Isom Chase was dead, with an armful of gold upon his breast.
Aye, Isom Chase was dead. Back there in the still house his limbs were stiffening upon his kitchen floor. Isom Chase was dead on the eve of the most bountiful harvest his lands had yielded him in all his toil-freighted years. Dead, with his fields around him; dead, with the maize dangling heavy ears in the white moonlight; dead, with the gold of pumpkin lurking like unminted treasure in the margin of his field. Dead, with fat cattle in his pastures, fat swine in his confines, sleek horses in his barn-stalls, fat cockerels on his perch; dead, with a young wife shrinking among the shadows above his cold forehead, her eyes unclouded by a tear, her panting breast undisturbed by a sigh of pity or of pain.
CHAPTER VIII
WILL HE TELL?
Constable Bill Frost was not a man of such acute suspicion as Sol Greening. He was a thin, slow man with a high, sharp nose and a sprangling, yellow mustache which extended broadly, like the horns of a steer. It did not enter his mind to connect Joe with the tragedy in a criminal way as they rode together back to the farm.
When they arrived, they found Sol Greening and his married son Dan sitting on the front steps. Mrs. Greening was upstairs, comforting the young widow, who was “racked like a fiddle,” according to Sol.
Sol took the constable around to the window and pointed out the body of Isom stretched beside the table.
“You’re a officer of the law,” said Sol, “and these here primisis is now in your hands and charge, but I don’t think you orto go in that room. I think you orto leave him lay, just the way he dropped, for the coroner. That’s the law.”
Frost was of the same opinion. He had no stomach for prying around dead men, anyhow.
“We’ll leave him lay, Sol,” said he.