The day after he had gone away—which chanced to be Saturday—at a late hour of the evening, I received a letter from him. He had written it that morning, and sent it to me by a shopkeeper who chanced to be returning to Jacksonville. So badly was the letter written, that I was occupied all the rest of the evening deciphering it; but after spending much time, patience, and ingenuity upon the epistle, I arrived at a tolerable understanding of the intelligence it was intended to convey.
Stormy commenced by stating, that I must excuse all faults: for it was the first letter he had written for a period of more than thirty years. In fact, all correspondence of an epistolary kind on Stormy’s part had been discontinued on the death of Ann!
I was then informed, in the old sailor’s characteristic fashion, that a murder had just been committed on the Stani. A woman had been killed by her husband; and the husband had been summarily tried, and found guilty of the crime.
The next day, at noon, the miners were going to teach the murderer “manners,” by hanging him to a tree. I was advised to come over, and be a spectator of the lesson—for the reason that Stormy believed we had both seen the guilty man before. Stormy was not sure about this. The murderer bore a name, that he had never heard me make use of; but a name was nothing. “I’ve a bit of a fancy in my head,” wrote Stormy, “that I have seen the man many years ago; and that you will know who he is—though I can’t be sartain. So come and see for yourself. I’ll expect you to be at my tent, by eleven o’clock in the mornin’.”
Who could the murderer be, that I should know him? Could Stormy be mistaken? Had he been drinking; and this time become affected in the brain, instead of the legs?
I could hardly think it was drink. He would not have taken the trouble to write, his first epistle in thirty years, without some weighty reason.
I went to see the store-keeper who had brought the letter. From him I learnt that a murder had been committed by a man from Sydney, and that the murderer was to be hung on the following day.
As I continued to reflect on the information I thus received, a horrid thought came into my mind. Could the murderer be Mr Leary? Could his victim have been my mother?
There was a time when this thought would have produced on me a different effect from what it did then, a time when, dark as might have been the night, such a suspicion would have caused me to spring to my feet and instantaneously take the road to Sonora.
It did not then. I now felt less interest in the mystery I had so long been endeavouring to solve. Time, with the experience it brought, had rendered me less impulsive, if not less firm in purpose. I could not, however, sleep upon the suspicion; and after passing a wretched night, I was up before the sun.