“What’s the matter now?” he demanded. “Has the cow jumped over the moon?”
“O grandfather!” she gasped, “I’ve found Aunt Mercy. I’m afraid she’s dead.”
“Hey!” exclaimed the Squire, starting up eagerly as he remembered that Aunt Mercy was his own child. “You don’t say so! Where is she?”
Bessie turned and reeled out of the house; the old man thumped after her on his cane. At the bottom of the garden was a small, neglected arbor, thickly overgrown with grape-vines in unpruned leaf, whither Aunt Mercy was accustomed to repair in her seasons of unusual perplexity or gloom, there to seek guidance or relief in meditation and prayer. In this arbor they found her, seated crouchingly on a bench near the doorway, her arms stretched over a little table in front of her, and her head lying between them with the face turned from the gazers. The moon glared in a ghastly way upon her ominously white hands, and disclosed a dark yet gleaming stain, seemingly a drying pool, which spread out from beneath her forehead.
“Good Lord!” groaned Squire Lauson. “Mercy! I say, Mercy!”
He seized her hand, but he had scarcely touched it ere he dropped it, for it was the icy, repulsive, alarming hand of a corpse. We must compress our description of this scene of horrible discovery. Miss Mercy Lauson was dead, the victim of a brutal assassination, her right temple opened by a gash two inches deep, her blood already clotted in pools or dried upon her face and fingers. It must have been an hour, or perhaps two hours, since the blow had been dealt. At her feet was the fatal weapon,—an old hatchet which had long lain about the garden, and which offered no suggestion as to who was the murderer.
When it first became clear to Squire Lauson that his daughter was dead, and had been murdered, he uttered a sound between a gasp and a sob; but almost immediately afterward he spoke in his habitually vigorous and rasping voice, and his words showed that he had not lost his iron self-possession.
“Bessie, run into the house,” he said. “Call the hired men, and bring a lantern with you.”
When she returned he took the lantern, threw the gleam of it over his dead daughter’s face, groaned, shook his head, and then, leaning on his cane, commenced examining the earth, evidently in search of footmarks.
“There’s your print, Bessie,” he mumbled. “And there’s my print. But whose print’s that? That’s the man. That’s a long slim foot, with nails across the ball. That’s the man. Don’t disturb those tracks. I’ll set the lantern down there. Don’t you disturb ’em.”