Where the Atlantic meets the land

by H. Caldwell Lipsett

By this time he had reached the house. He carried the bag in under the mackintosh, and the walking-stick in his hand. The latter he put in the stand. He had used it constantly of late, and its absence would excite remark.

The bag he wrapped in oil-cloth to keep it from the damp, carried it out into the garden at the first opportunity, and hid it in an apple-tree, high up among the branches, in a hole, which had been his secret alone since boyhood.

Late that night the rumor reached the house that his cousin had fallen off his car and broken his neck. They all scouted the idea, and Philip mentioned having met him that afternoon a couple of miles out of the town, but Dick wouldn't stop to speak to him. The next day the rumor was confirmed: Philip had been the last person to see him alive.

For himself, Philip was physically prostrated, he could hardly move, and ached in every limb and every muscle: the fatigue resulting from the emotions which had racked him on the previous day was so much greater than any mere bodily fatigue he had hitherto known. The day afterwards—the Monday—he received a visit from the police-sergeant. He went cheerfully down. It was to summon him, he supposed, as a witness at the inquest, which was fixed for the morrow. Judge, then, of his surprise when he was arrested on a charge of having murdered his cousin.

He was very angry at first. Then the absurdity of the situation struck him, and he laughed aloud. Here had this lumbering country lout stumbled on the truth by accident, where a cleverer man would not have dreamt of looking for it. But it might prove no laughing matter for him, once the scent had been struck. The sergeant had applied, it seemed, to the magistrate for the warrant, upon his own responsibility, on the strength of a rumor that Philip was at the bottom of the affair somehow. How the rumor originated he never discovered—probably from some distortion in the repetition of his own story of the meeting. But it made matters very unpleasant for him for the time. He said that he would go quietly to the police-barracks if he were not handcuffed.

When he arrived there, the officer in charge—the District Inspector, and an old friend of Philip's, named Fitzgerald—cried out:

'Hullo, young 'un, what have you been doing now?—run in for being drunk and disorderly?' He thought that Philip had dropped in to see him, and that the presence of the sergeant was only a coincidence. Great was his surprise when he heard that the young man was really a prisoner—and upon what charge? He was more angry than Philip had been, and called the sergeant a blundering idiot, only in stronger language. At last he cooled down again and said:

'Well, never mind, you'll have to stop here to-night, but you'll be let loose again to-morrow, and everybody will think it only a good joke.'

'Yes, that's all very well,' replied Philip; 'but Richards, the coroner, has a grudge against me. As you know, he is the town baker; last year he set up a carriage, and heard me call it the bread-cart. He is sure to seize the opportunity of taking the change out of me. And I entirely fail to see where the joke comes in.'

When he arrived in the court next day, everybody was talking and laughing. They thought it an absurd farce that he should be accused of such a crime at all. Even the police-sergeant had been sneered out of his momentary inspiration of shrewdness long ago. Philip alone knew what a hair's-breadth removed from earnest the affair was capable of proving. He was like a man sitting on a powder magazine with people ignorantly letting off crackers all round him, one of which might at any moment blow him into eternity.