CHAPTER I.—THE FIRST NIGHT.
My name is Leonard Benary—rather a foreign-sounding name, though I am a pure-blooded Englishman. I reside at No. 63, Riverview Road, in the American city of Adironda, though I was born in Devonshire. And I am a physician and surgeon, though retired from active practice. My age can be computed when I say that I came into the world on the 21st day of July, in the year 1818.
I must at the outset crave the reader's indulgence for two things. First, my style. I am not a literary man; and my style will therefore be ungraceful. Secondly, my provincialisms. I have lived in Adironda for very nearly half a century, and I have therefore fallen into divers local peculiarities of speech. But I have a singular, and I believe an interesting and significant, story to tell, and I think it had better be ill told than not told at all.
It begins with the night of Friday, June 13th, 1884.
Towards twelve o'clock on that night I was walking in an easterly direction along the south side of Washington Street, between Myrtle Avenue and Riverview Road, on my way home from a concert which I had attended at the Academy of Music. Moving in the same direction, on the same side of the street, and leading me by something like a hundred feet, I could make out the figure of a woman. Except for us two, the neighbourhood appeared to be deserted.
Anything about my fellow pedestrian, beyond her sex, which was proclaimed by the outline of her gown as she passed under a street-lamp—whether she was young or old, white or black, a lady or a beggar—I was unable, owing to the darkness of the night, and to the distance that separated us, to distinguish. Indeed, I should most likely have paid no attention whatever to her, for I was busy with my own thoughts, had I not happened to notice that when she readied the corner of Riverview Road, instead of turning into that thoroughfare, she proceeded to the terrace at the foot of Washington Street, and immediately disappeared down the stone staircase which leads thence to the water's edge.
This action at once struck me as odd, and put an end to my pre-occupation.
What could a solitary woman want at the brink of the Yellow Snake River at twelve o'clock midnight?
Her errand could scarcely be a benign one; and the conjecture that suicide might possibly be its object, instantly, of course, arose in my mind.
My duty under the circumstances, anyhow, seemed plain—to keep an eye upon her, and hold myself in readiness to interfere, if needful.
After a moment's deliberation, I, too, descended the stone stairs.