CHAPTER IX
THE SEALED ENVELOPE
In the light of Joe’s reluctant testimony and his strange, stubborn, and stiff-necked refusal to go into the matter of the quarrel between himself and Isom; the unexplained mystery of the money which had been found in the burst bag on Isom’s breast; and Joe’s declaration that he had not seen it until Isom fell: in the light of all this, the people of that community believed the verdict of the coroner’s jury to be just.
This refusal of Joe’s to talk out and explain everything was a display of the threadbare Newbolt dignity, people said, an exhibition of which they had not seen since old Peter’s death. But it looked more like bull-headedness to them.
“Don’t the darned fool know he’s pokin’ his head under the gallus?” they asked.
What was the trouble between him and Isom about? What was he doin’ there in the kitchen with the lamp lit that hour of the night? Where did that there money come from, gentlemen? That’s what I want you to tell me!
Those were the questions which were being asked, man to man, group to group, and which nobody could answer, as they stood discussing it after Joe had been taken away to jail. The coroner mingled with them, giving them the weight of his experience.
“That Newbolt’s deeper than he looks on the outside, gentlemen,” he said, shaking his serious whiskers. “There’s a lot more behind this case than we can see. Old Isom Chase was murdered, and that murder was planned away ahead. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anybody on the witness-stand 153 as shrewd and sharp as that Newbolt boy. He knew just what to so say and just what to shut his jaws on. But we’ll fetch it out of him–or somebody else.”
As men went home to take up their neglected tasks, they talked it all over. They wondered what Joe would have done with that money if he had succeeded in getting away with it; whether he would have made it out of the country, or whether the invincible Bill Frost, keen on his scent as a fox-hound, would have pursued him and brought him back.
They wondered how high they built the gallows to hang a man, and discussed the probability of the event being public. They speculated on the manner in which Joe would go to his death, whether boldly, with his head up that way, or cringing and afraid, his proud heart and spirit broken, and whether he would confess at the end or carry his secret with him to the grave. Then they branched off into discussions of the pain of hanging, and wondered whether it was a “more horribler” death than drowning or burning in a haystack, or from eating pounded glass.