Rayton: A Backwoods Mystery

by Theodore Goodridge Roberts

At this, Harley halted in his talk, and his walk, at one and the same moment, and began to cut tobacco for his pipe.

"Go ahead!" exclaimed young Marsh.

"Well, all that row was kept quiet," continued Harley. "My father sailed away—and then came a report that pieces of the wreck of his ship had gone ashore on the Bahamas. Then people who knew about the marked card began to talk. It looked as if what the Spanish count had said, in the old days—or what people supposed he had said—had some truth in it. His girl—she who was afterward my mother—nearly went crazy. Then, one fine day, my father turned up, sound as a bell—the only survivor of the wreck of his ship. He got his share of the underwriter's money, and invested it in a one-third interest in another and smaller vessel. He had no trouble in getting the job of skipper of her; but he had plenty of trouble with his sweetheart and her parents, for they were all sure that the red crosses were really the marks of the devil and had caused the loss of his ship. My father laughed at them; and well he might, since his ship had gone down in a hurricane that had wrecked half a dozen other vessels, and he was the only man to be saved from all his crew. 'If the devil had anything to do with it,' he said, 'he certainly made a mess of it.' But it took him a whole week to calm them down and get the girl's promise to marry him on his return from his next voyage.

"On the very night before he was to sail, when he was on his way to the ship from saying good-by to my mother and the old people, a man sprang out from behind a pile of lumber on one of the wharves, and struck at him; but my father jumped back in time and struck in return with a loaded stick which he carried. The man let a yelp of pain out of him, and ran up the wharf to the dark streets of the city. My father struck a light and presently found something that he had heard drop on the planks when the fellow yelped—a long knife with a point sharp as a needle.

"He went aboard his ship, wrote a letter, packed up the knife in a box, and first thing in the morning sent both letter and knife ashore to a magistrate. Then he sailed away. He returned after three months, with a cargo of sugar and molasses—and his left arm in a sling. He had been stabbed, one night, in Bridgetown, Barbados. That was a thing that did not often happen in Barbados.

"Immediately upon his return, he made quiet inquiries for young Mr. Jackson. But Jackson had gone away, months before. There had been some talk about the police going to look for Jackson too, just about the time my father had sailed away. My father never gave the red crosses two thoughts; but he often remembered the look in Jackson's face that night they had fought in the street after the game of cards.

"Well, they married, and my father gave up the sea, moved to the mouth of the Miramichi, and started shipbuilding. That was on my mother's account. He did a good business, and they were happy. I was their first child. Five years later, Nell came. About six months after that an envelope was left at the house for him by a poor old half-witted character in the town, who had once been a sailor. When my father came home from the office he opened the envelope—and out fell a blue-backed playing card onto the carpet. My mother went into a dead faint, without waiting to see the face of it. When my father turned it over, there were the two red crosses!"

"Did they catch Jackson?" asked David Marsh.

"No," returned Harley. "My father ran out of the house, maybe to find the poor half-wit who had brought it to him, and he was shot dead within ten yards of his own door."

"By Jackson?" cried David, in a husky voice.