3
The theory of the defence
That is what occurred during a night in a forest, but not all of it did Irene Marlowe relate to Jenner Brading; not all of it was known to her. When she had concluded the sun was below the horizon and the long summer twilight had begun to deepen in the hollows of the land. For some moments Brading was silent, expecting the narrative to be carried forward to some definite connection with the conversation introducing it; but the narrator was as silent as he, her face averted, her hands clasping and unclasping themselves as they lay in her lap, with a singular suggestion of an activity independent of her will.
‘It is a sad, a terrible story,’ said Brading at last, ‘but I do not understand. You call Charles Marlowe father; that I know. That he is old before his time, broken by some great sorrow, I have seen, or thought I saw. But, pardon me, you said that you – that you – ’
‘That I am insane,’ said the girl, without a movement of head or body.
‘But, Irene, you say – please, dear, do not look away from me – you say that the child was dead, not demented.’
‘Yes, that one – I am the second. I was born three months after that night, my mother being mercifully permitted to lay down her life in giving me mine.’
Brading was again silent; he was a trifle dazed and could not at once think of the right thing to say. Her face was still turned away. In his embarrassment he reached impulsively toward the hands that lay closing and unclosing in her lap, but something – he could not have said what – restrained him. He then remembered, vaguely, that he had never altogether cared to take her hand.
‘Is it likely,’ she resumed, ‘that a person born under such circumstances is like others – is what you call sane?’
Brading did not reply; he was preoccupied with a new thought that was taking shape in his mind – what a scientist would have called an hypothesis; a detective, a theory. It might throw an added light, albeit a lurid one, upon such doubt of her sanity as her own assertion had not dispelled.
The country was still new and, outside the villages, sparsely populated. The professional hunter was still a familiar figure, and among his trophies were heads and pelts of the larger kinds of game. Tales variously credible of nocturnal meetings with savage animals in lonely roads were sometimes current, passed through the customary stages of growth and decay, and were forgotten. A recent addition to these popular apocrypha, originating, apparently, by spontaneous generation in several households, was of a panther which had frightened some of their members by looking in at windows by night. The yarn had caused its little ripple of excitement – had even attained to the distinction of a place in the local newspaper; but Brading had given it no attention. Its likeness to the story to which he had just listened now impressed him as perhaps more than accidental. Was it not possible that the one story had suggested the other – that finding congenial conditions in a morbid mind and a fertile fancy, it had grown to the tragic tale that he had heard?
Brading recalled certain circumstances of the girl’s history and disposition, of which, with love’s incuriosity, he had hitherto been heedless – such as her solitary life with her father, at whose house no-one, apparently, was an acceptable visitor, and her strange fear of the night, by which those who knew her best accounted for her never being seen after dark. Surely in such a mind imagination once kindled might burn with a lawless flame, penetrating and enveloping the entire structure. That she was mad, though the conviction gave him the acutest pain, he could no longer doubt; she had only mistaken an effect of her mental disorder for its cause, bringing into imaginary relation with her own personality the vagaries of the local myth-makers. With some vague intention of testing his new ‘theory’, and no very definite notion of how to set about it he said, gravely, but with hesitation: ‘Irene, dear, tell me – I beg you will not take offence, but tell me – ’
‘I have told you,’ she interrupted, speaking with a passionate earnestness that he had not known her to show – ‘I have already told you that we cannot marry; is anything else worth saying?’
Before he could stop her she had sprung from her seat and without another word or look was gliding away among the trees toward her father’s house. Brading had risen to detain her; he stood watching her in silence until she had vanished in the gloom. Suddenly he started as if he had been shot; his face took on an expression of amazement and alarm: in one of the black shadows into which she had disappeared he had caught a quick, brief glimpse of shining eyes! For an instant he was dazed and irresolute; then he dashed into the wood after her, shouting: ‘Irene, Irene, look out! The panther! The panther!’
In a moment he had passed through the fringe of forest into open ground and saw the girl’s grey skirt vanishing into her father’s door. No panther was visible.
4
An Appeal to the Conscience of God
Jenner Brading, attorney-at-law, lived in a cottage at the edge of the town. Directly behind the dwelling was the forest. Being a bachelor, and therefore, by the Draconian moral code of the time and place denied the services of the only species of domestic servant known thereabout, the ‘hired girl’, he boarded at the village hotel, where also was his office. The woodside cottage was merely a lodging maintained – at no great cost, to be sure – as an evidence of prosperity and respectability. It would hardly do for one to whom the local newspaper had pointed with pride as ‘the foremost jurist of his time’ to be ‘homeless’, albeit he may sometimes have suspected that the words ‘home’ and ‘house’ were not strictly synonymous. Indeed, his consciousness of the disparity and his will to harmonise it were matters of logical inference, for it was generally reported that soon after the cottage was built its owner had made a futile venture in the direction of marriage – had, in truth, gone so far as to be rejected by the beautiful but eccentric daughter of Old Man Marlowe, the recluse. This was publicly believed because he had told it himself and she had not – a reversal of the usual order of things which could hardly fail to carry conviction.
Brading’s bedroom was at the rear of the house, with a single window facing the forest.
One night he was awakened by a noise at that window; he could hardly have said what it was like. With a little thrill of the nerves he sat up in bed and laid hold of the revolver which, with a forethought most commendable in one addicted to the habit of sleeping on the ground floor with an open window, he had put under his pillow. The room was in absolute darkness, but being unterrified he knew where to direct his eyes, and there he held them, awaiting in silence what further might occur. He could now dimly discern the aperture – a square of lighter black. Presently there appeared at its lower edge two gleaming eyes that burned with a malignant lustre inexpressibly terrible! Brading’s heart gave a great jump, then seemed to stand still. A chill passed along his spine and through his hair; he felt the blood forsake his cheeks. He could not have cried out – not to save his life; but being a man of courage he would not, to save his life, have done so if he had been able. Some trepidation his coward body might feel, but his spirit was of sterner stuff. Slowly the shining eyes rose with a steady motion that seemed an approach, and slowly rose Brading’s right hand, holding the pistol. He fired!
Blinded by the flash and stunned by the report, Brading nevertheless heard, or fancied that he heard, the wild, high scream of the panther, so human in sound, so devilish in suggestion. Leaping from the bed he hastily clothed himself and, pistol in hand, sprang from the door, meeting two or three men who came running up from the road. A brief explanation was followed by a cautious search of the house. The grass was wet with dew; beneath the window it had been trodden and partly levelled for a wide space, from which a devious trail, visible in the light of a lantern, led away into the bushes. One of the men stumbled and fell upon his hands, which as he rose and rubbed them together were slippery. On examination they were seen to be red with blood.
An encounter, unarmed, with a wounded panther was not agreeable to their taste; all but
Brading turned back. He, with lantern and pistol, pushed courageously forward into the wood. Passing through a difficult undergrowth he came into a small opening, and there his courage had its reward, for there he found the body of his victim. But it was no panther. What it was is told, even to this day, upon a weather-worn headstone in the village churchyard, and for many years was attested daily at the graveside by the bent figure and sorrow-seamed face of Old Man Marlowe, to whose soul, and to the soul of his strange, unhappy child, peace. Peace and reparation.
The Stranger
A man stepped out of the darkness into the little illuminated circle about our failing campfire and seated himself upon a rock.
‘You are not the first to explore this region,’ he said, gravely.
Nobody controverted his statement; he was himself proof of its truth, for he was not of our party and must have been somewhere near when we camped. Moreover, he must have companions not far away; it was not a place where one would be living or travelling alone. For more than a week we had seen, besides ourselves and our animals, only such living things as rattlesnakes and horned toads. In an Arizona desert one does not long coexist with only such creatures as these: one must have pack animals, supplies, arms – ‘an outfit’. And all these imply comrades. It was perhaps a doubt as to what manner of men this unceremonious stranger’s comrades might be, together with something in his words interpretable as a challenge, that caused every man of our half-dozen ‘gentlemen adventurers’ to rise to a sitting posture and lay his hand upon a weapon – an act signifying, in that time and place, a policy of expectation. The stranger gave the matter no attention and began again to speak in the same deliberate, uninflected monotone in which he had delivered his first sentence: ‘Thirty years ago Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw, George W. Kent and Berry Davis, all of Tucson, crossed the Santa Catalina mountains and travelled due west, as nearly as the configuration of the country permitted. We were prospecting and it was our intention, if we found nothing, to push through to the Gila river at some point near Big Bend, where we understood there was a settlement. We had a good outfit but no guide – just Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw, George W. Kent and Berry Davis.’
The man repeated the names slowly and distinctly, as if to fix them in the memories of his audience, every member of which was now attentively observing him, but with a slackened apprehension regarding his possible companions somewhere in the darkness that seemed to enclose us like a black wall; in the manner of this volunteer historian was no suggestion of an unfriendly purpose. His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily distinguishable from mental aberration. A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and torsions that environ him. Some such thoughts were in my mind as I watched the man from the shadow of my hat, pulled low to shut out the firelight. A witless fellow, no doubt, but what could he be doing there in the heart of a desert?
Having undertaken to tell this story, I wish that I could describe the man’s appearance; that would be a natural thing to do. Unfortunately, and somewhat strangely, I find myself unable to do so with any degree of confidence, for afterward no two of us agreed as to what he wore and how he looked; and when I try to set down my own impressions they elude me. Anyone can tell some kind of story; narration is one of the elemental powers of the race. But the talent for description is a gift.
Nobody having broken silence the visitor went on to say: ‘This country was not then what it is now. There was not a ranch between the Gila and the Gulf. There was a little game here and there in the mountains, and near the infrequent waterholes grass enough to keep our animals from starvation. If we should be so fortunate as to encounter no Indians we might get through. But within a week the purpose of the expedition had altered from discovery of wealth to preservation of life. We had gone too far to go back, for what was ahead could be no worse than what was behind; so we pushed on, riding by night to avoid Indians and the intolerable heat, and concealing ourselves by day as best we could. Sometimes, having exhausted our supply of wild meat and emptied our casks, we were days without food or drink; then a water-hole or a shallow pool in the bottom of an arroyo so restored our strength and sanity that we were able to shoot some of the wild animals that sought it also. Sometimes it was a bear, sometimes an antelope, a coyote, a cougar – that was as God pleased; all were food.
‘One morning as we skirted a mountain range, seeking a practicable pass, we were attacked by a band of Apaches who had followed our trail up a gulch – it is not far from here. Knowing that they outnumbered us ten to one, they took none of their usual cowardly precautions, but dashed upon us at a gallop, firing and yelling. Fighting was out of the question: we urged our feeble animals up the gulch as far as there was footing for a hoof, then threw ourselves out of our saddles and took to the chaparral on one of the slopes, abandoning our entire outfit to the enemy. But we retained our rifles, every man – Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw, George W. Kent and Berry Davis.’
‘Same old crowd,’ said the humorist of our party. He was an Eastern man, unfamiliar with the decent observances of social intercourse. A gesture of disapproval from our leader silenced him and the stranger proceeded with his tale.
‘The savages dismounted also, and some of them ran up the gulch beyond the point at which we had left it, cutting off further retreat in that direction and forcing us on up the side. Unfortunately the chaparral extended only a short distance up the slope, and as we came into the open ground above we took the fire of a dozen rifles; but Apaches shoot badly when in a hurry, and God so willed it that none of us fell. Twenty yards up the slope, beyond the edge of the brush, were vertical cliffs, in which, directly in front of us, was a narrow opening. Into that we ran, finding ourselves in a cavern about as large as an ordinary room in a house. Here for a time we were safe: a single man with a repeating rifle could defend the entrance against all the Apaches in the land. But against hunger and thirst we had no defence. Courage we still had, but hope was a memory.
‘Not one of those Indians did we afterward see, but by the smoke and glare of their fires in the gulch we knew that by day and by night they watched with ready rifles in the edge of the bush – knew that if we made a sortie not a man of us would live to take three steps into the open. For three days, watching in turn, we held out before our suffering became insupportable. Then – it was the morning of the fourth day – Ramon Gallegos said: ‘ “Señores, I know not well of the good God and what please him. I have live without religion, and I am not acquaint with that of you. Pardon, señores, if I shock you, but for me the time is come to beat the game of the Apache.”
‘He knelt upon the rock floor of the cave and pressed his pistol against his temple. “Madre de Dios,” he said, “comes now the soul of Ramon Gallegos.”
‘And so he left us – William Shaw, George W. Kent and Berry Davis.
‘I was the leader: it was for me to speak.
‘ “He was a brave man,” I said – “he knew when to die, and how. It is foolish to go mad from thirst and fall by Apache bullets, or be skinned alive – it is in bad taste. Let us join Ramon Gallegos.”
‘ “That is right,” said William Shaw.
‘ “That is right,” said George W. Kent.
‘I straightened the limbs of Ramon Gallegos and put a handkerchief over his face. Then William Shaw said: “I should like to look like that – a little while.”
‘And George W. Kent said that he felt that way, too.
‘ “It shall be so,” I said: “the red devils will wait a week. William Shaw and George W. Kent, draw and kneel.”
‘They did so and I stood before them.
‘ “Almighty God, our Father,” said I.
‘ “Almighty God, our Father,” said Willia
m Shaw.
‘ “Almighty God, our Father,” said George W. Kent.
‘ “Forgive us our sins,” said I.
‘ “Forgive us our sins,” said they.
‘ “And receive our souls.”
‘ “And receive our souls.”
‘ “Amen!”
‘ “Amen!”
‘I laid them beside Ramon Gallegos and covered their faces.’
There was a quick commotion on the opposite side of the campfire: one of our party had sprung to his feet, pistol in hand.
‘And you!’ he shouted – ‘You dared to escape? – You dare to be alive? You cowardly hound, I’ll send you to join them if I hang for it!’
But with the leap of a panther the captain was upon him, grasping his wrist. ‘Hold it in, Sam Yountsey, hold it in!’
We were now all upon our feet – except the stranger, who sat motionless and apparently inattentive. Someone seized Yountsey’s other arm.
‘Captain,’ I said, ‘there is something wrong here. This fellow is either a lunatic or merely a liar – just a plain, everyday liar whom Yountsey has no call to kill. If this man was of that party it had five members, one of whom – probably himself – he has not named.’
‘Yes,’ said the captain, releasing the insurgent, who sat down, ‘there is something – unusual. Years ago four dead bodies of white men, scalped and shamefully mutilated, were found about the mouth of that cave. They are buried there; I have seen the graves – we shall all see them tomorrow.’
The stranger rose, standing tall in the light of the expiring fire, which in our breathless attention to his story we had neglected to keep going.
‘There were four,’ he said – ‘Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw, George W. Kent and Berry Davis.’
With this reiterated roll-call of the dead he walked into the darkness and we saw him no more.
At that moment one of our party, who had been on guard, strode in among us, rifle in hand and somewhat excited.
Terror by Night Page 6