I looked up and saw two round eyes which glittered like a wild beast"s, staring at us out of the darkness. A cold chill ran up my back and I instinctively huddled closer to the others. For a moment no one spoke and I heard the click of Terry"s revolver as he c.o.c.ked it. Then it suddenly came over me what it was, and I cried out:
"It"s Cat-Eye Mose!"
"Good Lord, he can see in the dark! Strike a light, some one," Terry said huskily.
The sheriff struck a match. We lit our candles with trembling hands and pressed forward (in a body) to the spot where the eyes had appeared.
Crouched in a corner of a little recess half way up the irregular wall, we found Mose, shivering with fear and looking down at us with dumb, animal eyes. We had to drag him out by main force. The poor fellow was nearly famished and so weak he could scarcely stand. What little sense he had ever possessed seemed to have left him, and he jabbered in a tongue that was scarcely English.
We bolstered him up with a few drops of whisky from Mattison"s flask, and half carried him out into the light. The guide ran ahead to get a carriage, spreading the news as he ran, that Cat-Eye Mose had been found. Half the town of Luray came out to the cave to escort us back, and I think the feeling of regret was general, in that there had not been time enough to collect a bra.s.s band.
CHAPTER XXIII
MOSE TELLS HIS STORY
We took Mose back to the hotel, shut out the crowd, and gave him something to eat. He was quite out of his head and it was only by dint of the most patient questioning that we finally got his story. It was, in substance, as Terry had sketched it in the cave.
In obedience to my request, Mose had gone back after the coat, not knowing that the Colonel was before him. Suddenly, as he came near the pool he heard a scream and looked up in time to see a big negro--the one my uncle had struck with his crop--spring upon the Colonel with the cry, "It"s my tu"n, now, Cunnel g.a.y.l.o.r.d. You whup me, an" I"ll let you see what it feels like."
The Colonel turned and clinched with his a.s.sailant, and in the struggle the light was dropped. Mose, with a cry, ran forward to his master"s a.s.sistance, but when the negro saw him climbing up the bank he suddenly screamed, and hurling the old man from him, turned and fled.
"The fellow must have taken him for the devil when he saw those eyes, and I don"t wonder!" Terry interpolated at this point.
After the Colonel"s murder, it seems that Mose, crazed by grief and fear, had watched us carry the body away, and then had stayed by the spot where his master had died. This accounted for the marks on the border of the pool. Knowing all of the intricate pa.s.sages and hiding places as he did, it had been an easy matter for him to evade the party that had searched for his body. He ate the food the murderer had left, but this being exhausted, he would, I haven"t a doubt, have died there himself with the unreasoning faithfulness of a dog.
When he finished his rambling and in some places scarcely intelligible account, we sat for a moment with our eyes upon his face, fascinated by his look. Every bit of repugnance I had ever felt toward him had vanished, and there was left in its place only a sense of pity. Mose"s cheeks were hollow, his features sharper than ever, and his face was almost pale. From underneath his straight, black, matted hair his eyes glittered feverishly, and their expression of uncomprehending anguish was pitiful to see. He seemed like a dumb animal that has come into contact with death for the first time and asks the reason.
Terry took his eyes from Mose"s face and looked down at the table with a set jaw. I do not think that he was deriving as much pleasure from the sight as he had expected. We all of us experienced a feeling of relief when the doctor appeared at the door. We turned Mose over to him with instructions to do what he could for the poor fellow and to take him back to Four-Pools.
As the door shut behind them, the sheriff said (with a sigh, I thought), "This business proves one thing: it"s never safe to lynch a man until you are sure of the facts."
"It proves another thing," said Terry, dryly, "which is a thing you people don"t seem to have grasped; and that is that negroes are human beings and have feelings like the rest of us. Poor old Colonel g.a.y.l.o.r.d paid a terrible price for not having learned it earlier in life."
We pondered this in silence for a moment, then the sheriff voiced a feeling which, to a slight extent, had been lurking in the background of my own consciousness, in spite of my relief at the denouement.
"It"s kind of disappointing when you"ve got your mind worked up to something big, to find in the end that there was nothing but a chance n.i.g.g.e.r at the bottom of all that mystery. Seems sort of a let-down."
Terry eyed him with an air of grim humor, then he leaned across the table and spoke with a ring of conviction that carried his message home.
"You are mistaken, Mattison, the murderer of Colonel g.a.y.l.o.r.d was not a chance n.i.g.g.e.r. There was no chance about it. Colonel g.a.y.l.o.r.d killed himself. He committed suicide--as truly as if he had blown out his brains with a gun. He did it with his uncontrollable temper. The man was an egoist. He has always looked upon his own desires and feelings as of supreme importance. He has tried to crush the life and spirit and independence from everyone about him. But once too often he wreaked his anger upon an innocent person--at least upon a person that for all he knew was innocent--and at one stroke his past injustices were avenged.
It was not chance that killed Colonel g.a.y.l.o.r.d. It was the inevitable law of cause and effect. "Way back in his boyhood when he gave way to his first fit of pa.s.sion, he sentenced himself to some such end as this.
Every unjust act in his after-life piled up the score against him.
"Oh, I"ve seen it a hundred times! It"s character that tells. I"ve seen it happen to a political boss--a man whose business it was to make friends with every voter high and low. I"ve seen him forget, just once, and turn on a man, humiliate him, wound his pride, crush him under foot and think no more of the matter than if he had stepped on a worm. And I"ve seen that man, the most insignificant of the politician"s followers, work and plot and scheme to overthrow him; and in the end succeed. The big man never knew what struck him. He thought it was luck, chance, a turn of the wheel. He never dreamed that it was his own character hitting back. I"ve seen it so often, I"m a fatalist. I don"t believe in chance. It was Colonel g.a.y.l.o.r.d who killed himself, and he commenced it fifty years ago."
"It"s G.o.d"s own truth, Terry!" I said solemnly.
The sheriff had listened to Terry"s words with an anxiously reminiscent air. I wondered if he were reviewing his own political past, to see if by chance he also had unwittingly crushed a worm. He raised his eyes to Terry"s face with a gleam of admiration.
"You"ve been pretty clever, Mr. Patten, in finding out the truth about this crime," he acknowledged generously. "But you couldn"t have expected me to find out," he added, "for I didn"t know any of the circ.u.mstances.
I had never even heard that such a man existed as that chicken thief--and as to there being two ghosts instead of one, there wasn"t a suggestion of it brought out at the inquest."
Terry looked at him with his usual slowly broadening smile. He opened his mouth to say something, but he changed his mind and--with a visible effort--shut it again.
"Terry," I asked, "how _did_ you find out about the chicken thief? I confess I don"t understand it yet."
He shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
"Nothing simpler. The trouble with you people was that you were searching for something lurid, and the little common-place things which, in a case like this, are the most suggestive, you overlooked. As soon as I read the story of the crime in the papers I saw that in all probability Rad was innocent. His behavior was far too suspicious for him really to be guilty; unless he were a fool he would have covered up his tracks. There was of course the possibility that Mose had committed the murder, but in the light of his past devotion to the Colonel it did not seem likely.
"I had already been reading a lot of sensational stuff about the ghost of Four-Pools, and when the murder followed so close on the heels of the robbery, I commenced to look about for a connecting link. It was evident that Radnor had nothing to do with it, but whether or not he suspected someone was not so clear. His reticence in regard to the ha"nt made me think that he did. I came South with pretty strong suspicions against the elder son, but with a mind still open to conviction. The telegram showing that he was in Seattle at the time of the murder, proved his innocence of that, but he might still be connected with the ha"nt. I tried the suggestion on Radnor, and his manner of taking it proved pretty conclusively that I had stumbled on the truth. The ha"nt business, I dare say, was started as a joke, and was kept up as being a convenient method of warding off eavesdroppers. Why Jefferson came back and why Radnor gave him money are not matters that concern us; if they prefer to keep it a secret that"s their own affair.
"Jeff helped himself pretty freely to cigars, roast chickens, jam, pajamas, books, brandy, and anything else he needed to make himself comfortable in the cabin, but he took nothing of any great value. In the meantime, though, other things commenced disappearing--things that Radnor knew his brother had no use for--and he supposed the workers about the place were stealing and laying it to the ghost, as a convenient scapegoat.
"But as a matter of fact they were not. A second ghost had appeared on the scene. This tramp negro had taken up his quarters in the spring-hole and was prowling about at night seeking what he might devour. He ran across Jeff dressed in a sheet, and decided to do some masquerading on his own account. Sheets were no longer left on the line all night, so he had to put up with lap robes. As a result, the spring-hole shortly became haunted by a jet black spirit nine feet tall with blue flames and sulphur, and all the other accessories.
"This made little impression at the house until Mose himself was frightened; then Radnor saw that the hoax had reached the point where it was no longer funny, and he determined to get rid of Jeff immediately.
While he drove him to the station he left Mose behind to straighten up the loft; and Mose, coming into the house to put some things away, met ghost number two just after he had robbed the safe. If Mose"s eyes looked as they did to-day I fancy the fright was mutual. The ghost, in his excitement, dropped one package of papers, but bolted with the rest.
He made for his lair in the spring-hole and examined his booty. The bonds were no more than old paper; he tossed them aside. But the pennies and five-cent pieces were real; he lit out for the village with them.
The robbery was not discovered till morning and by that time the fellow was at "Jake"s place" on his way toward being the drunkest n.i.g.g.e.r in the county.
"He stayed at the Corners a week or so until the money was gone, then he came back to the spring-hole. But he made the mistake of venturing out by daylight; the stable-men caught him and took him to the Colonel, and you know the rest.
"As soon as I heard the story of the beating I decided to follow it up; and when I heard of a jet black spirit rising from the spring-hole, I decided to follow that up too. At daylight this morning I routed out one of the stable-men, and we went down and examined the spring-hole; at least I examined it while he stood outside and shivered. It yielded an even bigger find than I had hoped for. Chucked off in a corner and trampled with mud I found the bonds. A pile of clothing and carriage cushions formed a bed. There were the remains of several fires and of a great many chickens--the whole place was strewn with feathers and bones; he had evidently raided the roosts more than once.
"When I finished with the spring-hole it still lacked something of six o"clock and I rode over to the village hoping to get an answer to my telegram. I wanted to get Jeff"s case settled. "Miller"s store" was not open but "Jake"s place" was, and it was not long before I got on the track of my man. There was no doubt but that I had him accounted for up to the time of the thrashing; after that I could only conjecture. He had not appeared in the village again; the supposition was that he had taken to the woods. Now he might or he might not have come in the direction of Luray. All the facts I had to go upon were, a man of criminal proclivities, who owed Colonel g.a.y.l.o.r.d a grudge, and who was used to hiding in caves. It was pure supposition that he had come in this direction and it had to be checked at every point by fact. I didn"t mention my suspicions because there was no use in raising false hopes and because, well--"
"You wanted to be dramatic," I suggested.
"Oh, yes, certainly, that"s my business. Well, anyway I felt I was getting warm, and I came over here this morning with my eyes open, ready to see what there was to see.
"The first thing I unearthed was this story of the church social provisions. There had, then, been a thief of some sort in the neighborhood just at the time of Colonel g.a.y.l.o.r.d"s murder. The further theft of the boots fitted very neatly into the theory. If the fellow had been tramping for a couple of days his shoes, already worn, had given out and been discarded. The new ones, as we know, were too small--he left them at the bottom of the pasture--and went bare-footed. The marks therefore in the cave, which everyone ascribed to Mose, were in all probability, not the marks of Mose at all. Actual investigation proved that to be the case. The rest, I think, you know. The Four-Pools mystery has turned out to be a very simple affair--as most mysteries unfortunately do."
"I reckon you"re a pretty good detective, Mr. Patten," said Mattison with a shade of envy in his voice.
Terry bowed his thanks and laughed.
"As a matter of fact," he returned, "I am not a detective of any sort--at least not officially. I merely a.s.sume the part once in a while when there seems to be a demand. Officially," he added, "I am the representative of the New York Post-Dispatch, a paper which, you may know, has solved a good many mysteries before now. In this case, the Post-Dispatch will of course take the credit, but it wants a little more than that. It wants to be the only paper tomorrow morning to print the true details. We four are the only ones who know them. I should, perhaps, have been a little more circ.u.mspect, and kept the facts to myself, but I knew that I could trust you."
His eye dwelt upon the sheriff a moment and then wandered to Pete Moser who had sat silently listening throughout the colloquy.
"Would it be too much," Terry inquired, "to ask you to keep silent until tomorrow morning?"
"You can trust me to keep quiet," said Mattison, holding out his hand.