There were several of these strange tracks; the clayey soil of the walk, slightly tempered with sand, had preserved them with fatal distinctness; it showed them advancing to the arbor and halting close by the murdered woman. As Bessie stared at them, it seemed to her that they were fearfully familiar, though where she had seen them before she could not say.
“Keep away from those tracks,” repeated Squire Lauson as the two laborers who lived with him came down the garden. “Now, then, what are you staring at? She’s dead. Take her up—O, for God’s sake, be gentle about it!—take her up, I tell you. There! Now, carry her along.”
As the men moved on with the body he turned to Bessie and said: “Leave the lantern just there. And don’t you touch those tracks. Go on into the house.”
With his own hands he aided to lay out his daughter on a table, and drew her cap from her temples so as to expose the bloody gash to view. There was a little natural agony in the tremulousness of his stubbly and grizzly chin; but in the glitter of his gray eyes there was an expression which was not so much sorrow as revenge.
“That’s a pretty job,” he said at last, glaring at the mangled gray head. “I should like to l’arn who did it.”
It was not known till the day following how he passed the next half-hour. It seems that, some little time previous, this man of over ninety years had conceived the idea of repairing with his own hands the cracked wall of his parlor, and had for that purpose bought a quantity of plaster of Paris and commenced a series of patient experiments in mixing and applying it. Furnished with a basin of his prepared material, he stalked out to the arbor and busied himself with taking a mould of the strange footstep to which he had called Bessie’s attention, succeeding in his labor so well as to be able to show next day an exact counterpart of the sole which had made the track.
Shortly after he had left the house, and glancing cautiously about as if to make sure that he had indeed left it, his wife entered the room where lay the dead body. She came slowly up to the table, and looked at the ghastly face for some moments in silence, with precisely that staid, slightly shuddering air which one often sees at funerals, and without any sign of the excitement which one naturally expects in the witnesses of a mortal tragedy. In any ordinary person, in any one who was not, like her, denaturalized by the egotism of shattered nerves, such mere wonder and repugnance would have appeared incomprehensively brutal. But Mrs. Lauson had a character of her own; she could be different from others without exciting prolonged or specially severe comment; people said to themselves, “Just like her,” and made no further criticism, and almost certainly no remonstrance. Bessie herself, the moment she had exclaimed, “O grandmother! what shall we do?” felt how absurd it was to address such an appeal to such a person.
Mrs. Lauson replied by a glance which expressed weakness, alarm, and aversion, and which demanded, as plainly as words could say it, “How can you ask me?” Then without uttering a syllable, without attempting to render any service or funereal courtesy, bearing herself like one who had been mysteriously absolved from the duties of sympathy and decorum, she turned her back on the body of her step-daughter with a start of disgust, and walked hastily from the room.
Of course there was a gathering of the neighbors, a hasty and useless search after the murderer, a medical examination of the victim, and a legal inquest at the earliest practicable moment, the verdict being “death by the hand of some person unknown.” Even the funeral passed, with its mighty crowd and its solemn excitement; and still public suspicion had not dared to single out any one as the criminal. It seemed for a day or two as if the family life might shortly settle into its old tenor, the same narrow routine of quiet discontent or irrational bickerings, with no change but the loss of such inflammation as formerly arose from Aunt Mercy’s well-meant, but irritating sense of duty. The Squire, however, was permanently and greatly changed: not that he had lost the spirit of petty dictation which led him to interfere in every household act, even to the boiling of the pot, but he had acquired a new object in life, and one which seemed to restore all his youthful energy; he was more restlessly and distressingly vital than he had been for years. No Indian was ever more intent on avenging a debt of blood than was he on hunting down the murderer of his daughter. This terrible old man has a strong attraction for us: we feel that we have not thus far done him justice: he imperiously demands further description.
Squire Lauson was at this time ninety-three years of age. The fact appeared incredible, because he had preserved, almost unimpaired, not only his moral energy and intellectual faculties, but also his physical senses, and even to an extraordinary degree his muscular strength. His long and carelessly worn hair was not white, but merely gray; and his only baldness was a shining hand’s-breadth, prolonging the height of his forehead. His face was deeply wrinkled, but more apparently with thought and passion than from decay, for the flesh was still well under control of the muscles, and the expression was so vigorous that one was tempted to call it robust. There was nothing of that insipid and almost babyish tranquillity which is commonly observable in the countenances of the extremely aged. The cheekbones were heavy, though the healthy fulness of the cheeks prevented them from being pointed; the jaws, not yet attenuated by the loss of many teeth, were unusually prominent and muscular; the heavy Roman nose still stood high above the projecting chin. In general, it was a long, large face, grimly and ruggedly massive, of a uniform grayish color, and reminding you of a visage carved in granite.