"I, HOWARD STENNIS, being of sound mind, and desiring that after my death nothing should be left uncertain, have decided to put on record all that has occurred. This I do, not in the least to exculpate myself, because what I have done, I have done calmly and with intention aforethought.
"This paper is for the sole use of the heir whom I shall choose.
"If it be his will not to accept a fortune accumulated under these conditions or in the way I made mine, I have joined to this a paper with the names of those to whose heirs reparation can be made. But it is my present intention to seek rather some strong man, at war with other men—a hater of his kind, as I have good reason to be—who will continue my work after I am gone. So that in time, if the life of our instrument, Jeremy Orrin, be spared, one of the greatest fortunes of the age may be built up.
"From my youth I was called Miser Hobby. And that most unjustly. Because I wrought day and night that I might leave my one daughter Bell in a position of a lady. But she chose to throw my lifetime's work in my face. She left me without a word for a penniless boy in a uniform. My heart had been black and bitter before, but there had always been a bright spot upon it. That was Bell. Afterward it became black altogether, for I cast Bell out of my heart and sight like an untimely birth. I worked harder, yet for all that I wearied of the work. To be rich suddenly, to have all in my power, and to deny to Bell and her tramping rascal of a redcoat a sup of broth, a bite of bread—that alone I counted sweet. It would come to me some day, I knew.
"I looked about for a weapon—for the hand to strike. This I found in Jeremy Orrin. It was at the Tryst of Longtown, whither I had gone to deliver a web. There I saw a limber youth, very dark, turning somersaults on a scrap of carpet. He spread out his hands and walked on them. There was hair on the palms. The thumb was as long as the fingers, and he raised himself upon them as on steel springs. I saw him take a byre 'grape'—or fork of three thick prongs—and bend the three into one by the mere strength of one hand.
"Then that set me thinking of other things that these fingers might be taught to do. So, in a little inn, I made the tumbler's acquaintance, and I could see that at first he eyed me curiously. I could read such looks. I knew the wickedness that was in his heart. He meant to murder me on my way home!
"But first I gave him to drink as much as he would. Suddenly I turned my pockets inside out and let him feel the linings of my coat—there in that lighted room, to prove that he would not be twopence halfpenny the richer by the transaction. Then, leaning forward as if jesting, I made a proposition. By himself, I said, such a man could do but little. He was but a tracked beast without a den. See what it had brought him to, tumbling on a carpet for a living, and hungry withal! I would give him safety, a position, the high road between two market towns, neither of them yet reached by the railway, running before our very door.
"Finally, on the doorstep of the Red Lion, holding unstably by either lintel, a warning to all sober men like myself, I pointed out Riddick of Langbarns, who, as I knew, had that day sold his two-year-old horses to the tune of eight hundred pounds!
"Jeremy Orrin and I left the lighted town behind us. I am well aware even then that I put my life in his hands—how terrible was my danger I did not know. For the young man's wayward madness was as yet hidden from me, as from all the world except his elder sister. At the Windy Slap, a narrow wind-swept gully, and a wild enough scene at the best of times, I came out suddenly, and speaking to Riddick, who was on horseback, asked him civilly if he would need any sheets or tablecloths that year. For that I was making out my winter's orders. He knew me at once, and bade me get out of his sight for an arrant self-seeking miser that would keep a shivering man from a good glass of toddy at his own fireside!
"Then I lowered my prices till he checked his horse beside a bank (for I had been walking by his side), and while he strove to calculate cost and rebate in his drink-dozened brain, Jeremy quietly leaped up from behind, and clasped about his neck the broad-palmed, long-fingered, hairy hands that had crushed the byre trident. Riddick of Langbarns never spake word. We buried him decently in the kirkyard—in a grave that had that day been filled, laying him on the coffin of a better man than himself—even that of Ephraim Rae, elder in the Hardgate Cameronian Kirk. Face down we laid him—his nose to the name plate—and so filled in and replaced the sods. It was very secure—an idea of my own. No disturbance of the earth, or none that mattered. For who would ever seek for a lost man in the grave, where, that same day, another had been laid with all due funeral observances? It would be sacrilege. Afterwards, when we used this method, I always tried to be present at both interments. In fact, I got a name for my reverence and exactitude at burials. Also it gave me some useful thoughts upon the transitory nature of all things. Besides, I liked to watch the mourners' daylit faces and then think of Jeremy's twelve hours later, seen perhaps by the light of a late-rising, cloudy, out-worn moon!