The Rest Hollow Mystery

by Rebecca N. Porter

When he left San Francisco, heavily hand-cuffed, a crowd followed to the depot. The trip down the coast was uneventful, and he sat staring out of the window, recalling his former ride through that same country when the pruners had waved their shears to him in a sort of voiceless Godspeed. There were no pruners visible from the car-window now, and the stark stretches of orchard looked bleak and desolate. The bare, tangled branches of the roadside poplars showed against the dull January sky like intricate designs of lacework. They seemed to Kenwick to have lost the comforting warmth of their leaves just when they needed them most.

It was almost dusk when the train drew into Mont-Mer, and here another crowd was waiting. The engine appeared to plow its way through them. Never had the quiet little city been so stirred. Never in all its decorous history had the white spot-light of sensationalism played upon it. It knew that its name was featured in every newspaper of the country.

And Kenwick found the Mont-Mer papers even more lavish in descriptive detail than those of the city had been. There was a picture of the murdered man and one of himself spread upon the front page of the evening sheet, and below, a cut of Rest Hollow, with the inevitable black cross marking the spot under the dining-room window where the body of Ralph Regan had been found. The morning daily matched this with a picture of the handsome Kenwick home in New York, and an account of the death, the previous spring, of Everett Kenwick and his wife, victims of influenza. As he read, Kenwick reflected that Richard Glover must have been very busy, very busy indeed since the night that they had encountered each other at the theater.

And outside the county jail the city buzzed with comment and speculation. Mont-Mer real estate men were elated over this unexpected scandal in high society which had resulted in putting their town "on the map." Better a gruesome publicity, they told each other, than no publicity at all. Tourists from Los Angeles and the near-by towns motored up during the week-end and made futile attempts to gain access to Rest Hollow. The old conservative residents of the aristocratic little city were horrified, and the colony of Eastern capitalists, who made up a large part of the suburban population, were hotly resentful of the hideous notoriety which had invaded their retreat by the sea. The two country estates that bordered Rest Hollow were put on the market at what the local realty dealers advertised as "spectacular bargains."

After the body of Ralph Regan had been exhumed and identified by the grief-stricken little woman who was his sister, the links of the chain which incriminated Kenwick seemed to fall of their own volition into place. He reviewed them himself, sitting alone in Mont-Mer's bleak little jail.

There would be first the testimony of the coroner who would describe the gunshot wound. And then the evidence that he, Kenwick, had been armed on that fatal night. The woman, or whoever it was that occupied the right wing of the house, would narrate in detail all that he had said about being a good shot and would doubtless follow this with the testimony that he was obviously looking for trouble. The revolver, which he had left on the table in the den, would add its mute confirmation of these assertions. And his own mode of departure from that house, under such circumstances, was sufficient in itself to send him to the electric chair without any further testimony. Glover would be, of course, the star witness for the State, and against his glib and convincing story would be pitted the word of a man known to have been of an unsound state of mind and never proved to have recovered from it. It was this last evidence, he knew, that would acquit him. With the brand of Cain upon his forehead he would be set free. The ghastly notoriety which he had striven, with the difficult patience of the impatient temperament, to avoid, had struck him with the force of a bomb and blown him skyward to be the cynosure of every eye. Never while the world stood could he ask Marcreta Morgan to take the name of Kenwick. Acquittal on any terms was all that most men would have asked of fate. But Kenwick was made of finer stuff. And so far as his future was concerned, he was already tried, convicted, and sentenced.

A week intervened between his arrival at Mont-Mer and the day set for the trial. During that time he knew himself to be under the most relentless surveillance. By day and by night his every act was watched. With his food they brought him neither knife nor fork. On the second day of this startling omission he smiled grimly at the attendant. "You can tell the jailer," he said, "that he needn't be worried about me to that extent. You see, I've worn my country's uniform, and that spoils a man for taking the Dutch route."

The stolid-faced attendant looked at him without replying. Kenwick felt a sudden pity for him. "I suppose he thinks I'm likely to get violent and begin smashing up things at any moment," he reflected. For in the jailer's eyes was that thing for which he had been on the watch for almost two months. He pushed away his food almost untasted. When he was left alone again he walked over to the heavily barred window and stood looking down at the court-house garden. Very gently he shook one of the iron rods. "For almost a year," he muttered. "Barred in for almost a year; and the world has no intention of ever letting me forget it."

The date-palms in the grounds below swept the wintry air with long graceful plumes. How helpless they were in the driving force of the wind! And yet they were moored to something, securely rooted. The storm might buffet but would not utterly destroy them. Down the curving path which they bordered he saw a man approaching with a flat leather case under his arm. It was Dayton, the young attorney whom the court had appointed for his defense. Kenwick, who had taken his intellectual measure at their first meeting the day before, had little faith in his legal ability. But he liked him; liked his buoyant, unspoiled personality. And Dayton was undisguisedly elated over this sudden opportunity to try his mettle in so conspicuous a case. It was the chance he had been hoping for during three years of commonplace practice.

As the prisoner heard his step in the upper corridor he turned from the window. Dayton closed the portal behind him and sat down on the edge of the narrow cot. Downstairs he had just held brief parley with the jailer. "Hasn't Kenwick got any family?" he had inquired.