The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

“‘Miss Dalton,’ says Joel, ‘your husband is in the well.’

“Then she screeched so loud that some of the neighbors heard her and come runnin’ to see what was the matter, while she made as if she’d throw herself over the curb, but Joel catched her by her clothes and pulled her back.

“‘Oh, John, John. Is he dead? Get him out, somebody,’ she cried.

“‘That’s what we are goin’ to do. Who’ll go down after him?’ Joel said, and, as no one offered, he pulled off his shoes and stockin’s, and, tyin’ a rope round his waist, went down himself, clingin’ to the slippery stones, and got him up dead as a door-nail, with the marks of two big hands round his throat, as if he had been seized and choked till the life was out of him, and then been chucked into the well as the nearest place to hide him.”

At this point Uncle Zacheus became so excited and agitated that he was obliged to wait a few minutes before describing more of the terrible scenes which shook the little village of Ridgefield to its depths that summer morning, when the dead man lay upon the grass in his dripping garments, a bruise on his forehead where he must have struck a stone in his fall, and a look of horror in his wide-open eyes as he lay with his face upturned to the sky.

“Oh, John, who could have done this?” Mrs. Dalton moaned, as she knelt beside him, her arms across his chest and her long curls falling over his swollen features.

Unnoticed by any one, the little boy, Robbie, had crept down the doorsteps and came toddling across the yard to the group by the well.

“Papa, mam-ma,” he said, laying one hand on his mother’s head and the other on his father’s wet hair. “Papa, wake up. I’s ’f’aid,” he said, shaking the drops of water from his fingers and beginning to cry.

“’Twas awful,” Uncle Zach said, resuming the story and dwelling at length upon the picture of the little boy stooping over his dead father and trying to wake him up. “Yes, ’twas awful, and, though I’ll bet I’ve told the story over a hundred times, if I have once, I can never get over that part without somethin’ stickin’ in my throat and thinkin’ what if it had been Johnny and me, with Dot makin’ b’lieve. Oh—h,” and he groaned aloud;—then continued: “‘Oh, please somebody find the murderers,’ Miss Dalton said; and Joel answered: ‘You bet we will. We know ’em,’ and he winked at the bartender.

“They’d got the coroner there and half the town come with him, for the news flew like lightnin’, and the yard was full, and the fence was full,—the folks fightin’ to git sight of the tracks in the mud, and the well and the mark of a hand on the curb and the piece of his coat on a nail, and when they couldn’t do that they went and looked at the wheel tracks where the buggy turned in the lane, and then went back and fit agin to see the well. The women was mostly in the house where Miss Dalton sat wringin’ her hands soft as wool and covered with rings, her white gown bedraggled with mud and her hair flyin’ over her face, makin’ her look like a crazy critter. I tell you she stimulated grief so well that she could almost have deceived the very elect, and folks at fust didn’t know what to think. That Mr. Dalton had been killed was sure, and the verdict was wilful murder by somebody, and in less than ten minutes a posse of men with Joel and the constable started full run for Worcester. At a livery stable there they heard that a hoss driv’ nearly to death had come in towards mornin’. Who brought him the stable man didn’t know. It wa’n’t the one who hired him the afternoon before, but he paid the bill,—a big one, too,—the hoss was so used up, and he wore a stovepipe hat. That was Mr. Dalton’s, and the man was the vally’s brother. I b’lieve I could have planned better than they did, for they left their tracks so plain behind ’em that before sundown they was all three under arrest and an officer on the way to Ridgefield to keep an eye on Miss Dalton and Mari. They found Mr. Dalton’s gold watch in the vally’s pocket and his wallet and twenty-five dollars in the pocket of the vally’s brother. St. John was at a hotel with a cigar in his mouth, readin’ a paper as cool as you please and mighty indignant at being suspected of murder. He pretended to be awfully shocked at the news. Dalton was his best friend, he said, and he’d no more harm him than he would himself. He knew nothing about the movements of the vally or his brother. He was at the hotel all night and could prove it. This was true, but the vally’s brother gin him away by sayin’ to him low, but so as to be heard, ‘We sink or swim together; that was the bargain, and I’ve papers to prove it.’ They found ’em on him, too, and the three was clapped into jail, and Joel and his men and the officer got back some time in the night to Ridgefield, which next mornin’ was all up in arms wus than the day before.