A Dead Reckoning

by T. W. Speight

Never had the little town of Cummerhays been stirred to its depths as it was on a certain April morning, when it awoke to find that it had rendered itself famous after a fashion which would cause its existence to become known wherever an English newspaper penetrated. Its name would be in everybody's mouth for weeks to come. It felt that it could never again sink into utter obscurity.

For the prisoners--about whose alleged attempt to rob the train all sorts of wild rumours were afloat--had after their capture been put into the train and brought on to Cummerhays, and were for the present lodged in the town jail. The magistrates would assemble at ten o'clock, when the preliminary inquiry would take place. But even a deeper interest, if that were possible, centred itself in the arrest of the alleged murderer of the Baron von Rosenberg, who was said to have actually been working as a signalman on the line for the past three or four months. It was dreadful to think that the lives of several hundreds of respectable people should have been at the mercy of such a miscreant!

The town-hall was besieged by an excited crowd long before the opening of the doors, and had the justice-room been three times larger than it was, it might easily have been filled three times over. Among the foremost ranks of the surging crowd, and maintaining his position with passive tenacity, was a man on whom many curious eyes were bent. He was a foreigner--so much was evident at a glance--and that of itself was enough to excite the curiosity of the good folk of Cummerhays, many of whom had never been a score miles from home. He was very lean and very sallow, with drawn-in cheeks and sharply defined cheek-bones. He had deep-set eyes, black and burning, with something in them of the expression of a half-famished wild animal. He wore small gold circlets in his ears, and was dressed in a coat of frayed velveteen, with a soft felt hat; and a coloured silk handkerchief knotted loosely round his throat. He spoke to no one, and no one spoke to him; but now and then his lips worked strangely, as though he were holding a silent colloquy with some invisible companion. He was the one man in the crowd who was the least incommoded by the crowd. Those nearest to him shrank a little from him, involuntarily as it were. He was a being of a different world from theirs, and they knew not what to make of him.

Jules Picot--for he it was--had arrived in Cummerhays at a late hour the preceding night, having walked there from another town about a dozen miles away. By what strange chance his wandering footsteps had brought him by many devious paths to this place of all others, and at this particular time, will be told a little later on. He had hired a bed for the night at the Wheatsheaf Inn, a cheap and unpretentious hostelry. He was up and had ordered his breakfast by eight o'clock next morning, and it was while waiting for that meal to be brought him that his attention was attracted by some conversation in the taproom which he could not help overhearing. The pallor of his face grew deeper as he listened; but whatever other emotion the change might arise from, it certainly had not its origin in fear.

"Soh! It is for this that I have been brought here," he muttered, half to himself and half aloud, in French. "Now I understand."

Going into the taproom, he put a few questions to the men to whose talk he had been listening. Having ascertained what he wanted to know, he left the house without waiting for his breakfast, and bent his steps in the direction of the town-hall. At a quarter to ten o'clock, when the doors were thrown open, Jules Picot was one of the first to push his way forward, or to be pushed forward by those behind him, into the small penned-up space allotted in the justice-room of Cummerhays to the general public. In three minutes the place was crannied to its utmost limits.

A few minutes after ten, the magistrates entered one by one and took their seats, their clerk having preceded them by a few seconds. They were three in number, all venerable gentlemen. One was partially blind; one partially deaf; while the third, who had a very red face and took the lead in everything, was quick-tempered and aggressive in his manner. There were two cases of drunkenness and one of theft to be disposed of before the great sensation of the day would begin.

Everybody seemed relieved when they were over; and presently a flutter of intense excitement ran through the court as three men, in charge of as many constables, filed in and were placed in the dock. Then, after a brief pause, a fourth man was ushered in whose left arm was supported by a sling, and a murmur ran round that this was the alleged murderer of the German Baron. A moment later another door opened, and there glided in a female in black, closely veiled, who sat down on a chair in the background which one of the officials handed her with a bow. The prisoner with his arm in a sling was also allowed to be seated a little way from the dock in which the other men had been placed.

When the mountebank beheld Gerald Brooke, whom he still knew only by the name of "Mr. Stewart," marched in as a prisoner, and when he saw, and his quick eyes recognised, the veiled figure in black who entered immediately afterwards, he was seized with a vertigo, which caused the room, the magistrates, and the prisoners to surge up and down before his eyes as though they were being tempest-tossed at sea. "Mon Dieu! est-il possible?" he exclaimed half aloud. Then he buried his face in his hands for a time, while a cloud seemed to lift itself slowly from his brain, and much became clear to him that had been dark before.

The charge against the first three prisoners was one of assault and attempted robbery; but against one of them there was a supplementary charge of attempted murder. That against the fourth prisoner was the much more serious charge of murder. But from what the magistrates could understand of the case at present, this fourth prisoner was so mixed up with the charge against the other three--he being the man who had been assaulted and bound and afterwards shot by one of them--that the poor gentlemen, who had never before had to investigate a case of such gravity, or one which presented so many peculiar features, were fairly at their wits' ends to know how to deal with it from a strictly legal point of view. Thus it fell out that the whole of the prisoners found themselves in court at the same time. It was now, however, suggested by the clerk that the prisoner on the capital charge should be put back while the examination of the others was being proceeded with. This suggestion was at once acted upon.