The low, flat bridge was about fifty feet from the corner of the dividing line, and less that distance from the scene of one of the murders. Near to it ran the path my friend had to pursue on his return at night. In my walks, before the murders, I had passed over this bridge almost daily, and afterward, during the sealed week, I had not interrupted my habit, though probably I did not go that route as often as before, for the weather was getting intensely hot, and kept me to the woods nearer the house. In these walks, however frequent or seldom, I was accompanied by old Jack; and though the body of the boy, at one part of the track, lay not more than ten or fifteen feet away on our left, hidden in the shrubbery, the dog never attempted to approach it. I remembered afterward, when everything was revealed, that as soon as we got over the bridge, he would walk quietly at my heels, keeping as close to me as possible; but when I had advanced to the denser wood, that clothed the base of the hill, he was all alive, plunging in every direction, and opening with a courageous vigor upon the up-tree, defying squirrels. I blamed him much for his reticence; for I felt assured that both he and his namesake had, before that, perhaps on the very day of the deed, gone into that dense mass and gazed upon the slain. Be it as it might, his manner changed completely whenever we passed by that red resting-place.
On the morning of the murders—the 12th of June—I had prepared myself for sketching (I have that gift, moderately to be sure, but yet with wonderful kindness extended to me by a beneficent Providence), intending to make a memorandum in oil colors of a group of rocks a hundred yards or so beyond (eastward) the murder-rock, and to which I have already referred. These gray rocks, that I intended to sketch, can be seen from the road leading up to the hill, by which you reach, from the direction of the railroad, the outer scarp of the ridge behind which the girl was found. And this is the route by which the children may have reached the wood.
As the sun rose higher in the heavens the heat increased in proportionate intensity, and when I was ready to start, say about half-past ten o’clock, I was glad to second the persuasions of my friends not to venture out in such seething weather. Probably it was providential, or possibly a great error, that I did not accomplish my original design. To reach my objective point—the picturesque rocks which had so fascinated my sense of the beautiful—I would have been obliged to follow the path, first over the low bridge, and subsequently within six or seven feet of the spot where the body of Isabella Joyce was first seen. Now, it is a well-ascertained fact, that the children left their home by the cars sometime about eleven o’clock on that morning. Their intention was simply to go to May’s wood, nearer to Boston than Bussey’s. What induced them to change their purpose, and advance as far as the latter, is partially a mystery; and though I have a well-digested theory upon that very important—indeed, all-important—point, I must withhold it; for well I know that if he is alive, one of the first persons to read this narrative, on its publication, will be the murderer himself, and I cannot afford to give him farther chance to plot explanations and arrange evasion by any word of mine. Leaving home at about eleven, in three-quarters of an hour, or less, they could reach Bussey’s wood (for I take it for granted they did not tarry at May’s wood, persuaded by some one to go farther off from Boston), say, about twelve o’clock. Give them time to gather leaves and wreathe them, as they did,—a wreath being found around the boy’s hat, and portions of wreaths about the murder-rock, where the girl had evidently been employed in such amusement,—and we reach half-past twelve, or perhaps a little later; and that is the time I have fixed as the epoch; for after that, whatever of garlands were woven, were made by hands we cannot see, but only hope to see. Now, had I not changed my intention to sketch that forenoon, I would have passed by the path beyond which, hidden by the woody screen, the girl was afterward sitting, and also grazed the spot whither the boy had fled, or been thrown; but it would have been before they had entered the wood; but I would have been at work at the moment of the killing, or, mayhap, passing within a few feet of the place where Isabella Joyce was murdered, or, after being murdered, concealed.
If, in passing at the moment when the deed was in the act of accomplishment, and I had heard a cry ever so feeble, I would, unquestionably, have proceeded to inquire into its cause; and had I come upon the brute, and been at the instant in possession of as much pluck as I had weapon,—an iron-clasped, well-seasoned, heavy camp-stool,—he would have fared badly; for, once up, my arm is one of very admirable development, and my temper not the best calculated for easy martyrdom, and I might have saved her life at least, and in doing which, an incident might have happened which the fiend would not have had time to remember—in the flesh. Or, if I had not passed at that exact exigency of time, but was engaged in my sketching, I possibly might have been startled by her outcry for mercy from him, or appeal to others, and by the manhood that is systematized, for the defence of the weak and wronged, in this six-foot carcass of mine, I would have gone with utter ferocity to the rescue; but with what success crowning my enterprise, is only known to the Great Inscrutable. However, had the murderer accomplished his bloody purpose on the girl, and was following the boy, and I had passed downward to the level bridge, I might have seen that supplemental tragedy, or arrested it, and taken the culprit red-handed in his course. I would, under any of these circumstances, have been more happy in my life, had I been the means of saving two other lives, or even one, though I question much if it would not have been at the expense of another life as yet unclaimed by the gibbet.
Barring all these contingencies, and taking it for granted that I had passed in and out of the wood without detecting anything of those terrible occurrences, it might have fared ill with me in the subsequent phases of the affair, for there was a strict investigation made as to who was in that wood during that day; and beyond a question, as I would not have attempted to conceal the fact of my presence, my friends of the police would have laid their justifiable hands upon me, and placed me in the black category of the suspected. In mentioning this idea since to my friend the logician of judicial mystery, the tall chief of the force, he assured me that I would not have been interfered with, as I did not come in the least within the principles of his theory of the murder. But that did not exempt me, as I shall proceed to state.
VII.
SUSPECTED.
Keeping in view the fact of the week’s concealment, my reader will readily understand that I had no inducement to change my usual habits, so far as the woods were concerned, and I consequently kept up my visitations; but as the heat was growing daily more severe, I did not stroll far from the house, but confined myself in the main to the wood that reaches from the brook to the westward road in our front. I avoided thus pretty much my former walks, which included all that space lying between the flat bridge and the old gray rocks it had been my intention to make a memorandum of. Now and then, when the heat of the day had subsided, I went as far down as the stream; for exceedingly cool and pleasant was it there, and quiet, too, in the shady evenings. Sometimes I took my sketching apparatus, but oftener went without it; but it seems that, however I might go, I was not to do so without creating a terrible suspicion.
The search, prompted by public duty, or instigated by private curiosity, had apparently worn itself out, when, upon a sweet morning, some two weeks after the discovery of the bodies, I stepped out of the front door, and saw, sitting under a shady tree in the stable-yard, holding converse with my host’s father, a member of the polician fraternity. Naturally enough, thought I, this vigilant is wandering round to see what he can pick up of stray hints and suggestions that may lead to the discovery of the criminal, and the obtaining of the large rewards that had been tendered by public and private liberality. I recognized the policeman at once, having often rode in the car on Tremont Street which he conducted. Circumstances then induced quite an acquaintance of great kindness between us. He had been left for dead after one of the great battles in the Chickahominy, slaughtered by four or five bullets of the Southern rifles, but picked up and cured, and fated in after days to have the high prerogative of being put upon my track as one of, if not the bloody villain of all, concerned in the killing of the Joyce children.
I went over to where the two were chatting under the bee-laden lime-tree, and, after hand-shaking with the ex-dead soldier-policeman, I helped to keep up the conversation, which flowed naturally upon the subject of the universal curiosity. He smiled a very peculiar smile when he saw me coming to him, and the farmer smiled, too; but that passed in my mind for nothing more than the fact of his meeting with an old friend. Ah! little did I think, while I smoked my pipe and gossiped so sociably with that placid friend of justice, that it was especially to find who the tall, dark stranger was, who, with a bowie-knife in hand, and great firing of his revolver, roved those haunted woods of Bussey. I did not know until he had shaken hands and gone away; when the farmer told me that the policeman had come to inquire who it was that was living with the family, and what my habits were, and where I was on the day of the murders, etc. My coming out of the house had interrupted this diabolical inquisition, and, upon seeing me, they both had looked at each other and exchanged a knowing smile, which, interpreted into English, could be spelled out thus: “Oh, I know him!” on the part of the policeman; and “You’re sold this time,” on the part of the farmer. The fact was that a youth, with his head full of ghosts and shrieking children, had seen me in the vicinage woods before and after the murders, and, frightened at my pallette knife and my ball practice, had hastened to the station at Jamaica Plains and made report of the terrible bandit and assassin. My friend of the police has often since laughed with me over the adventure, and I have almost grown to look upon myself as a gentleman of rather a forbidding and ferocious cut, and feel prepared to let myself out to some of my friends at the Studio Building as a model for any species of brigand, of Italy or Wall Street; or, if it be not treason to say so, of State Street, Boston. There is something, after all, in being remarkable. However, it so happened that in one way or another I became a satellite to the sanguinary meteor that had swept over those woods, and, had I allowed it, I would have grown into a morbid mass of melodramatic idiosyncrasy. But the worst had not come yet.