decades been entirely extinct, the hollow offered no attractions to anybody, save possibly to naturalists impervious to mosquito bites. It was in truth a dank sort of place, full of underbrush, and inaccessible except by the wood road leading to the Hermit’s abode, which some years he cleared out and some he didn’t, and where you had to go afoot anyway.

Nevertheless, once you got there, you found that the hermit was a genuine up-to-date hermit, with most of the modern improvements. For he was neither a hundred years old with a bald pate and long white whiskers like William Cullen Bryant or Father Time; nor did he mutter incantations over a seething caldron like the witches in Macbeth, or meander aimlessly about prattling to himself as conventional hermits are supposed to do. And his shanty was no cave, but on the contrary a comfortable enough one-story shack, with windows of glass which, while they were nailed down tight and hence could not be opened, allowed plenty of light to stream in. By the door usually stood a butterfly net, a fish rod, and a hoe and spade,--for he had a small garden where he raised such vegetables as he needed,--and on one side of the shanty was a table, on the other his cot, over which by day was thrown a discolored “comfortable,” while directly “on ax” with the door and between the two rear windows was a tall, old-fashioned clock--the only article of any value in the place.

This was, indeed, rather a strange object to be in the middle of the woods and as it was of shining mahogany, its face decorated with the sun, moon and stars, ships, savages and zodiacal signs, it was an object of comment and surmise to the few who visited the place. No one ventured to ask where it had come from or how the hermit had acquired it, but he had been once heard to say that it made less noise than a woman, talked no nonsense, and was all the company anyone had need of. Even those who had never seen the hermit himself knew that he had a clock. That is the way of things. People will refer for years to a man as “the old chap who always wears that pair of gray trousers” and then accidentally discover that he is a world famous civil engineer or retired statesman who has swayed the fate of nations. So the hermit was known by his clock; although regularly once a week he walked to Pottsville to get his mail and buy groceries. For being an up-to-date hermit he was not without an occupation,--he drank; and he did it very well.

He was a large, lumbering man of about sixty years, full-bearded, bent, frankly ungiven to washing and generally a shade woozy in the upper story; and nobody could remember Turkey Hollow when he had not been there.

He was reputed to be possessed of mysterious, ill-gotten wealth hidden in and about the clearing, and, in spite of his squalor, the rumor acquired a certain _cachet_ owing to the fact that his correspondence, regularly inspected by Constable Higgins out of abundant caution, consisted almost entirely of get-rich-quick-circulars and similar catch-penny advertisements. His name, which otherwise might never have been known, was Wilbur Drake,--although he was never referred to as anything but the “Hermit of Turkey Hollow.” That was his sum total--to the world at large.

Yet sometime and somewhere, he had perhaps been somebody; and nailed over his cot in a tarnished oaken frame was a dingy photograph of a dumpy little girl in pigtails. Why this sick soul had sought seclusion nobody knew and nobody cared, yet afterwards, although he was morose, taciturn and brutal in his manners, the Pottsville folk were sorry for him and regretted that they had not been kinder to him.

Skinny the Tramp was a totally different type of bird,--a “character” as they all said, beloved of the village children and regarded with good-natured tolerance by their elders. He was tall, lean, hawkish, with the traditional stubble about his chin and neck, which a Byronic negligée exposed to wind and weather. He belonged to Pottsville in his own way quite as much as did the hermit, for in spite of his peripatetic sojournings, he was a native of the town and, as James Hawkins, had passed those earlier days--before manual labor had been abhorrent to him--in its vicinity, having been even at one time admitted to the lowlier degrees of the Brotherhood of Abyssinian Mysteries. This famous order, however, he had ultimately abandoned in favor of the Hibernating Hoboes of Hesperides, of which he was now a member in good standing.

The reader will, of course, appreciate that for various reasons,--including that we may sometime run for public office--the foregoing names and titles are fictitious; but the organizations themselves are not, and each in its own way exerts an influence not lightly to be disregarded, whether one be a yokel on the one hand, or a yegg on the other. Twice yearly, once on his annual autumn trip to the Golden West and again on his return therefrom in the spring, Hawkins, emaciated, hairy, black from coal dust, dropped lightly off the truck of some fast freight and revisited the scenes of his youth.

Sitting upon a cracker barrel in Colson’s Grocery--so that nutriment might be the more easily accessible--Skinny the Tramp, like some wandering scop, bard, or friar of medieval days--would fill the wagging ears of the countryside with the narrative of his later wanderings in search of the treasure that somehow always just managed to elude his grasp. For Skinny believed absolutely that at the foot of every rainbow there was a Crock of Gold, and he would have gladly died for his belief--as any gentleman and sportsman would have done, and as he came very near to doing in this case.

However, while Skinny chased rainbows he declined to do so afoot--preferring the artificial and speedier means of transportation afforded by the transcontinental railroad systems, from the trains of which he was habitually--and at divers times and places, ignominiously,--hurled, to his great physical and temperamental detriment. Yet, albeit that he was a high officer of the Hibernating Hoboes of Hesperides and had once been an Abyssinian Brother of that elevation known as the “Order of the Sacred Camel of King Menelik,” from which noble association he had been swiftly dropped for non-payment of dues, he was, like a multitude of his fellow wanderers, merely a harmless child of good-nature, nearly a half-wit, essentially a devotee of Zoroaster, who spent his life following the sun. On these biennial visits Skinny hung about the town, spending a goodly portion of his time--both by night and by day--sleeping in a lean-to on the hillside above Turkey Hollow, and part of it wandering through the woods,--but always looking for the rainbow that should empty a hoard of gold into his tattered lap.

Twice yearly also passed through Pottsville the “Sons and Daughters of the Southland”--the Zingara Gipsies,--in auto trucks and flivvers--camping for a time on the end of the old, deserted racetrack,--a sinister crew, surreptitious panderers to credulity and lust, the men surly and brutal, the women insolent and dirty, but attracting the imaginative and susceptible bumpkins as a trickle of molasses will draw a swarm of flies. When in the night they folded their tents and stole silently away the citizens of Pottsville invariably discovered that many of their most cherished personal possessions were unaccountably missing. But no one cared to pursue and prosecute them. They were too dangerous. Besides, they could have told things.

In the case of Skinny the Tramp there was, however, a practical as well as a sentimental reason for these half-yearly stop-overs, the legal necessity of his putting in a personal appearance to claim and receipt for the one hundred dollars of income which accrued to his account every six months from the trust fund created by his mother in her last will and testament, of which the Honorable--or “Squire”--Hezekiah Mason was executor. And as Squire Mason is one of the central figures in this legal tragi-comedy it may perhaps be worth while to stop for a moment at this point and give him what might be called the “literary once-over.”

Let us state frankly, without circumlocution or evasion, that while Hezekiah was known as “honorable” and “squire,” this grim visaged, tight-lipped country attorney was neither. He was “honorable” only in a Pickwickian sense; and a “squire” only by courtesy; but why or how any courtesy should have been extended to him remained a mystery, since he was the most unpopular man in the county,--evidenced by the fact that he alone of Pottsville’s masculine élite--which included the barber, druggist, sheriff and dentist--was not one of the Sacred Camels of King Menelik, and needless to say it rankled in his dried peapod of a soul.

Nevertheless, the Hon. Hezekiah was a power for he had mortgages on a majority of the farms of Somerset County already and his tentacles were reaching out along the county highways and by-ways after the others. Moreover, he was the only lawyer practising in either Pottsville or Somerset Corners so that, in one way or another, he managed to be mixed up in almost everything that went on. However, he couldn’t break into the mystic circle of The Abyssinian Brotherhood, which has a distinct bearing on our narrative. As Sheriff Moses Higgins,--who was the Grand Supreme Exalted Patriarch and Ruler of the Sacred Camels of King Menelik--had said at the lodge meeting held three months before in the P. of H. (No. 769) Hall when Hezekiah had made his final attempt to become one of the genus dromedary and had been flatly and contumaciously turned down, refused, rejected, rebuffed and repudiated--I repeat, as Sheriff Higgins had said on that well known occasion, it made no difference how big a feller’s bank account was if he was a stinker, and everybody who had an atom of brains fer fifty miles ’round knew all-fired well what kind of a cuss Mason was. Get a feller like that into the Camels and you never could get rid of him--“once a Camel always a Camel”--the whole herd would be contaminated. He’d sooner take in “Nigger” Jo, the colored ostler over to the Phoenix House stable. He spoke fifteen minutes and there wasn’t a white ball in the box when it was passed.

So Squire Mason nursed his antique grudge and took his revenge in coin of the realm. Then came the turn of the wheel and Hezekiah found himself in a position where by the adroit application of five thousand dollars where it would do most good he could get a strangle hold on one of the leading politicians of the county. The fact that the only funds available were those he held as trustee for James Hawkins was the merest incident and did not disturb him even momentarily. They were at hand and he used them. Skinny was only a tramp. He might get run over any day, just as, fortunately for Hezekiah, was Lawyer Tompkins, of Felchville, the public prosecutor of Somerset, for whose vacant job the Honorable Squire Mason instantly applied. As he had a cinch on the local political boss, and as the attorney general needed the influence of the boss in his own business, and as the attorney general had a cinch on the governor--he won in a walk and duly became, by official appointment and designation, for Tompkins’ unexpired term, district attorney of Somerset County, and having, after forty years of plodding obscurity, suddenly found himself elevated to office he instantly became consumed by the fire of ambition. While Cicero says that “the noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory,” we do not intend by this mere statement of fact to entwine with any wreath of bay or laurel the perspiring brow of Hezekiah. Objectively Mason was a bombastic, old-fashioned country lawyer, acrid, dry as dust, entirely unscrupulous, and, while superficially shrewd, on the whole rather dull. Noise was his strong point, and there was not a tougher pair of leather lungs in the Mohawk Valley, down which he now looked with longing eyes towards the capital at Albany, hoping perhaps to roar loud enough so that he could be heard there, which at times seemed by no means impossible. Once ambition stirs a man’s soul no height appears too high for him to scale.

“On the summit see, The scales of office glitter in his eyes: He climbs, he pants, he grasps them! At his heels, Close at his heels, a demagogue ascends, And with a dexterous jerk soon twists him down, And wins them, but to lose them in his turn.”

And now, having had one piece of luck, the lightning of fortune, as sometimes happens, struck him again.

Pottsville is the kind of “hick” town where the girls bob their hair and the boys wear the very latest “pineapple” cut, where you can buy “college ices” and “sundaes” at the drug store, but where the movies run only twice a week and the barber shop is open only after four o’clock on Saturdays. There is a smutty little wooden railroad station, a memorial library of funereal granite, a brick business block bearing date 1879, an octagonal horse-trough right in the middle of Main Street, and the rickety old Phoenix Hotel, run by “Ma” Best, _née_ Louisa Barrows, whose dad, “Old Doc Barrows,” was sent up to Sing Sing for high-financing the countryside.

There are, in addition, two churches, Baptist and Methodist, each white with green shutters and a steeple,--a court house, the Mohawk Palace Theater (celluloid), the P. of H. Hall, the “Pottsville Dry Goods Emporium” belonging to “Toggery Bill” Gookin, Meachem’s Notion Store and Colson’s Grocery. The street is unpaved and from February to April is ankle high with mud. Such towns still survive even in the Empire State. But while Pottsville will refer to Somerset Corners five miles away as a “hick” town, it remains serenely oblivious of its own hickitude.

It was here that on a soft Saturday afternoon towards the end of April, Squire Mason’s great moment came--that opportunity knocked upon his office door and beckoned to him. And Hezekiah did not hesitate.

He had been more than usually sour all day, for he had quarreled with his wife at breakfast and when he reached the office he had found that a farmer over Felchville way whose mortgage he held--and on whose prompt payment he had relied to cover James Hawkins’ semiannual interest of like amount, had unexpectedly defaulted. And--curse it!--at eleven o’clock Skinny had come for his money, peering apologetically through the door like the half-wit that he was, twisting his faded bicycle cap between his fingers, almost afraid to ask the squire for what was his.

“Mornin’, squire,” he said, leaning awkwardly against the door jamb. “Been well, I trust?”

The Honorable Hezekiah Mason regarded the tramp malevolently.

“Tol’rable!” he replied curtly. “I s’pose you’ve come after your money.”

“Yes,” assented Skinny. “Still,” he added politely, “if it ain’t convenient----” His blue eyes roved vaguely around the barren room seeing nothing.

“Look here, Skinny!” remarked the lawyer gruffly, “what’s the use of my turning over a hundred dollars to you to throw away? Why don’t you let me keep it an’ invest it for you? The way you live ain’t provident. A penny saved is a penny earned, an’ a hundred dollars is a lot of money.”

“It’s very kind of you,” faltered Skinny, “but I don’t throw it away. Honest Injun, I don’t. It keeps me wanderin’--I’d like it if you kin let me have it.” He paused and took a timid step towards the squire. “May I ask you a question?”

Now the one thing in the world that Squire Mason did not want was any question from Hawkins about the whereabouts of his money. He had intended to put the tramp off, but now he swiftly changed his mind.

“Your money’s all right,” he retorted, getting to his feet. “You don’t need to worry any ’bout it! I’ll go get it fer you!”

“Thank you,” replied Skinny. “I was only goin’ to ask----”

But Mason had bolted through the door. Ten minutes later he returned and handed the tramp five twenty dollar bills, for which he took Skinny’s receipt.

“Now,” he remarked brusquely, “you’ve got your money. You better get along. I’m busy this mornin’!”

But Skinny had a matter of vital moment upon what by a euphemism might have been termed his mind. It had been troubling him ever since his conversation with the hermit with which this chronicle opens. And he wanted the opinion of Squire Mason, as a learned man who presumably knew all about such things.

“I’d like to ask you a question, squire!” he persisted.

Mason, cornered in his office, turned on him like a rat.

“Well,--ask it!” he snapped defiantly.

“I want to ask you if folks that know about such things think that when a thing’s dead it’s dead?”

The squire stared at him contemptuously.

“P’tah!” he ejaculated. “What are you ravin’ about?”

“About whether when folks die that’s the end of ’em,” explained Skinny. “And if it’s the same with the animals.”

Mason took courage. Skinny was not bothered about the safety of his principal.

“What’s the use conjecturin’ about things like that?” he asked more genially.

“It’s kinder important, ain’t it?” returned the tramp.

The lawyer pursed his lips and gazed for an instant through the window upon the sill of which a blue-bottle lay upon its back with its legs stiffly in air. Then he turned sententiously to the tramp.

“If you really want to know what I think,” he answered. “When a man’s dead, he’s dead.”

Skinny, his money in his pocket but troubled in his mind, made his way slowly back to Turkey Hollow. The sun, which had been shining when he had gone into the squire’s office, had become obscured by a bank of cloud and it looked like rain, but all about him as he strode through the woods the dogwoods were bursting into blossom amid a background of diaphanous budding green. The spring was stirring in him, too. A hundred dollars! Visions of purple valleys, of cool, trickling ravines dank with spreading ferns, of fragrant fields of hay in which to lie--without the necessity of chopping a single piece of kindling to pay for his supper--rose in his mind. Wouldn’t it be great to be rich! To lie in a hammock with a feather pillow under his head in the shade of an orange tree and a nigger to hand him cool drinks and sandwiches and gold-tipped cigarettes! To ride luxuriantly inside a Pullman car or stand on the clinking back platform of the Sunset Limited watching the misty mountains turn from azure to rose and from rose to lilac--and pitying the bums walking the sleepers. To sleep--sleep--sleep--in a big, soft bed! To have a man delicately remove the hair from your neck and chin and scent your cheeks with cologne water! To go into a grand hotel, bully the waiter, and eat everything on the bill of fare without asking the price! Money! That would do it. But a hundred dollars was only a flea bite! What he needed was the real kale--a whole pot of gold!

It had begun to rain by the time he had cooked his dinner, and afterwards, as he sat in the opening of his shack smoking cigarettes, it grew very dark and for half an hour poured down in torrents. Then as will happen in fickle April the sun burst forth and turned the leaden world into a dripping golden grotto, where every bough and twig and leaf’s edge gleamed with a jeweled setting of pearls and diamonds, and the hot mist rose shimmering from the steaming ground. Gold--gold everywhere! Gold--the mystic element sought of the alchemists and of the philosophies of ancient, medieval and modern times alike. Gold!

Suddenly Skinny stiffened and sat erect. Thrown against the torn black wind clouds of the departing storm was a great arch whose glowing colors pained the eye, a perfect piece of heavenly architecture. High it rose into the zenith a concentrated prismatic glory--emblem of the eternal hope that sprang in the tramp’s breast. One end of the arc came to earth far to the west--the golden west--and the other plunged down at his feet into Turkey Hollow. There was no doubt about it at all. Right into Turkey Hollow--right upon the hermit’s shanty, which he could see through the interlacing boughs of the hillside sharply defined as in a spotlight of saffron. Skinny started to his feet. If he could only reach the hermit’s shanty before the rainbow faded the crock of gold would be there. Sure! His mind never doubted it. It was there now. If he hurried--this time he might find it! Without a moment’s hesitation Skinny plunged down the hillside through the reeking undergrowth, drenched to the skin, slipping, falling now on beds of soaking moss, now over roots and stones--blood smearing his face and hands--until he crashed down through the clump of birches next the clearing.

A man was sitting there under a boulder smoking a pipe, his ax across his knees--waiting evidently for things to dry up a bit. He waved at Skinny, but the tramp was too intent to answer him. Then came the yellow gleam of the clearing through the brush and the shanty rose hard against the sky just beyond. Surely he must be in time!

He had emerged from the woods in the rear of the shanty on the edge of the potato patch and he did not trouble to go around it but plowed straight through the muddy rows, leaving a deep wake behind him across the loam. Panting and dripping with sweat, Skinny hurried to the nearest window of the shanty, the one above the hermit’s cot, and peeked in. What he saw made his heart stand still. The sun was pouring through the opposite window upon the back of the hermit, who sat bowed over the table; and in front of him--its overflowing contents sending yellow flashes darting into the dim recesses of the hut--stood a small red bean-pot or “crock”--still sticky with earth--filled with shining gold pieces. An expression of transcendental satisfaction illuminated Skinny’s face. His faith was justified--as he had known and predicted all along that eventually it would be. His confidence in his own mental processes and spiritual beliefs rebounded from where it had been crushed to earth by Squire Mason’s crass materialism. Stealthily--so as not to frighten the hermit--he crept towards the open door of the shanty.…

It was Charlie Emerson--the man sitting under the boulder with his ax across his knees--who heard the shot that killed the hermit. He was not a native of Pottsville, although he usually could be found there every spring, working over at Sampson’s steam lumber mill at the lower end of Turtle Pond. This particular Saturday he had got the afternoon off to fill an order for pea sticks which he purposed cutting from the birches which grew thick in the less swampy part of Turkey Hollow, and he was right in the middle of it when the thunderstorm came up and he had to stop for awhile until the sun should dry the bushes off.

He saw Skinny cruising through the underbrush and was puzzled by the fact that the tramp ignored his salutation. But he had gone on smoking and, after taking a short nap, had resumed his work on the pea sticks. Then, as the sun had begun to slant through the tree trunks and the shadow of the hill to come creeping across the marsh, the hot silence of the afternoon had been shattered first by a cry for help and then by a shot--both from the hermit’s shanty less than two hundred yards away. Ax in hand he made the distance through the thickets in less than three minutes, and as he broke cover into the clearing behind the house he saw the undergrowth moving on the other side and heard the snapping of twigs.

It was so still that he could hear the drone of a bee in the fringe of meadow-sweet down by the well, and--coupled with the cry--it gave him a weird creepy feeling such as he never knew before. But he took a good grip on himself, walked round the shanty, and looked in through the open door.

Everything was as usual--the clock, the cot, the rickety table, the chair, the fish rod and butterfly net, all were undisturbed--except that the hermit lay upon his back on the floor, his arms outstretched, the blood jetting from his mouth, a film gathering in his wide open eyes. Emerson knelt by the side of the dying man and gently lifted the great hairy head. The blood that came from his mouth made a queer guttering sound--grotesquely resembling to his agitated mind the faint clucking of a hen. Then the noise stopped; the hermit no longer breathed; and the lumberman as he lowered the hermit’s head to the floor heard the loud beat of an insect’s wings and observed a large gray moth flapping frantically against the window. He had seen a million moths--! Yet, with relief Emerson saw it vanish through the open doorway.

With averted face he threw the “comfortable” across the hermit’s body and, as he did so, noticed the broken fragments of a small, red clay pot lying beneath the table. One of the hermit’s hands protruded from beneath the coverlet--grasping tightly a single gold-piece. Emerson, standing in the stifling atmosphere of the hut, could hear no sound but the beating in his ears of his own heart.

The mill hand dashed from the shanty, marking the footprints in the garden patch, and hunted courageously for the murderer in the surrounding woods; but the criminal had too good a start. Then, with no doubt whatever in his mind as to who it had been, he ran down the wood road that joined the main highway half a mile from the shanty.

There had been a big gang assembled in Colson’s Grocery waiting for the barber shop to open next door when Skinny entered at almost precisely four o’clock by the Western Union automatically regulated clock over the candy counter; and, while nobody had paid much attention to him at the time, it was remembered distinctly afterwards that he had been breathing hard and excited, and had ordered a bottle of root beer and drank it with a sort of ostentatious, devil-may-care indifference. He had also remarked to someone that he had cut his finger in the woods, and his handkerchief was bloody.

Most of the crowd were still there when, fifteen minutes later, Charlie Emerson, the lumber man with the ax, reached the village with the news that the hermit had been murdered.

He came running down the road all splashed with mud and the fellows in Colson’s could hear him shouting nearly a furlong away. There was a general stampede for the street,--in which the occupants of the brick block, the barber shop, and the drug store all joined. Emerson came staggering along--stopping every few yards to yell “Murder!”--and brought up exhausted in front of the stairs leading to Squire Mason’s office, which was opposite the sheriff’s on the first landing.

“Th’ hermit’s been murdered!” he panted hysterically. “Shot right through the lungs!--Where’s the sheriff?--Gosh, it’s fierce!--Where’s Squire Mason?”

The crowd surged round him, Squire Mason’s head appeared at his window, and then, with a whoop, they all rushed up the stairs to the sheriff’s office. But Mason held the crowd back sternly on the landing.

“I’m prosecutor o’ this county!--I’ll take care o’ this witness!” he announced in a tone of authority. “Now some o’ you hustle over and fetch the sheriff--he’s gone down to the station fer the mail. An’ don’t none of you dare so much as move ’till he comes and tells you what to do.--Now, you!” to the ax-man--“Come into my office an’ let me take your deposition.”

There was a murmur of disappointment from the crowd as Mason firmly conducted Emerson inside and shut the door; but they all obediently poured down the stairs again after the sheriff. Then some one began to ring the fire alarm and, by the time Sheriff Higgins reached the horse trough, the mob was so dense in front of the doorway that he could hardly force his way through. He was inside less than a minute before he reappeared at Mason’s window.

“Anybody seen Skinny Hawkins?” he cried excitedly.

“He was here a minute ago!” answered someone.

“I seen him walkin’ off down the road towards the race track--just afore the bell began ringin’!” yelled up a small boy.

“Well!” shouted Higgins, “get after him an’ stop him.--Don’t let him get away!”

The next instant the pack were in full cry.

* * * * * *

Perhaps if Skinny hadn’t been a half-wit he wouldn’t have run. Perhaps he should have pulled himself together--and with his pockets full of the hermit’s gold and his boots covered with mud from the hermit’s potato patch--he should have boldly answered: “Here I am! What do you want of me?” and marched up to the sheriff’s office. But, on the other hand, perhaps many a more sensibly-minded man than he under the same unfortunate circumstances would have taken to his legs. Admit, it was a foolish and useless thing to do! We have all on occasion lost our nerve--even if we all be wise men. And certainly Skinny was not wise!

He could not deny having been in the hermit’s company within half an hour, the gold was on his person, the mud upon his feet. He had been caught almost, had his addled memory retained the phrase, _in flagrante delicto_. Being a tramp, used to rough treatment even from ordinarily kind people, accustomed to be called a vagabond and a thief and to have the dogs set upon him, familiar from long experience with his brother hoboes with tales of tortures and lynchings in which the knotted rope and kerosene figured vividly, Skinny fled in a hysteria of fear down the road towards the race track and thence across the fields into the woods.

He was less than three minutes ahead of the crowd at the start and unfortunately for him the sheriff’s flivver was standing in front of the drug store, so that by the time he took cover they were actually at his heels. Moreover, a dozen of the older boys sensing that he might try to beat back towards the Hollow ran up the crossroad to cut him off. The fact that most of them liked him was nothing. A chase was a chase. Hare and hounds,--while it lasted. Besides, this was a hunt for a murderer--and flight was equivalent to confession.

Badly winded, Skinny crashed through the woods, the shouts of his pursuers close in his ears. Ahead he could see the blue sky through the trees where the fields began again. He reached the edge and came dead upon a man plowing. Faintly borne on the wind he heard the distant clang of the fire bell and a couple of revolver shots from nearer at hand. “Putt!” they said. “Putt-putt!” Skinny did not like the sound of them. He ducked back and ran like a fagged fox along the hedge by the field, then paused to listen again. There was a crackling in the brush to the left while just beyond, on the other side of the open, the barber and the drug clerk, who had followed a wood road suddenly appeared staring directly at him.

“Hi!” yelled the barber, waving his razor which he had carried in his hand. “Hi! Here he is! This way!”

The crackling behind him grew louder. He could see shadows stealthily creeping from tree to tree. Of course they thought him armed! They might shoot! He did not know what to do. He did not want either to be carved up by the barber or to be blown to bits by a shotgun. His tongue was like a baked potato and his lungs ached as if with rheumatism. He could hardly see. There they were--hundreds of them--!

“’S all right, Bill!” he called hoarsely. “I ain’t tryin’ to git away.”

And he staggered out a few feet between the furrows and fell in a faint. It was characteristic of him that he had made no attempt to throw away the hermit’s gold.

Twenty minutes later “Ma” Best, who had been quietly cooking in the Phoenix House kitchen throughout the whole disturbance, heard a great shouting down the road and went to the door to see what it was all about. Over by the “deppo” she could see a crowd of men and boys pushing or dragging somebody in their midst. The smaller of the boys danced and capered ahead of the throng, one of them turning fancy “cartwheels.” Then came Sheriff Higgins, stalking along importantly, two men with shotguns on either side of him, followed by the barber, Mr. Perkins the proprietor of the Mohawk Palace, and old Colson the grocer. Directly behind this cluster of notables--who in a grotesque way suggested a group of Roman senators escorted by their lictors--at an interval of perhaps ten feet, walked Skinny the tramp, his face pale as that of the murdered hermit, hatless, a rope around his neck, and his hands bound behind his back. The end of the rope was held by no less a personage than “Toggery Bill” Gookin, who providentially had happened to be returning from a visit to Zayda the Zingara Gipsy fortune teller at the moment of Skinny’s capture. From time to time the haberdasher would jerk the rope as if the tramp were a horse and the more light-minded in the crowd would cluck and call out “Geddap!” For the rest, they swarmed along in a mob, yelling, joking, uttering cat-calls and other vague and meaningless noises.

“What’s the trouble, sheriff?” called out “Ma” Best. “What yer doin’ with Skinny?”

The dignity of Sheriff Higgins did not permit him to make reply. Instead the crowd yelled at her generally.

“’S killed the hermit!” shouted an urchin. “Murdered him!--Whoop-ee! Hurray!”

“Murder nuthin’!” snorted “Ma” Best. “You’re jest a pack of idiots.--Skinny wouldn’t kill a spider!”

“Whee-uup! Whoop! Hurray!” shrieked the crowd in the delight of having conducted a successful man-hunt, jumping around “Toggery Bill” and his victim, as a pack of hounds will jump, snapping and barking about the body of the fox they have run to earth. “Whee-uup! Hurray!--Lynch him! String him up!”

They had reached the horse-trough and the two men with the shotguns held back the crowd while Sheriff Higgins relieved “Toggery Bill” of the rope and led Skinny upstairs to his office. In a moment the sheriff appeared at the window.

“Feller citizens of Pottsville!” he shouted. “In the name o’ the People of the State of New York I call on ye to disperse peaceable and go to your homes. There ain’t goin’ to be no lynchin’ nor nuthin’ like that. Skinny’s goin’ to the jail and he’s goin’ to stay there until the Grand Jury has acted on his case which will be day after to-morrer. Now, there’s no use kickin’ up any fuss or ruction and I warn ye not to go near Turkey Hollow. Kindly disperse!”

Skinny the Tramp having been treated to a brief and exceedingly crude variety of the “third degree” in the sheriff’s office, and having “stood mute,” was transferred to the calaboose, where Sam Bellows, who, owing to his obesity, could not take any more active part, was set to watch him. It is doubtful whether Skinny would have made any further attempt to get away, even if “paroled in his own custody”; for his flight had been the instant, automatic reaction from a paroxysm of terror in which he visioned himself as a human torch--not the result of any genuine hope that he could escape the processes of the law, for whose far-reaching effectiveness he had in fact a vast respect.

Now that he had been brought back without having been lynched, his instinct told him to hold his tongue. He was no match for them--not even for Sheriff Higgins--and he knew it. If he said anything they would twist it somehow against him. His only hope lay in the quantum of evidence. Nobody had seen him at the hermit’s shanty, so why admit that he had been there? That was only common caution. Anybody could have gold pieces; and if he had left any tracks there was no way of proving when they had been made. So Skinny obstinately refused to open his mouth, and sat on a decayed chair in the unsanitary box resembling a flagman’s shanty which passed for a jail while the youth--the extreme youth--of Pottsville sat in rows around Sam Bellows, dividing their attention between comments upon his beauty of person and audible conjectures as to the probable fate of the murderer within.

Contemporaneously Squire Mason, having in his office reduced to written form the testimony of Emerson the lumberman, unexpectedly realized that he was confronted by a disturbing problem in legal ethics. Here he was, hardly appointed district attorney a week before the most sensational murder ever committed in the county had occurred at his very door! It was his chance!--the chance of a lifetime!--a sure conviction! But--and here was the rub!--were his relations to the accused such that he could properly conduct the case against him? At best could he take any more active part in the trial than as a mere witness, considering the fact that he was trustee of the tramp’s money and bore to him the confidential relationship of lawyer to client? Could he even appear against him as a witness? Might not the half-wit, indeed, have had murder in his mind that very morning when he had asked him if “anything ever really died?” The squire’s hopes wilted at the thought and his heart fell. Why, it was the biggest opportunity for legitimate notoriety since the Rosenthal murder! It was ridiculous to let a little thing like the fact that he was Skinny’s trustee make any difference! No one would in fact need to know? If Skinny remained mute, as he apparently intended to do, it probably would never come to light,--at any rate not until Hawkins had been convicted, and then it would sink into insignificance in the blaze of his glory. There was nothing to connect him with Skinny in any way, for the five twenty-dollar bills which he had delivered to the tramp that morning had not been found upon him when he was arrested. No,--the chance was worth taking. A brave man would take it; and fortune always favored the brave!

Squire Mason, however, was not the only brave man in Pottsville, for Sheriff Moses Higgins meanwhile had started for Turkey Hollow to make an examination of the scene of the crime. With him in the flivver officially designated as “Lizzie” were Emerson, the lumberman, the two armed deputies and Mr. Pennypacker, the photographer from Somerset Corners, for the sheriff was up on all the latest modern methods of detecting crime and knew just how it should be done. And some day they would all have to be witnesses and testify to exactly what they had seen.

They left the flivver where the wood road from the Hollow joined the highway and walked in the rest of the way on foot. It was a circumstance commented on by all of them that the sheriff’s order, that nobody should visit the scene of the murder until he had done so, had been strictly obeyed. But the ghastly corpse of a murdered man is its own best guardian--particularly if it be that of a hermit lying in his blood--alone in a bosky, lonely spot--with evening coming on. The peaceful inhabitants of Pottsville had no great hankering to see how the dead hermit looked, much preferring the less grim sport of tramp-baiting. So the five men met no one on their way; neither did any sound break the silence of the woods about them.

An unexpected pall descended upon their spirits. It had been great sport to jump into a motor with guns and cameras, and whirr off consequentially in a cloud of dust, leaving the staring crowd gazing enviously after them. They had even cracked jokes while they were on the road. But now, with the sun already behind the ridge that framed the Hollow upon which the shadows were closing steadily as if night were about to clutch it in its fingers, with no sound save the creak of their own boots or the gibber of a chipmunk in the alders to break the deathly silence of the woods, they found conversation difficult. The men with the shotguns felt fairly comfortable--although of course it would be a cinch for anybody lurking in the bushes to shoot the lot of them. But Sheriff Higgins, who although a sheriff and the Supreme Exalted Ruler of the Sacred Camels of King Menelik had never seen a dead body and was more of a “family man” than a bloodhound, and “Cy” Pennypacker, whose most daring adventure had been to invite Zayda the Zingara vamp to his studio to be photographed--for which he paid heavily afterwards at home, and who now, owing to the weight of his camera and plate holders, found difficulty in keeping up with the others,--both these worthies secretly began to wish that they could escape the duty which lay before them.

“Ssh!” suddenly whispered Emerson, and they all jumped; then stood tensely in their tracks.

Far up on the dark hillside could be heard at intervals of a few seconds the snapping of twigs.

“That’s a long ways off!” said the sheriff inconsequently.

They resumed their pilgrimage at a somewhat lessened pace; but at last they could see the opening-up of the trees against the sky that marked the hermit’s clearing.

“Hold up a second!” remarked the sheriff nervously. “Le’s decide about this thing! Suppose you fellers with the guns go first--so’s to be all ready--an’ then I’ll come right along----”

“Look here, Moses,” retorted one of the gunmen. “I ain’t got no partic’lar objection to goin’ first, but you’re sheriff an’ I reckon it’s up to you.”

Mr. Higgins hesitated. As Patriarch of the Sacred Camels it would not do to permit any intimation of pusillanimity upon his part to get abroad.

“Guess you’re right!” he remarked carelessly. “Gimme the gun.”

“What for?” demanded its owner. “You don’t need no gun to shoot a dead man!”

“I know that ’s well as you do!” retorted the sheriff. “But wha’d you bring a gun fer if there wasn’t no use fer it?--Le’s go up together!”

Thus reinforced the sheriff and his companion cautiously approached the open door of the hermit’s shanty, on which the shadow of the ridge had already fallen and was now slipping across the potato patch towards the edge of the woods. On the threshold they paused. Then the sheriff, swallowing, thrust in his head. It was so dark that at first he could see only the face of the hermit’s old clock leering at him out of the dusk. Then gradually he made out the crumpled bundle that had been the hermit, lying in front of it. A grimy fist protruded from beneath the covering. The sheriff bent over gingerly and took hold of one corner of the comfortable. Then he withdrew his hand quickly. The bedding had been lying upon the floor and was soaked in blood.

“God!” shrieked the sheriff and tottered out of the shanty.

“What’s th’ matter?” demanded Emerson rudely.

“There’s blood on everything--all over the place!” gasped Higgins.

“Well,--didn’t you look at him?” continued the lumberman brutally.

“I’m goin’ to, soon’s I kin git the blood off’n my hands!” returned the sheriff valiantly.

He rubbed his fingers ostentatiously in the grass. Then he crept back to the door of the shanty and looked in. The man with the gun poked the comfortable off the hermit’s body.

“P’thah!” coughed the sheriff recoiling. “P’thah!--Somebody else search that body--I can’t!”

He leaned heavily against the outside of the shanty and lowered his head.