CHAPTER XXXI
In Boston Eben would have been safely housed against the storm, but Eben was not in Boston. He had driven to the village and put his horse and buggy in the livery stable. At the station he had bought a ticket for Boston, but when the express made its first stop he had dropped off to buy a paper and had intentionally allowed his train to go on without him.
To several acquaintances whom he met he confided the circumstance of his clumsy mistake, and one of them remembered in the light of after events that though he spoke with his ordinary reserve of manner his eyes had held a "queer glitter." Tollman told these persons that he would take the later train to his destination, but what he actually did was to board the afternoon local going in the direction of his home. As chance ordained, he paid his fare to a new conductor, who did not know him, and sat in the day coach unaccosted and unrecognized.
He did not remain on the local until it reached his own town of Tanner, but dropped off at West Tanner, one station short of the full distance, from which point he had a walk of four miles by a road sandy and little frequented, to his own house.
Even now Eben did not hurry, but when he had left the limits of the village he walked slowly and even paused occasionally to rest and reflect, consulting his watch on these halts as though his object was not so much the saving of time, as its killing.
In short, the Eben Tollman of this evening was not the same man that he had ever been before. To a superficial eye he was, as usual, sedately quiet, yet there was a new quality in his mood. This was the sort of quiet that might brood at the bottom of an ocean whose surface is being lashed into the destructive turmoil of tempest. Only since Eben Tollman was a madman—not a noisy and raving maniac but a homicidally dangerous and crafty one—his situation was inverted. It was the surface that was calm with him and the deeps that were frenzied.
To be sure, all these seeming vicissitudes of his journey were parts of a plan symmetrically ordered from the crazed compulsion of suspicion and jealousy and now ripe for its fruition, which was to be murder.
Of course the motive which actuated him, locked in its logic-proof compartment, would not have been, by him, called murder but obedience to a divine mandate. None-the-less it contemplated human sacrifice.
Just as the storm broke with its cannonading of winds and its fulmination of lightning he stopped at the edge of a small lake where an ice-house, now exhausted of supply, had been left accommodatingly unlocked.
He felt no hesitancy to taking refuge there because the place belonged to him. Quite recently he had foreclosed, the mortgage which gave him title to the small farm upon which it stood.