The man who had fired the shot turned and fled headlong, he knew not, cared not, whither.
Suddenly he tripped over something and shot forward. He thrust out his hands to break his fall. They touched nothing. His whole body seemed to hang suspended in air for an instant. Then his hands and arms shot into water. His face was dashed against the smooth cold surface, and a boisterous tumult of water was in his ears, and his breathing ceased.
"The ice-house! No gates! Why do I not rise? If I do he will kill me. I cannot get out of this without help, and he is the only one near who could help, and he would kill me, would with pleasure see me drown a thousand times. When I rise I shall shout, come what may. I wonder is he dead? Why do I not rise? Yes, now I know why I do not rise. The gold, the two hundred pounds in gold; and my clothes are already soaked through. I shall never rise. I need struggle no more. I am going, going red-handed before the face of God."
That night William Crawford slept under ten feet of water, on the bed of ooze and slime, at the bottom of the flooded ice-house on Crawford's Bay.
The wounded woman never spoke again, never recovered consciousness. She passed peacefully away in the fresh clear light of early day.
It was not until the evening after the fatal night that, at the suggestion of Bayliss, the water of the flooded ice-house was dragged, and the body of William Crawford discovered. In the case of Kate Bramwell, a verdict of wilful murder was brought in by the coroner's jury against William Crawford. In his own case the jury said that he was found drowned in the flooded ice-house, but how he happened, to get into the water there was no evidence to show.
Mrs. Farraday, who came at once to Richmond on receiving Crawford's letter, was careful to let no newspaper containing any account of the Welford tragedy near Mrs. Crawford. The patient and gentle invalid was gradually sinking. She never complained to any one of his desertion. She never told a soul of the money she had given him. Whatever she thought of his letter to her she kept to herself. Her evidence, no doubt, would have been required at the inquest if her health had been ordinary. But Dr. Loftus certified that the mere mention of his death would in all likelihood prove fatal to her.
About a month after his death she said one evening to Mrs. Farraday:
"I should like to get one letter from my husband, announcing his safe arrival, before I go on my long journey. But it is not to be. I shall not be here when the letter comes. Let no one open it. Let it be burnt unopened. The letters between a husband and wife ought to be sacred."
She was afraid something in it might militate against the good opinion in which those who had met Crawford in Richmond had held him.