 CHAPTER I It is close upon daybreak. The great wall of pines and hemlocks that keep off the west wind from Stillwater stretches black and indeterminate against the sky. At intervals a dull metallic sound, like the guttural twang of a violin string, rises from the frog-infested swamp, skirting the highway. Suddenly the birds stir in their nests over there in the woodland, and break into that wild jargoning chorus with which they herald the advent of a new day. In the apple orchards and among the plum trees of the few gardens in Stillwater, the wrens and the robins and the blue jays catch up the crystal crescendo and what a melodious racket they make of it with their fives and flutes and flagelets. The village lies in a trance like death, possibly not a soul hears this music, unless it is the watchers at the bedside of Mr. Leonard Tapleton, the richest man in town who has lain dying these three days and cannot last until sunrise, or perhaps some mother drowsily hushing her wakeful baby, pauses a moment, and listens vacantly to the birds singing. But who else? The hubbub suddenly ceases, ceases as suddenly as it began, and all is still again in the woodland. But it is not so dark as before. A faint glow of white light is discernible behind the ragged line of the treetops. The deluge of the darkness is receding from the face of the earth, as the mighty waters receded of old. The roofs and tall factory chimneys of Stillwater are slowly taking shape in the gloom. Is that a cemetery coming into view yonder, with its ghostly architecture of obelisks and broken columns and huddled headstones? No, that is only Slocum's marble yard, with the finished and unfinished work heaped up like snowdrifts. A cemetery in Embryo. Here and there in an outlying farm a lantern glimmers in the barnyard. The cattle are having their fodder at the times. Scarlet Cap Chanticleer gets himself on the nearest rail fence and lifts up his rankerous voice like some irate old cardinal launching the Curse of Rome. Something crawls swiftly along the gray of the serpentine turnpike, a cart with the driver lashing a jaded horse. A quick wind goes shivering by and is lost in the forest. Now a narrow strip of two-colored gold stretches along the horizon. Stillwater is gradually coming to its senses. The sun has begun to twinkle on the gilt cross of the Catholic Chapel, and make itself known to the doves in the stone belfry of the south church. The patches of cobweb that here and there cling tremulously to the coarse grass of the inundated meadows have turned into silver nets, and the mill pond, it will be steel blue later, is as smooth and white as if it had been paved with one vast unbroken slab out of Slocum's marble yard. Through a row of button-woods on the northern skirt of the village is seen a square lap-streaked building painted a disagreeable brown and surrounded on three sides by a platform. One of seven or eight similar stations strung like Indian heads on a branched thread of the Great Sagamore Railway. Listen, that is the jingle of the bells on the baker's cart as it begins its rounds. From innumerable chimneys the curled smoke gives evidence that the thrifty housewife, or what is rarer in still water, the hired girl, has lighted the kitchen fire. The chimney-stack of one house at the end of a small court, the last house on the easterly edge of the village and standing quite alone, sends up no smoke, yet the carefully-trained ivy over the porch, and the lemon verbenia in a tub at the foot of the steps, intimate that the place is not unoccupied. Moreover, the little schooner which acts as a weather-cock on one of the gables, and is now heading due west, has a new top-sale. It is a story in a half cottage, with a large expanse of roof which, covered with porous, unpainted shingles, seems to repel the sunshine that now strikes full upon it. The upper and lower blinds on the main building, as well as those on the extensions, are tightly closed. The sun appears to be in vain at the casements of this silent house, which has a curiously sullen and defiant air, as if it had desperately and successfully barricaded itself against the approach of mourning. Yet, if one were standing in the room that leads from the bed-chamber on the ground floor, the room with the lattice window, one would see array of light thrust through a chink in the shutters, and pointing like a human finger at an object which lies by the hearth. This finger, gleaming motionless and awful in its precision, points to the body of old Mr. Lemuel Shackford, who lies there, dead, in his nitress, with a gash across his forehead. In the darkness of that summer night, a deed darker than the night itself, had been done in Stillwater. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of the Stillwater Tragedy This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Stillwater Tragedy by Thomas Bailey Aldridge Chapter 2 That morning, when Michael Hennessey's girl Mary, a girl sixteen years old, carried the can of milk to the rear door of the silent house, she was nearly a quarter of an hour later than usual, and looked forward to being soundly rated. He's up and waiting for it, she said to herself, observing the scullery door ajar. Won't I catch it? It's him for growling and snapping at a body, and it's me for always being before a behind time. Bad luck to me. There's no place in him. Mary pushed back the door and passed through the kitchen, serving herself all the while to meet the obtracations which she supposed were lying in wait for her. The sunshine was blinding without, but sifted through the green jealousies it made a gray, crepuscular light within. As the girl approached the table, on which a plate with a knife and fork had been laid for breakfast, she noticed, somewhat indistinctly at first, a thin red line running obliquely across the floor from the direction of the sitting-room, and ending near the stove where it had formed a small pool. Mary stopped short, scarcely conscious why, and peered instinctively into the adjoining apartment. Then with a smothered cry she let fall the milk-can, and a dozen white rivulets in strange contrast to that one dark red line which first startled her, went meandering over the kitchen floor. With her eyes riveted upon some object in the next room, the girl retreated backward, slowly and heavily dragging one foot after the other, until she reached the gallery door, then she turned swiftly and plunged into the street. Twenty minutes later every man, woman, and child in still water knew that Mr. Shackford had been murdered. Mary Hennessy had to tell her story a hundred times during the morning, for each minute brought to Michael's tenement a fresh listener, hungry for the details at first hand. How was it, Molly? Tell a body, dear. Don't be asking me, cried Molly, pressing her palms to her eyes as if to shut out the sight, but taking all the while a secret creepy satisfaction in living the scene over again. It was kinder dark in the other room, and there he was, lying in his nightgown, with his face turned towards me so, looking mighty severe like, just as if he was a going to say, it's late with the milky hour, ye hussy, away he had a spakin'. But he didn't spake, Molly Darling. Never a word, he was stoned there, don't you see? It was that still. You could hear me heartbeat. Savin' there wasn't a drop of beat in it. I let go the can, sure. Then I backed out, with me eye on him all the while, a fear to death that he would up and spake them words. The poor child, for the likes of her to be wakin' up a mirthed man in the morning. There was little or no work done that day in still water outside the mills, and they were not running full-handed. A number of men from the Miantavona ironworks and Slocum's yard, Slocum employed some seventy or eighty hands, lounged about the streets in their blouses, or stood in knots in front of the tavern, smoking short clay pipes. Not an urchin put in an appearance at the small red brick building on the turnpike. Mr. Pinkham, the schoolmaster, waited an hour for the recusants, then turned the key in the lock, and went home. Dragged-looking women, with dishcloth or dustpan in hand, stood in doorways or leaned from windows, talking in subdued voices with neighbors on the curb-stone. In a hundred faraway cities, the news of the suburban tragedy had already been read and forgotten, but here the horror stayed. There was a constantly changing crowd gathered in front of the house in Welch's court. An inquest was being held in the room adjoining the kitchen. The court, which ended at the gate of the cottage, was fringed for several yards on each side by rows of squalid, wandering children who understood it that Coroner Whitten was literally to sit on the dead body. Mr. Whitten, a limp, inoffensive little man who would not have dared to sit down on a fly, he had passed, pallid and perspiring, to the scene of his perfunctory duties. The result of the investigation was awaited with feverish impatience by the people outside. Mr. Shackford had not been a popular man. He had been a hard, avaricious, passionate man, holding his own way remorselessly. He had been the reverse of popular, but he had long been a prominent character in Stillwater, because of his wealth, his endless lawsuits, and his eccentricity, an illustration of which was his persistence in living entirely alone in the isolated, injury-old house that was henceforth to be inhabited by his shadow. Not his shadow alone, however, for it was now remembered that the premises were already held in fee by another phantasmal tenant. At a period long anterior to this, one Lydia Sloper, a widow, had died an unexplained death under the same roof. The coincidence struck deeply into the imaginative portion of Stillwater. The widow's sloper and old Shackford have made a match of it, remarked a local humorist, in a grimmer vein than customary. Two ghosts had now set up housekeeping, as it were, in the stricken mansion, and what might not be looked for in the way of spectral progeny. It appeared to the crowd in the lane that the jury were unconscionably long in arriving at a decision, and when the decision was at length reached it gave but moderate satisfaction. After a spendthrift waste of judicial mind the jury had decided that the death of Lemuel Shackford was caused by a blow on the left temple inflicted with some instrument not discoverable in the hands of some person or persons unknown. We knew that before, grumbled a voice in the crowd, when to relieve public suspense, lawyer Perkins, a long, lank man with stringy black hair, announced the verdict from the doorstep. The theory of suicide had obtained momentary credence early in the morning, and one or two still clung to it with the tenacity that characterizes persons who entertain few ideas. To accept this theory it was necessary to believe that Mr. Shackford had ingeniously hidden the weapon after striking himself dead with a single blow. No, it was not suicide. So far from intending to take his own life Mr. Shackford, it appeared, had made rather careful preparations to live that day. The breakfast table had been laid overnight. The coals left ready for kindling in the Franklin Stove, and a kettle filled with water to be heated for his tea or coffee stood on the hearth. Two facts had sharply demonstrated themselves. First, that Mr. Shackford had been murdered, and second, that the spur to the crime had been the possession of a sum of money, which the deceased was supposed to keep in a strong box in his bedroom. The padlock had been wrenched open, and the less valuable contents of the chest, chiefly papers, scattered over the carpet. A memorandum among the papers seemed to specify the respective sums in notes and gold that had been deposited in the box. A document of some kind had been torn into minute pieces and thrown into the wastebasket. On close scrutiny a word or two here and there revealed the fact that the document was of a legal character. The fragments were put into an envelope and given in charge of Mr. Shackford's lawyer, who placed seals on that and on the drawers of an Escortoir which stood in the corner and contained other manuscript. The instrument with which the fatal blow had been dealt, for the autopsy showed that there had been but one blow, was not only not discoverable, but the fashion of it defied conjecture. The shape of the wound did not indicate the use of any implement known to the jurors, several of whom were skilled machinists. The wound was an inch and three-quarters in length and very deep at the extremities. In the middle it scarcely penetrated to the cranium. So peculiar a cut could not have been produced with the claw part of a hammer, because the claw is always curved and the incision was straight. A flat claw which is used in opening packing cases was suggested. A collection of several sizes manufactured was procured, but none corresponded with the wound. They were either too wide or too narrow. Moreover, the cut was as thin as the blade of a case knife. That was never done by any tool in these parts, declared Stevens, the foreman of the finishing shop at Slocums. The assassin or assassins had entered by the scullery door, the simple fastening of which a hook and staple had been broken. There were footprints in the soft clay path leading from the side gate to the stone step, but Mary Hennessey had so confused and obliterated the outlines that now it was impossible accurately to measure them. A half-burnt match was found under the sink, evidently thrown there by the burglars. It was of a kind known as the safety match, which can be ignited only by friction on a strip of chemically prepared paper glued to the box. As no box of this description was discovered, and as all the other matches in the house were of a different make, the charred splinter was preserved. The most minute examination failed to show more than this. The last time Mr. Shackford had been seen alive was at six o'clock the previous evening. Who had done the deed? Tramps, answered Stillwater with one voice, though Stillwater lay somewhat out of the natural highway, and the tramp, that bitter blossom of civilization whose seed was blown to us from over the seas, was not then so common by the New England road-sides as he became five or six years later. But it was intolerable not to have a theory, it was that or none, for conjecture turned to no one in the village. To be sure, Mr. Shackford had been in litigation with several of the corporations, and had had legal quarrels with more than one of his neighbors. But Mr. Shackford had never been victorious in any of these contests, and the incentive of revenge was wanting to explain the crime. Besides, it was so clearly robbery. Though the gathering around the Shackford house had reduced itself to half a dozen idlers, and the less frequented streets had resumed their normal aspect of dullness, there was a strange electric quality in the atmosphere. The community was in that state of suppressed agitation and suspicion which no word adequately describes. The slightest circumstance would have swayed it to the belief in any man's guilt, and indeed there were men in still water quite capable of disposing a fellow creature for a much smaller reward than Mr. Shackford had held out. In spite of the tramp theory, a harmless tin peddler who had not passed through the place for weeks was dragged from his glittering cart that afternoon as he drove smilingly into town and would have been roughly handled if Mr. Richard Shackford, a cousin of the deceased, had not interfered. As the day wore on, the excitement deepened in intensity, though the expression of it became nearly reticent. It was noticed that the lamps throughout the village were lighted an hour earlier than usual. A sense of insecurity settled upon still water with the falling twilight, that nameless apprehension which is possibly more trying to the nerves than tangible danger. When a man is smitten inexplicably, as if by a bodyless hand stretched out of a cloud, when the red slayer vanishes like a mist and leaves no faintest trace of his identity, the mystery shrouding the deed presently becomes more appalling than the deed itself. There is something paralyzing in the thought of an invisible hand somewhere ready to strike at your life or at some life dearer than your own. Whose hand and where is it? Perhaps it passes you your coffee at breakfast. Perhaps you have hired it to shovel the snow off your sidewalk. Perhaps it has brushed against you in the crowd, or maybe you have dropped a coin into the fearful palm at a street corner. Ah, the terrible unseen hand that stabs your imagination, this immortal part of you which is a hundred times more sensitive than your poor perishable body. In the midst of situations the most solemn and tragic, there often falls a light purely farcical in its incongruity. Such a gleam was unconsciously projected upon the present crisis by Mr. Bodge, better known in the village as Father Bodge. Mr. Bodge was stone death, naturally stupid, and had been nearly moribund for thirty years with asthma. Just before nightfall he had crawled in his bewildered, wheezy fashion down to the tavern, where he found a somber crowd in the bar room. Mr. Bodge ordered his mug of beer and sat sipping it, glancing meditatively from time to time over the pewter rim at the mute assembly. Suddenly he broke out. Suppose you've heard that old Shackford's been murdered! So the sun went down on Stillwater. Again the great wall of pines and hemlocks made a gloom against the sky. The moon rose from behind the treetops, frosting their ragged edges, and then sweeping up to the zenith hung serenely above the world, as if there were never a crime or a tear or a heartbreak in it all. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of the Stillwater Tragedy This Libervox recording is in the public domain. The Stillwater Tragedy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich Chapter 3 On the afternoon of the following day Mr. Shackford was dutely buried. The funeral, under the direction of Mr. Richard Shackford, who acted as chief mourner and was soul mourner by right of kinship, took place in profound silence. The carpenters, who had lost a day on Bishop's new stables, intermitted their sawing and hammering while the services were in progress. The steam was shut off in the iron mills, and no clinking of chisel was heard in the marble yard for an hour, during which many of the shops had their shutters up. Then, when all was over, the imprisoned fiend in the boilers gave a piercing shriek, the leather band slipped on the revolving drums, the spindles leaped into life again, and the old order of things was reinstated, outwardly, but not in effect. In general, when the grave closes over a man, his career is ended. But Mr. Shackford was never so much alive as after they had buried him. Never before had he filled so large a place in the public eye. Though invisible, he sat at every fireside. Until the manner of his death had been made clear, his ubiquitous presence was not to be exercised. On the morning of the memorable day, a reward of one hundred dollars, afterwards increased to five hundred, at the insistence of Mr. Shackford's cousin, had been offered by the board of selectmen for the arrest and conviction of the guilty party. Beyond this and the unsatisfactory inquest, the authorities had done nothing, and were plainly not equal to the situation. When it was stated, the night of the funeral, that a professional person was coming to Stillwater to look into the case, the announcement was received with a breath of relief. The person thus vaguely described appeared on the spot the next morning. To mention the name of Edward Taggart is to mention a name well known to the detective force of the great city lying sixty miles southwest of Stillwater. Mr. Taggart's arrival sent such a thrill of expectancy through the village that Mr. Leonard Tapleton, whose obsequies occurred this day, made his exit nearly unobserved. Yet there was little in Mr. Taggart's physical aspect calculated to stir either expectation or enthusiasm. A slender man of about twenty-six, but not looking it, with overhanging brown mustache, sparse side whiskers, eyes of no definite color, and faintly accentuated eyebrows. He spoke precisely, and with a certain unembarrassed hesitation, as persons do who have two thoughts to one word, if there are such persons, you might have taken him for a physician or a journalist, or the secretary of an insurance company, but you would never have supposed him the man who had disentangled the complicated threads of the great Barnaby bank defalcation. Stillwater's confidence, which had risen into the nineties, fell to zero at the sight of him. Is that Taggart, they asked? That was Taggart, and presently his influence began to be felt like a sea turn. The three dog-berries of the watch were dispatched on secret missions, and within an hour it was ferreted out that a man in a cart had been seen driving furiously up the turnpike the morning after the murder. This was an agricultural district, the road led to a market town, and teams going by in the early dawn were the rule and not the exception. But on that a special morning a furiously driven cart was significant. Jonathan Beers, who farmed the janks' land, had heard the wheels and caught an indistinct glimpse of the vehicle as he was feeding the cattle. But with a reticence purely rustic had not been moved to mention the circumstance before. Taggart has got a clue, said Stillwater under its breath. By noon Taggart had got the man, cart and all. But it was only Bluffton's son Tom of South Millville, who had started in hot haste that particular morning to secure medical service for his wife, of which she had sorely stood in need as two tiny girls in a willow cradle in South Millville now bore testimony. I haven't been cutting down the population much, said Bluffton, with his wholesome laugh. Thomas Bluffton was well known and esteemed in Stillwater, but if the crime had fastened itself upon him it would have given something like popular satisfaction. In the course of the ensuing forty-eight hours four or five tramps were overhauled as having been in the neighborhood at the time of the tragedy, but they each had a clean story and were let go. Then one dirgin, a workman at Slocum's Yard, was called upon to explain some half-washed-out red stains on his overalls, which he did. He had tightened the hoops on a salt-pork barrel for Mr. Shackford several days previous. The red paint on the head of the barrel was fresh and had come off on his clothes. Dr. Weld examined the spots under a microscope and pronounced them paint. It was manifest that Mr. Taggart meant to go to the bottom of things. The bar room of the Stillwater Hotel was a center of interest these nights. Not only the bar room proper, but the adjoining apartment, where the more exclusive guests took their seltzer water and looked over the metropolitan newspapers. Twice a week a social club met here, having among its members Mr. Craigie the postmaster, who was supposed to have a great political future, Mr. Pinkham, lawyer Perkins, Mr. Whitton, and other respectable persons. The room was at all times in some sense private, with a separate entrance from the street, though another door, which usually stood open, connected it with the main salon. In this was a long mahogany counter, one section of which was covered with a sheet of zinc perforated like a sieve, and kept constantly bright by restless caravans of large beer-glasses. Directly behind that end of the counter stood a gothic brass-mounted beer-pump, at whose faucets Mr. Snelling, the landlord, flooded you five or six mugs in the twinkling of an eye, and raised the vague expectation that he was about to grind out some popular operatic air. At the left of the pump stretched a narrow mirror, reflecting the gaily-colored wine-glasses and decanters which stood on each other's shoulders, and held up lemons, and performed various acrobatic feats on a shelf in front of it. The fourth night after the funeral of Mr. Shackford, a dismal southeast storm caused an unusual influx of idlers in both rooms. With the rain splashing against the casements and the wind slamming the blinds, the respective groups sat discussing in a desultory way the only topic which could be discussed at present. There had been a general strike among the workmen a fortnight before, but even that had grown cold as a topic. That was hard on Tom Bluffden, said Stevens, emptying the ashes out of his long-stem clay pipe, and refilling the bowl with cut camadas from a jar on a shelf over his head. Michael Hennessey sat down his beer-mug with an air of argumentative disgust, and drew one sleeve across his glistening beard. Stevens, you have had as many minds as a weather-cock-chist. Didn't you see yourself it looked mighty black for the lad when he was took? I might have said something of the sort. Stevens admitted reluctantly after a pause. His driving round at daybreak with an empty cart did have an ugly look at first, and they then— Not to anyone who knew Tom Bluffden! interrupted Samuel Pickett, Bluffden's brother-in-law. The boy hasn't a bad streak in him. It was an outrage. Might as well have suspected Parson Langley or Father O'Meara. If this kind of thing goes on, remarked a man in a corner with a patch over one eye, both of them reverent gents will be hauled up. I shouldn't wonder. Not so, Mr. Peters, responded Durgen. If my respectability didn't save me, who's safe? Durgen is talking about his respectability. He's joking. Look here, Dexter, said Durgen, turning quickly on the speaker. When I want to joke, I talk about your intelligence. What kind of a man is Taggett anyhow? asked Pickett. You saw him, Durgen. I believe he was at Justice Bemis's office the day Bluffden and I was there, but I didn't make him out in the crowd. Shouldn't know him from Adam. Still, what was a healthy place for tramps just about this time? Suggested somebody. Three of them snaked in to-day. I think, gentlemen, that Mr. Taggett is on the right track there, observed Mr. Snelling, in the act of mixing another old holland for Mr. Peters. Not to sweet, you said. I feel in my bones that it was a tramp, and that Mr. Taggett will bring him yet. He won't find him on the highway yonder, said a tall, swarthy man named Tarini, an Italian. Nationalities clash in still water. That tramp is a thousand miles from here. So he is, if he has any brains under his hat, returns Snelling. But they're on the lookout for him. The minute he pawns anything, he's gone. Can't put up green-backs or gold, can he? He didn't take nothing else, interposed Bishop, the veterinary surgeon. Not jewelry, nor nothing? There wasn't none, as I understand it, said Bishop, except a silver watch. That was all snug under the old man's pillar. Want or no, ejaculated Jonathan Beers. I opine, Mr. Craggie, said the schoolmaster, standing in the inner room, with a rolled-up file of the daily advertiser in his hand, that the person who, who removed our worthy townsman, will never be discovered. I shouldn't like to go quite as far as that, sir, answered Mr. Craggie, with that diplomatic suavity, which leads to post-masterships and seats in the general court, and has even been known to oil a dull fellow's way into Congress. I cannot take quite so hopeless a view of it. There are difficulties, but they must be overcome, Mr. Pinkham, and I think they will be. Indeed, I hope so, returned the schoolmaster. But there are cases, are there not, in which the problem, if I may so designate it, has never been elucidated, and the persons who undertook it have been obliged to go to the foot, so to speak. Ah, yes, there are such cases certainly. There was the Burdell mystery in New York, and later the Nathan affair. By the way, I've satisfactory theories of my own, touching both. The police were baffled, and remained so. But my dear sir, observe for a moment the difference. Mr. Pinkham raised one finger on the edge of a little round table, and leaned forward in a respectful attitude to observe the difference. Those crimes were committed in a vast metropolis affording a thousand chances for escape, as well as offering a thousand temptations to the lawless. But we are a limited community. We have no professional murderers among us. The deed which has stirred society to its utmost depth was plainly done by some wayfaring amateur. Remorse has already arrived upon him, if the police haven't, for the time being he escapes, but he is bound to betray himself sooner or later. If the right steps are taken, and I have myself the greatest confidence in Mr. Taggart, the guilty party can scarcely fail to be brought to the bar of justice, if he doesn't bring himself there. Indeed, indeed I hope so, repeated Mr. Pinkham. The investigation is being carried on very closely. Too closely, suggested the schoolmaster. Oh, dear no, murmured Mr. Craggy. The strictest secrecy is necessary in affairs of this delicate nature. If Tom, Dick, and Harry were taken behind the scenes, he added, with the air of one wishing to say too much, the bottom would drop out of everything. Mr. Pinkham shrunk from commenting on a disaster like that, and relapsed into silence. Mr. Craggy, with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and his legs crossed in an easy, senatorial fashion, leaned back in the chair and smiled blandly. I don't suppose there's anything new, boys! exclaimed a fat, floored man bustling in good-naturedly at the public entrance, and leaving a straight, wet trail on the sanded floor from the threshold to the polished mahogany counter. Mr. Wilson was a local humorist of the Faustafian stripe, though not so much witty in himself as the cause of wit in others. No, Jimmy, there isn't anything new, responded Dexter. I suppose you didn't hear that the old man done something handsome for me in his last will and testament. No, Jimmy, I don't think he's made any provision whatever for an almshouse. Sorry to hear that, Dexter, said Wilson, absorberedly chasing a bit of lemon peel in his glass with the spoon handle. For there isn't room for us all up at the town farm. How's your grandmother? Finds it tolerably comfortable? They are a primitive, candid people in their hours of unlazed social intercourse in Stillwater. This delicate, too-quoq, was so far from wounding Dexter that he replied carelessly. Well, only so-so. The old woman complains of too much chicken salad and hot-house grapes all the year round. Mr. Shackford must have left a large property, observed Mr. Ward of the firm of Ward and Locke, glancing up from the columns of the Stillwater Gazette. The remark was addressed to lawyer Perkins, who had just joined the group in the reading-room. Fairly large, replied the gentleman crisply. Any public requests? None to speak of. Mr. Craigie smiled vaguely. You see, said lawyer Perkins, there is a will and no will. That is to say, the fragments of what is supposed to be a will were found, and we are trying to put the pieces together. It is doubtful if we can do it. It is doubtful if we can decipher it after we have done it. And if we decipher it, it is a question whether the document is valid or not. That is a masterly exposition of the dilemma, Mr. Perkins, said the schoolmaster warmly. Mr. Perkins had spoken in his courtroom tone of voice, with one hand thrust into his frilled shirt bosom. He removed this hand for a second, as he gravely bowed to Mr. Pinkham. Nothing could be clearer, said Mr. Ward, in the case the paper is worthless. What then? I am not asking you in your professional capacity, he added hastily, for lawyer Perkins had been known to send in a bill on a slight provocation as Mr. Ward's. That's a point the next of kin has his claims. My friend, Shackford, of course, broken Mr. Craggie, admirable young man, one of my warmest supporters. He is the only heir at law, as far as we know, said Mr. Perkins. Oh, said Mr. Craggie, reflecting. The late Mr. Shackford might have had a family in Timbuktu or the sandwich islands. That's another point. The fact would be a deucid unpleasant point for young Shackford to run against, said Mr. Ward. Exactly. If Mr. Lemuel Shackford, remarked Coroner Whitten, softly joining the conversation to which he had been listening, in his timorous, apologetic manner, has chanced in the course of his early seafaring days to form any ties of an unhappy complexion. Complexion is good, murmured Mr. Craggie. Some Hawaiian lady? Perhaps that would be a branch of the case worth investigating, in connection with the homicide, a discarded wife, or a disowned son, burning with a sense of wrong. Really, Mr. Whitten, interrupted lawyer Perkins witheringly. It is bad enough for my client to lose his life, without having his reputation filched away from him. I, I will explain. I was merely supposing. The law never supposes, sir. This threw Mr. Whitten into great mental confusion, as Coroner was he not an integral part of the law, and when, in his official character, he supposed anything, was not that a legal supposition? But was he in his official character now, sitting with the glass of lemonade at his elbow, in the reading room of the Stillwater Hotel, was he or was he not a Coroner all the time? Mr. Whitten stroked an isolated tuft of hair, growing low on the middle of his forehead, and glared mildly at Mr. Perkins. Young Shackford has gone to New York, I understand, said Mr. Ward, breaking the silence. Mr. Perkins nodded, went this morning to look after the real estate interests there. It will probably keep him a couple of weeks, the longer the better. He was of no use here. Lemuel's death was a great shock to him, or rather the manner of it was. That shocked everyone. They were first cousins, weren't they? Mr. Ward was a comparatively new resident in Stillwater. First cousins, replied lawyer Perkins, but they were never very intimate, you know. I imagine nobody was ever very intimate with Mr. Shackford. My client was somewhat peculiar in his friendships. This was stating it charitably, for Mr. Perkins knew, and everyone present knew, that Lemuel Shackford had not had the shadow of a friend in Stillwater, unless it was his cousin Richard. A cloud of mist and rain was blown into the bar room, as the street doors stood open for a second, to admit a dripping figure from the outside darkness. What's blowed down, said Durgin, turning round on his stool, and sending up a ring of smoke, which uncurled itself with difficulty in the dense atmosphere. It's only some of Jeff Staver's nonsense. No nonsense at all, said the newcomer, as he shook the heavy beads of rain from his felt hat. I was passing by Welch's court. It's as black as pitch-out, fellas. When Slap won something against my shoulder. Something like wet wings. Well, I was scared. It's a bat, says I. But the thing didn't fly off. It was still clawing at my shoulder. I put it my hand, and I'll be shot if it wasn't the four-mast, gypsy in all, of the old weathercock on the North Gable of the Shackford House. Here you are. And the speaker tossed the broken mast, with the mimic's sails dangling from it, into Durgin's lap. A dead silence followed, for there was felt to be something weirdly significant in the incident. That's kinder ominous, said Mr. Peters interrogatively. Ominous of what? asked Durgin. Lifting the wet mass from his knees, and dropping it on the floor. Well, sort of queer, then. Where does the queer come in? inquired Stevens gravely. I don't know, but I'm hit by it. Come, boys, don't crowd a feller, said Mr. Peters, getting restive. I don't take the contract to explain the thing, but it does seem, someway, droll, that the old schooner should be wrecked so soon after what has happened to the old skipper. If you don't see it, or sense it, I don't insist. What's yours, Denevin? The person addressed as Denevin promptly replied with a fine, sonorous English accent. A mog in an aff in an aff with a aid on its nelen. At the same moment, Mr. Kragge, in the inner room, was saying to the schoolmaster, I must really take issue with you there, Mr. Pinkham. I admit there's a good deal in spiritualism which we haven't got at yet. The science is in its infancy. It is still attached to the bosom of speculation. It is a beautiful science, that of psychological phenomenon, and the spiritualists will yet become an influential class of... Mr. Kragge was going to say, voters, but glided over it, persons. I believe in clairvoyance myself to a large extent. Before my appointment to the post office, I had it very strong. I have no doubt that in the far future, this mysterious factor will be made great use of in criminal cases. But at present, I should resort to it only in the last extremity. The very last extremity, Mr. Pinkham. Oh, of course, said the schoolmaster deprecatingly. I threw it out only as the mirror's suggestion. I shouldn't think of... of... You understand me. It is beyond the dreams of probability, said Mr. Kragge, appealing to lawyer Perkins. That clairvoyance may eventually be introduced into cases in our courts. They are now, said Mr. Perkins with a snort. The police bring them in. Mr. Kragge finished the remainder of his glass of sherry in silence, and presently rose to go. Coroner Whidden and Mr. Ward had already gone. The guests in the public room were thinning out. A gloom, indefinable and shapeless like the night, seemed to have fallen upon the few that lingered. At a somewhat earlier hour than usual, the gas was shut off in the Stillwater Hotel. In the lonely house in Welch's Court, a light was still burning. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of The Stillwater Tragedy This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Stillwater Tragedy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich Chapter 4 A sorely perplexed man sat there, bending over his papers by the lamp-light. Mr. Taggett had established himself at the Shackford House on his arrival, preferring it to the hotel, where he would have been subjected to the curiosity of the guests and to endless annoyances. Up to this moment, perhaps not a dozen persons in the place had had more than a passing glimpse of him. He was a very busy man, working at his desk from morning until night, and then taking only a brief walk for exercise in some unfrequented street. His meals were sent in from the hotel to the Shackford House, where the constables reported to him, and where he had protracted conferences with Justice Bemis, Coroner Whidden, Lawyer Perkins, and a few others, and declined to be interviewed by the local editor. To the outside eye, that weather-stained, faded old house appeared a throbbing seat of esoteric intelligence. It was as if a hundred invisible magnetic threads converged to a focus under that roof, and incessantly clicked out the most startling information. Information which was never, by any chance, allowed to pass beyond the charm circle. The pile of letters which the mail brought to Mr. Taggett every morning, chiefly anonymous suggestions, and offers of assistance from lunatics in remote cities, was enough in itself to exasperate a community. Covertly at first, and then openly, still water began seriously to question Mr. Taggett's method of working up the case. The gazette, in a double-headed leader, went so far as to compare him to a bird with fine feathers and no song, and to suggest that perhaps the bird might have sung if the inducement offered had been more substantial. A singer of Mr. Taggett's plumage was not to be taught by such chaff as five hundred dollars. Having killed his man, the editor proceeded to remark that he would suspend judgment until next week. As if to make the perfect bird comparison, Mr. Taggett, after keeping the public in suspense for six days and nights, abruptly flew away with all the little shreds and straws of evidence he had picked up to build his speculative nest elsewhere. The defection of Mr. Taggett caused a mild panic among a certain portion of the inhabitants, who were not reassured by the statement in the gazette that the case would now be placed in the proper hands, the hand of the county constabulary. Within a few days, said the editor in conclusion, the matter will undoubtedly be cleared up. At present we cannot say more, and it would have puzzled him very much to do so. A week passed, and no fresh light was thrown upon the catastrophe, nor did anything occur to rattle the usual surface of life in the village. A man, it was Terini, the Italian, got hurt and dain his iron foundry. One of Blofton's twin girls died, and Mr. Slocum took a new hand from out of town. That was all. Stillwater was the stillwater of a year ago, was always the exception of that shadow lying upon it, and the fact that small boys who had kindling to get in were careful to get it in before nightfall. It would appear that the late Mr. Shackford had acquired a habit of lingering around wood piles after dark, and also of stealing into bed chambers, where little children were obliged to draw the sheets over their heads in order not to see him. The action of the county constabulary had proved quite as mysterious and quite as barren of result as Mr. Taggott's had been. They had worn his mantle of secrecy, and arrested the tramps over again. Another week dragged by, and the editorial prediction seemed as far as ever from fulfillment. But on the afternoon which closed that fortnight a very singular thing did happen. Mr. Slocum was sitting alone in his office, which occupied the whole of a small building at the right of the main gate to the marble works. When the door behind him softly opened and a young man, whose dress covered with stone dust indicated his vocation, appeared on the threshold, he hesitated a second, then stepped into the room. Mr. Slocum turned round with a swift, apprehensive air. You gave me a start? I believe I haven't any nerves left. Well? Mr. Slocum, I have found the man. The proprietor of the marble yard half rose from the desk in his agitation. Who is it? He asked beneath his breath. The same doubt or irresolution which had checked the workmen at the threshold seemed again to have taken possession of him. It was fully a moment before he gained the mastery over himself. But the mastery was complete, as he leaned forward gravely, almost coldly, and pronounced two words. A quick pallor overspread Mr. Slocum's features. Good God! he exclaimed, sinking back into the chair. Are you mad? End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of The Stillwater Tragedy This Libervox recording is in the public domain. The Stillwater Tragedy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich Chapter 5 The humblest painter of real life if he could have his desire would select a picturesque background for his figures, but events have an inexorable fashion for choosing their own landscape. In the present instance it is reluctantly conceded that there are few uglier or more commonplace towns in New England than Stillwater. A straggling overgrown village with whose rural aspects are curiously blended something of the grimness and squalor of certain shabby city neighborhoods. Being of comparably recent date, the place has none of those colonial associations which, like sprigs of lavender in an old chest of drawers, are a saving grace to other quite as dreary nooks and corners. Here and there at what is termed the West End is a neat brick mansion with garden attached, where nature asserts herself in dallas and china asters, but the houses are mostly frame houses that have taken a prevailing dingy tint from the breath of the tall chimneys which dominate the village. The sidewalks in the more aristocratic quarter are covered with a thin elastic paste of asphalt worn down to the gravel in patches and emitting in the heat of the day an astringent bituminous odor. The population is chiefly of the rougher sword such as breeds in the shadow of foundries and factories, and if the Protestant pastor and the fatherly Catholic priest whose respective lots are cast there have sometimes the sense of being missionaries dropped in the midst of a purely savage community, the delusion is not wholly unreasonable. The irregular heaps of scoria that have accumulated in the vicinity of the ironworks give the place an elusive air of antiquity, but it is neither ancient nor picturesque. The oldest and most pictorial thing in Stillwater is probably the marble yard, around three sides of which the village may be said to have sprouted up rankly, bearing here and there an industrial blossom in the shape of an iron mill or a cardigan jacket manufacturing. Roland Slocum, a man of considerable refinement, great kindness of heart, and no force, inherited the yard from his father, and at the period this narrative opens, the summer of 1870, was its sole proprietor and nominal manager, the actual manager being Richard Jackford, a prospective partner in the business and the betrothed of Mr. Slocum's daughter Margaret. Forty years ago every tenth person in Stillwater was either a Shackford or a Slocum. Twenty years later, both names were nearly extinct there. That fatality which seems to attend certain New England families had stripped every leaf but two from the Shackford branch. These were Lumuel Shackford, then about 46, and Richard Shackford, age four. Lumuel Shackford had laid up a competency as shipmaster in the New York and Calcutta trade, and in 1852 had returned to his native village, where he found his name and stock represented only by Little Dick, a very cheerful orphan, who stared complacently with big blue eyes at fate, and made mud pies in the lane whenever he could elude the vigilance of the kindly old woman who had taken him under her roof. This atom of humanity, by some strange miscalculation of nature, was his cousin. The strict devotion to his personal interest, which had enabled Mr. Shackford to acquire a fortune, thus early cost him to look a scance at a penniless young kinsman with stockings down at heel, and a straw hat, three sizes too large for him, set on the back of his head. But Mr. Shackford was ashamed to leave Little Dick a burden upon the hands of a poor woman of no relationship whatever to the child, so Little Dick was transferred to that dejected house which has already been described, and was then known as the Sloper House. Here, for three or four years, Dick grew up, as neglected as a weed, and every inch as happy. It should be mentioned that for the first year or so, a shock headed Sicily from the town farm had apparently been hired not to take care of him. But Dick asked nothing better than to be left to his own devices, which, moreover, were innocent enough. He would sit all day in the lane at the front gate, pottering with a bit of twig or a case knife in the soft clay. From time to time, passers-by observed that the child was not making mud pies, but tracing figures, comic or grotesque as might happen, and always quite wonderful, for their lack of resemblance to anything human. That patch of reddish-brown clay was his sole resource, his slate, his drawing book, and woe to anybody who chanced to walk over Little Dick's arabesques. Patient and gentle in his acceptance of the world's rebuffs, this he would not endure. He was afraid of Mr. Shackford, yet one day, when the preoccupied man happened to trample on a newly executed hieroglyphic, the child rose to his feet white with rage, his fingers clenched, and such a blue fire flashing in the eyes that Mr. Shackford drew back aghast. Why, it's a little devil! While Shackford Jr. was amusing himself with his primitive boss-reliefs, Shackford Sr. amused himself with his lawsuits. From the hour when he returned to the town, until the end of his days, Mr. Shackford was up to his neck in legal difficulties. Now he resisted a betterment assessment and fought the town. Now he secured an injunction on the Mi'antawana ironworks and fought the corporation. He was understood to have a perpetual case in equity before the Marine Corps in New York, to which city he made frequent and unannounced journeys. His immediate neighbor stood in terror of him. He was like a duelist, on the alert to twist the slightest thing into a cases' bely. The law was his rapier, his recreation, and he was willing to bleed for it. Meanwhile, that fairy world of which every baby becomes a Columbus, so soon as it is able to walk, remained an undiscovered continent to little Dick. Grim life looked in upon him as he lay in the cradle. The common joys of childhood were a sealed volume to him. A single incident of those years lights up the whole situation. A vague rumor had been blown to Dick of a practice of hanging up stockings at Christmas. It struck his materialistic mind as a rather senseless thing to do, but nevertheless he resolved to try it one Christmas Eve. He lay awake a long while in the frosty darkness, skeptically waiting for something remarkable to happen, once he crawled out of the cot bed and groped his way to the chimney place. The next morning he was scarcely disappointed at finding nothing in the piteous little stocking, except the original holes. The years that stole silently over the heads of the old man and the young child in Welch's court brought a period of wild prosperity to still water. The breath of war blew the forges to a white heat, and the baffling problem of the medieval alchemists was solved. The baser metals were transmuted into gold, a disastrous, prosperous time, with the air rent periodically by the cries of news boys as battles were fought and by the roll of the drum in the busy streets as fresh recruits were wanted, glory and death to the southward and at the north pale women in black. All which interested Dick mighty little, after he had learned to read at the district school he escaped into another world. Two lights were now generally seen burning of a night in the Shackford house, one on the ground floor, where Mr. Shackford sat mouthing his contracts and mortgages and weaving his webs like a great lean gray spider and the other in the north gable, where Dick hung over a tattered copy of Robinson Crusoe by the flicker of the candle ends which he had captured during the day. Little Dick was Little Dick no more, a tall, heavily built blonde boy with a quiet sweet disposition that at first offered temptations to the despots of the playground, but a sudden flaring up once or twice of that unexpected spirit which had broken out in his babyhood brought him immunity from serious persecution. The boy's home life at this time would have seemed pathetic to an observer, the more pathetic perhaps, in that Dick himself was not aware of his exceptional barrenness. The holidays that bring new brightness to the eyes of happier children work to him simply days when he did not go to school and was expected to provide an extra quantity of kindling wood. He was housed and fed and clothed after a fashion but not loved. Mr. Shackford did not ill-treat the lad in the sense of beating him, he merely neglected him. Every year the man became more absorbed in his law cases and his money which accumulated magically. He dwelt in a cloud of calculations. Though all his interests attached him to the material world, his dry, attenuated body seemed scarcely a part of it. Shackford, what are you going to do with that scape-grace of yours? It was Mr. Leonard Tapleton who ventured the question. Few persons dared to interrogate Mr. Shackford on his private affairs. I'm going to make a lawyer of him, said Mr. Shackford, crackling his finger joints like stiff parchment. You couldn't do better, you ought to have an attorney in the family. Just so asserted Mr. Shackford dryly. I could throw a bit of business his way now and then, eh? You could make his fortune, Shackford, I don't see, but you might employ him all the time. When he was not fighting the corporations, you might keep him at it suing you for his fees. Very good, very good indeed. Responded Mr. Shackford, with a smile in which his eyes took no share. It was merely a momentary curling up of crisp wrinkles. He did not usually smile at other people's pleasantries, but when a person were three or four hundred thousand dollars, condescends to indulge a joke, it is not to be passed over like that of a poor relation. Yes, yes, muttered the old man as he stooped and picked up a pin, adding it to a row of similarly acquired pins that gave the left lapel of his threadbare coat the appearance of a miniature harp. I shall make a lawyer of him. It had long been settled in Mr. Shackford's mind that Richard, so soon as he had finished his studies, should enter the law office of Blandman and Sharp, a firm of rather sinister reputation in South Millville. At fourteen Richard's eyes had begun to open on the situation. At fifteen he saw very clearly, and one day, without much preliminary formulating of his plan, he decided on a step that had been taken by every male Shackford, as far back as tradition preserves the record of his family. A friendship had sprung up between Richard and one William Durgin, a schoolmate. This Durgin was a sallow, brooding boy, a year older than himself. The two lads were antipodal in disposition intelligence and social standing, for though Richard went poorly clad, the reflection of his cousin's wealth gilded him. Durgin was the son of a washerwoman. An intimacy between the two would perhaps have been unlikely, but for one fact, it was Durgin's mother who had given Little Dick a shelter at the period of his parent's death. Though the circumstance did not lie within the pale of Richard's personal memory, he acknowledged the debt by rather insisting on Durgin's friendship. It was William Durgin, therefore, who was elected to wait upon Mr. Shackford on a certain morning, which found that gentleman greatly disturbed by an unprecedented occurrence. Richard had slept out of the house the previous night. Durgin was the bearer of a note which Mr. Shackford received in some astonishment and read deliberately, blinking with weak eyes behind the glasses. Having torn off the blank page and laid it aside for his own more economical correspondence, the rascal had actually used a whole sheet to write ten words. Mr. Shackford turned, and with the absorbed air of a naturalist studying some abnormal bug, gazed over the steel bow of his spectacles at Durgin. Durgin hastily retreated. There's a poor lawyer saved, muttered the old man, taking down his overcoat from a peg behind the door, and snapping off a shred of lint on the collar with his lean forefinger. Then his face relaxed, and an odd grin diffused a kind of wintry glow over it. Richard had run away to sea. End of Chapter 6 After a lapse of four years, during which he had as completely vanished out of the memory of Stillwater as if he had been lying all the while in the crowded family tomb beneath the South Church, Richard Shackford reappeared one summer morning at the door of his cousin's house in Welch's court. Mr. Shackford was absent at the moment, and Mrs. Morgenson, an elderly deaf woman who came in for a few hours every day to do the housework, was busy in the extension. Without announcing himself, Richard stalked upstairs to the chamber in the gable, and went directly to a little shelf in one corner upon which lay the dog's eared copy of Robinson Crusoe just as he had left it, save for the four year's accumulation of dust. Richard took the book fiercely in both hands, and with a single mighty tug tore it from top to bottom and threw the fragments into the fireplace. A moment later, on the way downstairs, he encountered his kinsmen ascending. Ah, you have come back! was Mr. Shackford's grim greeting after a moment's hesitation. Yes, said Richard with embarrassment, though he had made up his mind not to be embarrassed by his cousin. I can't say I was looking for you. You might have dropped me a line. You were politer when you left. Why do you come back? And why did you go away? demanded the old man with abrupt fierceness. The last four years had bleached him and bent him, and made him look very old. I didn't like the idea of blaming it sharp, for one thing, said Richard, and I thought I liked the sea. And did you? No, sir. I enjoyed seeing foreign parts and all that. Quite the young gentleman on his travels. But the sea didn't agree with you. And now you like the idea of Blandman and Sharp? Not the least in the world, I assure you, cried Richard. I take to it as little as I ever did. Perhaps that is fortunate, but it's going to be rather difficult to suit your taste. What do you like? I like you, cousin Amil. You have always been kind to me, in your way. said poor Richard, yearning for a glimmer of human warmth and sympathy, and forgetting all the dreariness of his uncared-for childhood, he had been out in the world, and had found it even harder-hearted than his own home, which he now idealized in the first flush of returning to it. Again he saw himself, a blond-headed little fellow with stocking down at heel, climbing the steep staircase, or digging in the clay at the front gate, with the air full of the breath of lilocks. That same penetrating perfume, blown through the open hall door as he spoke, nearly brought the tears to his eyes. He had looked forward for years to this coming back to still water. Many a time as he had wandered along the streets of some foreign seaport, the rich architecture and the bright costumes had faded out before him, and given place to the fat grey belfry and slim red chimneys of the humble New England village where he was born. He had learned to love it after losing it, and now he had struggled back through countless trials and disasters to find no welcome. Cousin Lemuel, said Richard gently, only just us two are left, and we ought to be good friends, at least. We are good enough friends, mumbled Mr. Shackford, who could not evade taking the hand which Richard had forlornly reached out to him. But that needn't prevent us from understanding each other like rational creatures. I don't care for a great deal of fine sentiment in people who run away without so much as a thanky. I was all wrong. That's what folks always say, with the delusion that it makes everything all right. Surely it helps to admit it. That depends. It generally doesn't. What do you propose to do? I hardly know at the moment. My plans are quite in the air. In the air, repeated Mr. Shackford, I fancy that describes them. Your father's plans were always in the air too, and he never got any of them down. I intend to get mine down. Have you saved by anything? Not a cent. I thought as much. I had a couple of hundred dollars in my sea-chest, but I was shipwrecked and lost it. I barely saved myself. When Robinson Crusoe— Damn, Robinson Crusoe, snapped Mr. Shackford. That's what I say, returned Richard gravely. When Robinson Crusoe was cast on an uninhabited island, shrimps and soft shell crabs and all sorts of delicious mollus, readily boiled I've no doubt, crawled up on the beach and begged him to eat them. But I nearly starved to death. Of course. You will always be shipwrecked and always be starved to death. You are one of that kind. I don't believe you are Shackford at all. When they were not anything else, they were good sailors. If you had only a drop of his blood in your veins. And Mr. Shackford waved his head toward a faded portrait of a youngish, floored gentleman with banged hair and high coat collar which hung against the wall halfway up the staircase. This was the counterfeit presentment of the Mule Shackford's father seated with his back at an open window through which was seen a ship under full canvas with the Union Jack standing out straight in the wrong direction. But what are you going to do for yourself? You can't start a subscription paper and play with shipwrecked mariner, you know. No, I hardly care to do that, said Richard, with a good natured laugh, though no poor devil ever had a better outfit for the character. What are you calculated for? Richard was painfully conscious of his unfitness for many things, but he felt there was nothing in life to which he was so ill adapted as his present position. Yet until he could look about him he must needs eat his kinsman's reluctant bread or starve. The world was younger and more unsophisticated when mana dropped from the clouds. Mr. Shackford stood with his neck craned over the frayed edge of his satin stock and one hand resting indecisively on the banister and Richard on the step above, leaning his back against the blighted flowers of the wallpaper. From an oval window at the head of the stairs the summer sunshine streamed upon them and illuminated the high shouldered clock which, ensconced in an alcove, seemed to be listening to the conversation. There is no chance for you in the law, said Mr. Shackford, after a long pause. Sharps, nephew, has the berth. A while ago I might have got you into the mea to one ironworks, but the rascally directors are trying to ruin me now. There is the union store, if they happen to want a clerk. I suppose you would be about as handy behind a counter as a hippopotamus. I have no business of my own to train you in. You are not good for the sea, and the sea has probably spoiled you for anything else. A drop of saltwater just poisons a landsman. I am sure I don't know what to do with you. Don't bother yourself about it at all, said Richard cheerfully. You are going back on the whole family, ancestors and posterity, by suggesting that I can't make my own living. I only want a little time to take breath, don't you see, and a crust and a bed for a few days, such as you might give any wayfarer. Meanwhile I will look after things around the place. I fancy I was never an idler here since the day I learnt to split kindling. There's your old bed in the North Chamber, said Mr. Shackford, wrinkling his forehead helplessly. According to my notion, it's not so good as a bunk or a hammock slung in a tidy forecastle, but it's at your service, and Mrs. Morgensen, I daresay, can lay an extra plate at table. With which gracious acceptance of Richard's proposition, Mr. Shackford resumed his way upstairs, and the young man thoughtfully descended to the hall door and thence into the street to take a general survey of the commercial capabilities of Stillwater. The outlook was not inspiring, a machinist or a mechanic or a day laborer might have found a foothold. A man without handicraft was not in request in Stillwater. What is your trade? Was the staggering question that met Richard at the threshold. He went from workshop to workshop, confidently and cheerfully at first, whistling softly between wiles, but at every turn the question confronted him. In some places where he was recognized with thinly veiled surprise, as that boy of Shackford's, he was kindly put off, in others he received only a stare or a brutal no. By noon he had exhausted the leading shops and offices in the village and was so disheartened that he began to dread the thought of returning home to dinner. Clearly he was a superfluous person in Stillwater. A mortar-splashed hod-carrier who had seated himself on a pile of brick and was eating his noonday rations from a tin can just brought to him by a slateringly girl, gave Richard a spasm of envy. Here was a man who had found his place and was establishing what Richard did not seem able to establish in his own case, a right to exist. At supper Mr. Shackford refrained from examining Richard on his day's employment, for which reserve or indifference the boy was grateful. When the silent meal was over the old man went to his papers and Richard withdrew to his room in the gable. He had neglected to provide himself with a candle, however there was nothing to read. For in destroying Robinson Crusoe he had destroyed his entire library, so he sat and brooded in the moonlight, casting a look of disgust now and then at the mutilated volume on the hearth. That lying romance! It had been indirectly the cause of all his woe, filling his boyish brain with visions of picturesque adventure and sending him off to sea, where he had lost four precious years of his life. If I had stuck to my studies, reflected Richard while undressing, I might have made something of myself. He's a great friend, Robinson Crusoe. Richard fell asleep with as much bitterness in his bosom against the foes ingenious hero as if Robinson had been a living person instead of a living fiction, and out of this animosity grew a dream so fantastic and comical that Richard awoke himself with a bewildered laugh just as the sunrise read in the panes of the chamber window. In this dream somebody came to Richard and asked him if he had heard of that dreadful thing about young Crusoe. No confound him, said Richard, what is it? It has been ascertained, said somebody who seemed to Richard at once an intimate friend and an utter stranger. It has been ascertained beyond a doubt that the man Friday was not a man Friday at all, but a light-minded young princess from one of the neighboring islands who had fallen in love with Robinson. Her real name was Saturday. Why, that scandalous, cried Richard with heat. Think of the admiration and sympathy the world has been lavishing on this precious pair. Robinson Crusoe and his girl Saturday, that puts a different face on it. Another great moral character exploded, murmured the shadowy shape, mixing itself up with the moats of a sunbeam and drifting out through the window. Then Richard fell to laughing in his sleep and so awoke. He was still confused with the dream as he sat on the edge of his bed, pulling himself together in the broad daylight. Well, he muttered at length, I shouldn't wonder, there's nothing too bad to be believed at that man. CHAPTER VII Richard made an early start that morning in search of employment and duplicated the failure of the previous day. Nobody wanted him. If nobody wanted him in the village where he was born and bred, a village of counting rooms and workshops, was any other place likely to need him? He had only one hope, if it could be called a hope. At any rate he had treated it tenderly as such, and kept it for the last. He would apply to roll and smoke them. Long ago when Richard was an urchin making pot hooks in the lane, the man used occasionally to pat him on the head and give him pennies. This was not a foundation on which to rear a very lofty castle, but this was all he had. It was noon when Richard approached the marble yard, and the men were pouring out into the street through the wide gate in the rough deal fence which enclosed the works, heavy brawny men covered with fine white dust, who shouldered each other like cattle, and took the sidewalk to themselves. Richard stepped aside to let them pass, eyeing them curiously as possible comrades. Suddenly a slim dark fellow, who had retained his paper cap and leather apron, halted, and thrust forth a horny hand. The others went on. Hello, Dick Shackford. What is that you will, you here? Been here two years now, on a slow come's apprentices. Added Durgin, with an air of easy grandeur. Two years, how time flies when it doesn't crawl. Do you like it? My time will be out next. Oh, the work? Well, yeah. It's not bad. And there's a jolly set in the yard. But how about you? I heard last night you'd got home, been everywhere and come back wealthy. The boys used to say you was off pirate-in. No such luck, answered Richard with a smile. I didn't pray on the high seas, quite the contrary. The high sea captured my kit and four-year savings. I will tell you about it some day. If I have a limb to my name and a breath left to my body, it is no thanks to the Indian Ocean. That is all I have got, Will, and I am looking around for bread and butter, literally bread and butter. No, an old gentleman so rich! Durgin said this with sincere indignation, and was perhaps unconscious himself, of experiencing that nameless, shadowy satisfaction which Rostrukald says we find in the adversity of our best friends. Certainly Richard looked very seedy in his suit of slop shop clothes. I was on my way to Mr. Slocum's to see if I could do anything with him, Richard continued. To get a job, do you mean? Yes, to get work. To learn how to work. To master a trade, in short. You can't be an apprentice, you know, said Durgin. Why not? Slocum has to. Suppose he should happen to want another. He might. Association won't allow it. What association? The Marble Workers' Association, of course. They wouldn't allow it. How is that? This is the way of it. Slocum is free to take on two apprentices every year, but no more. That prevents workmen increase in too fast, and so keeps up wages. The Marble Workers' Association is a very neat thing, I can tell you. But doesn't Mr. Slocum own the yard? I thought he did. Yeah, he owns the yard. If he wished to extend the business, couldn't he employ more hands? As many as he could get, skilled workmen, but not apprentices. And Mr. Slocum agrees to that, inquire Richard. He does. And likes it? Not he, he hates it, but he can't help himself. Upon my soul I don't see what prevents him taking on as many apprentices as he wants to. Why the association to be sure? return Durgin, glancing at the town clock, which marks seven minutes past the hour. But how could they stop him? In plenty of ways. Suppose Slocum has a lot of unfinished contracts on hand. He always has fat contracts, and the men was to knock off work. That would be kind of awkward, wouldn't it? For a day or two, yes. He could send out of town for hands, suggested Richard. And they wouldn't come, if the association said, stay where you are. They are mostly in the ring. Some outsiders might come, though. Then what? Why, then the boys would make it pretty hot for them in still water. Don't you notice? I notice there's not much chance for me, said Richard despondingly. Isn't that so? Can't say. Better talk with Slocum. But I must get along. I have to be back sharp at one. I want to hear about your knocking around, the worst kind. Can we meet somewhere tonight at the tavern? The tavern? That didn't used to be a quiet place. It isn't quiet now. But there's nowhere else to go of a night. It's a comfortable den, and there's always some capital fellas dropping in. A glass of lager with a maid is not a bad thing after a hard day's work. Both are good things when they are of the right sort. That's like saying I'm not the right sort, isn't it? I meant nothing of the kind. But I don't take to the tavern. Not that I'm squeamish. I have lived four years among sailors, and have been in rougher places than you ever dreamed of. But all the same I'm afraid of the tavern. I've seen many a brave fellow wrecked on that reef. Yeah, I always was a bit stuck up, said Durgin candidly. Not an inch. I never had much reason to be, and less now than ever, when I can scarcely afford to drink water, let alone beer. I will drop round to your mother some evening. I hope she's well, and tell you of my ups and downs. That will be pleasanter for all hands. Oh, as you like. Now for Mr. Slokom, though you have taken the wind out of me. The two separated, Durgin with a half smile on his lip, and Richard in a melancholy frame of mind. He passed from the grass fringe-stree into the deserted marble-yard, where it seemed as if the green summer had suddenly turned into white winter, and threading his way between the large drifts of snowy stone, knocked at the door of Mr. Slokom's private office. William Durgin had summed up the case fairly enough, as it stood between the Marble Workers Association and Roland Slokom. The system of this branch of the trades union kept trained workmen comparatively scarce, and enabled them to command regular and even advanced prices at periods when other trades were depressed. The older hands looked upon a fresh apprentice in the yard, with much the same favor as working men of the era of Jackherd looked upon the introduction of a new piece of machinery. Unless the apprentice had exceptional tact, he underwent a rough novitiate. In any case he served a term of social ostracism before he was admitted to full comradeship. Mr. Slokom could easily have found openings each year for a dozen learners, had the matter been under his control, but it was not. I am the master of each man individually, he declared, but collectively there are my master. So his business, instead of naturally spreading and becoming a benefit to the many, was kept carefully pruned down to the benefit of the few. He was often forced to decline important contracts, the filling of which would have resulted to the advantage of every person in the village. Mr. Slokom recognized Richard at once, and listened kindly to his story. It was Mr. Slokom's way to listen kindly to everyone, but he was impressed with Richard's intelligence and manner, and became desirous for several reasons to assist him. In the first place there was room in the shops for another apprentice. Experienced hands were on jobs that could have been as well done by beginners, and in the second place Mr. Slokom had an intuition that Lemuel Shackford was not treating the lad fairly, though Richard had said nothing to this effect. Now Mr. Slokom and Mr. Shackford were just then at swords-points. I don't suppose I could annoy Shackford more, was Mr. Slokom's reflection, than by doing something for this boy, whom he has always shamelessly neglected. The motive was not a high one, but Richard would have been well satisfied with it if he could have defined it. He did define that Mr. Slokom was favorably inclined towards him, and stood watching that gentleman's face with hopeful anxiety. I have my regulation number of young men, Richard, said Mr. Slokom, and there will be no vacancy until autumn, if you could wait a few months. Richard's head drooped. Can't do that. You write a good hand, you say? Perhaps you could assist the bookkeeper until there's a chance for you in the yard. I think I could, sir, said Richard eagerly. If you are only a draftsman, now I could do something much better for you. I intend to set up a shop for ornamental carving, and I want someone to draw patterns. If you had a knack at designing, if you could draw at all. Richard's face lighted up. Perhaps you have a turn that way? I remember the queer things you used to scratch in the mud in the court, when you were a little shaver. Can you draw? Why, that's the one thing I can do, cried Richard, in a rough fashion, of course, he added, fearing he had overstated it. It is a rough fashion that will serve. You must let me see some of your sketches. I haven't any, sir. I had a hundred in my sea-chest, but that was lost. Pencilings of old archways, cathedral spires, bits of frez, and such odds and ends as took my fancy in the ports we touched at. I recollect one bit. I think I could do it for you now, shall I? Mr. Slokom nodded ascent, smiling at the young fellow's enthusiasm, and only partially suspecting his necessity. Richard picked up a pen and began scratching on a letter sheet which lay on the desk. He was five or six minutes at the work, during which the elder man watched him with an amused expression. It's a section of cornice on the façade of the Hindu college at Calcutta, said Richard, handing him the paper. No, it's the custom house. I forget which, but it doesn't matter. The amused looked gradually passed out of Mr. Slokom's countenance as he examined the sketch. It was roughly, but clearly drawn, and full of facility. Why, that's very clever, he said, holding it at arm's length, and then with great gravity. I hope you're not a genius, Richard. That would be too much of a fine thing. If you're not, you can be of service to me in my plans. Richard laughingly made haste to declare that to the best of his knowledge and belief he was not a genius, and it was decided on the spot that Richard should assist Mr. Sims the bookkeeper, and presently try his hand at designing ornamental patterns for the carvers. Mr. Slokom allowing him apprentice wages, until the quality of his work should be ascertained. It is very little, said Mr. Slokom, but it will pay your board if you do not live at home. I shall not remain at my cousins, Richard replied, if you call that home. I can imagine it's not much of a home. Your cousin, not to put too fine a point on it, is a wretch. I am sorry to hear you say that, sir. He is my only living kinsman. You are fortunate in having but one, then. However, I am wrong to abuse him to you, but I cannot speak of him with moderation. He has just played me a despicable trick. Look here. Mr. Slokom led Richard to the door, and pointing to a row of new workshops, which extended the entire length of one side of the marble yard, said, I built these last sprint. After the shingles were on, we discovered that the rear partition, for a distance of seventy-five feet, overlapped two inches on Shackford's meadow. I was ready to drop when I sought. Your cousin is such an unmanageable old fiend. Of course, I went to him immediately, and what do you think? He demanded five hundred dollars for that strip of land. Five hundred dollars for a few inches of swamp meadow, not worth ten dollars the acre. Then take your disreputable mill of my property, said Shackford. He called it a disreputable mill. I was hasty, perhaps, and I told him to go to the devil. He said he would, and he did, for he went to Blandman, when the lawyers got hold of it they bothered the life out of me, so I just moved the building forward two inches at an expense of seven hundred dollars. Then what does the demon do? But board up my windows opening on the meadow. Richard, I make it a condition that you shall not lodge at Shackford's. Nothing could induce me to live another day in the same house with him, sir, answered Richard, suppressing an inclination to smile, and then seriously, his bread is bitter. Richard went back with a light heart to Welch's court, at the gate of the marble yard he met William Durgeon returning to work. The steam whistle had sounded the call, and there was no time for exchange of words, so Richard gave his comrade a bright nod and passed by. Durgeon turned and stared after him. Looks as if Slocum has taken him on, but it never can be as an apprentice. He wouldn't dare do it. Mr. Shackford had nearly finished his frugal dinner when Richard entered. If you can't hit it to be and at your meals, said Mr. Shackford, helping himself absently to the remaining chop, perhaps you had better stay away altogether. I can do that now, cousin, replied Richard sonnally. I have engaged with Slocum. The old man laid down his knife and fork. With Slocum? A Shackford? A miserable marble chipper? There was so little hint of the aristocrat and Lemieux Shackford's sordid life and person that no one suspected him of even self-esteem. He went as meanly dressed as a tramp and as careless of contemporary criticism. Yet clear down in his liver or somewhere in his anatomy he nourished an odd, abstract pride in the family Shackford. Heaven knows why. To be sure it dated far back. Its women had always been virtuous and its men, if not always virtuous, had always been ship captains. But beyond this the family had never amounted to anything, and now there was so very little left of it. For Richard as Richard Lemieux cared nothing. For Richard as a Shackford he had a chaotic feeling that defied analysis and had never before risen to the surface. It was therefore with a disgust entirely apart from the hatred of Slocum or regard for Richard that the old man exclaimed, A Shackford? A miserable marble chipper? That is better than hanging around the village with my hands in my pockets, isn't it? I don't know that anybody has demanded that you should hang around the village. I ought to go away, you mean, but I have found work here and I might not find it elsewhere. Still, Water, it's not the place to begin life in. It's the place to go away from and come back to. Well, I have come back. And how? With one shirt and a lot of bad sailor habits. My one shirt is my only very bad habit, said Richard with a laugh. He could laugh now. And I mean to get rid of that. Mr. Shackford snapped his fingers disdainfully. You ought to have stuck to the sea. That's respectable. In ten years you might have risen to the master of a bark. That would have been honourable. You might have gone down in a gale. You probably would. And that would have been fortunate. But a stone-cutter? You can understand. growled Mr. Shackford, reaching out for his straw hat, which he put on and crushed over his brows. I don't keep a boarding-house for Slocum's hands. Oh, I'm far from asking it, cried Richard. I am thankful for the two-night shelter I have had. That's some of your sarcasm, I suppose, said Mr. Shackford, half-turning, with his hands on the doorknob. No, it is some of my sincerity. I am really obliged to you. You weren't very cordial, to be sure, but I did not deserve cordiality. Yeah, figure that out correctly. I want to begin over again, you see, and start fair. Then begin by dropping Slocum. You have not given me a chance to tell you what the arrangement is. However, it's irrevocable. I don't want to hear. I don't care a curse, so long as it is an arrangement. And Shackford hurried out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Then Richard, quite undisturbed by his cousin's unreasonable-ness, sat himself down to eat the last meal he was ever to eat under that roof, a feat that his cousin's appetite had rendered comparatively easy. While engaged in this, Richard resolved in his mind several questions as to his future abode. He could not reconcile his thought to any of the working-men's boarding-houses, of which there were five or six in the slums of the village, where the doorways were greasy and women flitted about in the hottest weather, with thick woolen shawls over their heads. Yet his finances did not permit him to aspire to lodgings much more decent, if he could only secure a small room somewhere in a quiet neighborhood. Possibly Mrs. Durgen would let him have a chamber in her cottage. He was beginning life over again, and it struck him as nearly an ideal plan to begin it on the identical spot where he had, in a manner, made his first start. Besides, there was William Durgen for company, when the long nights of the New England winter set in. The idea smiled so pleasantly in Richard's fancy that he pushed the plate away from him impatiently, and picked up his hat, which lay on the floor beside the chair. That evening he moved from the Shackford house to Mrs. Durgen's cottage in Cross Street. It was not an imposing ceremony, with a small brown paper parcel under his arm. He walked from one threshold to the other, and the thing was done. The six months which followed Richard's installment in the office at Slocum's yard were so crowded with novel experience that he scarcely noted their flight. The room at the Durgen's, as will presently appear, turned out an unfortunate arrangement, but everything else had prospered. Richard proved an efficient aide to Mr. Sims, who quietly shifted the payroll to the younger man's shoulders. This was a very complicated account to keep, involving, as it did, a separate record of each employee's time and special work. An ancient bookkeeper parts lightly with such trifles when he has a capable assistant. It also fell to Richard's lot to pay the hands on Saturdays. William Durgen blinked his surprise on the first occasion, as he filed in with the others and saw Richard posted at the desk, with the payroll in his hand and the pile of green-backs lying in front of him. I suppose she'll be the proprietor next, remarked Durgen that evening at the supper table. When I am will, answered Richard cheerily, you will be on the road to Foreman of the finishing shop. Thank you, said Durgen, not too graciously. It graded on him to play the part of Foreman, even in imagination, with Dick Shackford as proprietor. Durgen could not disconnect his friend from that seedy, half-crestfallen figure to whom, a few months earlier, he had given elementary instruction on the Marble Workers Association. Richard did not find his old schoolmate so companionable as memory and anticipation had painted him. The two young men moved on different levels. Richard's sea-life, now that he had got a sufficient distance from it, was a perspective full of pleasant color. He had a taste for reading, a thirst to know things, and his world was not wholly shut in by the Stillwater horizon. It was still a pittifly narrow world, but wide compared with Durgen's, which extended no appreciable distance in any direction from the Stillwater Hotel. He spent his evenings chiefly there, returning home late at night, and often in so noisy a mood as to disturb Richard, who slept in an adjoining apartment. This was an annoyance, and it was an annoyance to have Mrs. Durgen coming to him with complaints of William. Other matters irritated Richard. He had contrived to replenish his wardrobe, and the sunburn was disappearing from his hands, which the nature of his occupation left soft and unscarred. Durgen was disposed at times to be sarcastic on these changes, but always stopped short of actual offence, for he remembered that Shackford, when a boy, amiable and patient as he was, had had a tiger's temper at bottom. Durgen had seen it roused once or twice, and even received a chance sweep of the paw. Richard liked Durgen's rough wit, as little as Durgen relished Richard's good-natured bluntness. It was a mistake, that trying to pick up the drop-thread of old acquaintance. As soon as the permanency of his position was assured, and his means warranted the step, Richard transported himself and his effects to a comfortable chamber in the same house with Mr. Pinkham, the schoolmaster, the perpetual falsetto of whose flute was positively soothing after four months of William Durgen's bass. Mr. Pinkham, having but one lung and that defective, played on the flute. You see what you have done, William, remarked Mrs. Durgen plaintively, with your ways. There goes the quietest young man in Stillwater, and four dollars a week. There goes a swell, you'd better say. He was always a proud beggar. Nobody was ever good enough for him. You shouldn't say that, William. I could cry to lose him and his cheerfulness out of the house, and Mrs. Durgen began to whimper. Wait till he's out of luck again, and he'll come back to us fast enough. That's when his kind remembers their friends. Blast him. He can't even take a drop of beer with a chum at the tavern. And right, too. There's beer enough taken at the tavern without him. If you mean me, mother, I'll get drunk to-night. No, no, cried Mrs. Durgen, pleadingly. I didn't mean you, William. But Peters, in that set. I thought you couldn't mean me, said William, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his monkey jacket, and sauntering off in the direction of the Stillwater Hotel, where there was a choice company gathered, it being Saturday night, and the monthly meeting of the union. Mr. Slocum had wasted no time in organizing a shop for his experiment in ornamental carving. Five or six men, who had worked elsewhere at this branch, were turned over to the new department, with Stevens as foreman, and Richard as designer. Very shortly, Richard had as much as he could do to furnish the patterns required. These consisted mostly of scrolls, wreaths, and mortuary dove wings for headstones. Fortunately for Richard, he had no genius, but plenty of a kind of talent just abreast with Mr. Slocum's purpose. As the carvers became interested in their work, they began to show Richard the respect and goodwill which at first had been withheld. For they had not quite liked being under the supervision of one who had not served at the trade. His youth had also told against him. But Richard's pleasant, offhand manner quickly won them. He had come in contact with rough men on shipboard, he had studied their ways, and he knew that with all their roughness there is no class so sensitive. This insight was of great service to him. Stevens, who had perhaps been the least disposed to accept Richard, was soon his warm ally. See what a smooth fist the lad has, he said one day, holding up a new drawing to the shop. A man with a wreath of them acorns on his headstone, ought to be perfectly happy, damn him! It was, however, an anchor with a broken chain pendant, a design for a monument to the late Captain Septimius Salter, who had parted his cable at sea, which settled Richard's status with Stevens. Boys, that's Shackford is what I call a boring, genie-eye. After all, is not the one-eyed man who is king among the blind, the most fortunate of monarchs? Your little talent in a provincial village looms a great deal taller than your mighty genius in a city. Richard Shackford, working for Roland Slocum at Stillwater, was happier than Michelangelo in Rome with Pope Julius II at his back, and Richard was the better paid, too. One day he picked up a useful hint from a celebrated sculptor, who had come to the village in search of marble for the base of a soldier's monument. Richard was laboriously copying a spray of fern, the delicacy of which eluded his pencil. The sculptor stood a moment, silently observing him. Why do you spend an hour doing only passably well when you could do perfectly in ten minutes? I suppose it is because I am stupid, sir, said Richard. No stupid man ever suspected himself of being anything but clever. You can draw capitalally. But nature beats you out and out at designing ferns. Just ask her to make you a facsimile in plaster and see how handily she will lend herself to the job. Of course you must help her a little. Oh, I am not above giving nature a lift, said Richard modestly. Lay a cloth on your table, place the fern on the cloth, and pour a thin paste of plaster of paris over the leaf. Do that gently, so as not to disarrange the spray. When the plaster is set, there's your mold. Remove the leaf, oil the matrix, and pour in fresh plaster. When that is set, cut away the mold carefully, and there's your spray of fern. As graceful and perfect as if nature had done it all by herself. You get the very texture of the leaf by this process. After that Richard made cast instead of drawings for the carvers, and fancied he was doing a new thing, until he visited some marble works in the great city. At this period whatever change subsequently took place in his feeling, Richard was desirous of establishing friendly relations with his cousin. The young fellow's sense of kinship was singularly strong, and it was only after several repulses at the door of the Shackford house and on the street that he relinquished the hope of placating the sour old man. At times Richard was moved almost to pity him. Every day Mr. Shackford seemed to grow shabbier and more spectral. He was a grotesque figure now, in his napless hat and broken down stock. The metal buttonholes on his ancient waistcoat had worn their way through the satin coverings, leaving here and there a sparse fringe around the edges, and somehow suggesting little bald heads. Looking at him you felt that the inner man was as threadbare and dilapidated as his outside, but in his lonely old age he asked for no human sympathy or companionship, and in fact stood in no need of either. With one devouring passion he set the world at defiance. He loved his gold, the metal itself, the weight and color and touch of it. In his bedroom on the ground floor Mr. Shackford kept a small iron-clamped box filled to the lid with bright yellow coins. Often at the dead of night, with door bolted and curtain down, he would spread out the glittering pieces on the table, and bend over them with an amorous glow in his faded eyes. These were his blond mistresses. He took a fearful joy in listening to their rustling muffled laughter as he drew them towards him with eager hands. If at that instant a blind chance to slam, or a footfall to echo in the lonely court, then the withered old sultan would hurry his slaves back into their iron-bound suraglio and extinguish the light. It would have been a wasted tenderness to pity him. He was very happy, in his own way, that Lemuel Shackford. Towards the close of his second year with Mr. Slocum, Richard was assigned a workroom by himself, and relieved of his accountant's duties. His undivided energies were demanded by the carving department, which had proved a lucrative success. The rear of the lot on which Mr. Slocum's house stood was shut off from the marble yard by a high brick wall pierced with a private door for Mr. Slocum's convenience. Over the kitchen in the extension, which reached within a few feet of the wall, was a disused chamber, approachable on the outside by a flight of steps leading to a veranda. To this room Richard and his traps were removed. With a round table standing in the center, with the plaster models arranged on shelves, and sketches in pencil and crayon, tacked against the whitewashed walls, the apartment was transformed into a delightful atelier. An open fireplace with a brace of antiquated iron dogs straddling the red brick hearth gave the finishing touch. The occupant was an easy communication with the yard, from which the busy din of clinking chisels came in musically to his ear, and was still beyond the reach of unnecessary interruption. Richard saw clearly all the advantages of this transfer, but he was far from having any intimation that he had made the most important move of his life. The room had two doors, one opened on the veranda and the other into a narrow hall connecting the extension with the main building. Frequently, that first week after taking possession, Richard detected the sweep of a broom and the rustle of drapery in this passageway, the sound sometimes hushing itself quite close to the door, as if someone had paused a moment just outside. He wondered whether it was the servant maid or Margaret Slokum, whom he knew very well by sight. It was, in fact, Margaret, who was dying with the curiosity of fourteen to peep into the studio, so carefully locked whenever the young man left it, dying with curiosity to see the workshop, and standing in rather great awe of the workman. In the home-circle her father had a habit of speaking with deep respect of young Shackford's ability and once she had seen him at their table, at a Thanksgiving. On this occasion Richard had appalled her by the solemnity of his shyness. Poor Richard, who was so unused to the amenities of a handsomely served dinner, that the chill that came over him cooled the thanksgiving turkey on his palate. When it had been decided that he was to have the spare room for his workshop, Margaret, with womanly officiousness, had swept it and dusted it and demolished the cobwebs, but since then she had not been able to obtain so much as a glimpse of the interior. A ten-minute sweeping had suffice for the chamber, but the passageway seemed in quite an irreclamable state, judging by the number of times it was necessary to sweep it in the course of a few days. Now Margaret was not an unusual mixture of timidity and daring, so one morning, about a week after Richard was settled, she walked with quaking heart up to the door of the studio and knocked as bold as brass. Richard opened the door and smiled pleasantly at Margaret standing on the threshold, with an expression of demure defiance in her face. Did Mr. Shackford want anything more in the way of pans and pales for his plaster? No, Mr. Shackford had everything he required of the kind. But would not Miss Margaret walk in? Yes, she would step in for a moment, but with a good deal of indifference, though giving an air of chance to her subtle determination to examine that room from top to bottom. Richard showed her his drawings and casts, and enlightened her on all the simple mysteries of the craft. Margaret, of whom he was a trifle afraid at first, amused him with her candor and sedateness, seeming now a mere child, and now an elderly person gravely inspecting matters. The frankness and simplicity were hers by nature, and the oldish ways, notably her self-possession, so quick to assert itself after an instance for getfulness, came perhaps of losing her mother in early childhood, and the premature duties which that misfortune entailed. She amused him, for she was only fourteen, but she impressed him also, for she was Mr. Slocum's daughter, yet it was not her lightness but her gravity that made Richard smile to himself. I am not interrupting you, she said presently. Not in the least, said Richard. I am waiting for these moles to harden. I cannot do anything until then. Papa says you are very clever, remarked Margaret, turning her wide black eyes full upon him, are you? For from it, replied Richard, laughing to veil his confusion, but I am glad your father thinks so. You should not be glad to have him think so, returned Margaret reprovingly. If you are not clever, I suppose you are, though. Tell the truth now. It is not fair to force a fellow into praising himself. You are trying to creep out. Well, then, there are many cleverer persons than I in the world, and a few not so clever. That won't do, said Margaret positively. I don't understand what you mean by cleverness, Ms. Margaret. There are great many kinds and degrees. I can make fairly honest patterns for the men to work by, but I am not an artist, if you mean that. You are not an artist? No, an artist creates, and I only copy, and that in a small way. Anyone can learn to prepare casts, but to create a bust or a statue, that is to say a fine one, a man must have genius. You have no genius? Not a grain. I am sorry to hear that, said Margaret with a disappointed look. But perhaps it will come, she added encouragingly. I have read that nearly all great artists and poets are almost always modest. They know better than anybody else how far they fall short of what they intend, and so they don't put on airs. You don't either. I like that in you. Maybe you have genius without knowing it, Mr. Shackford. It is quite without knowing it, I assure you, protested Richard, with suppressed merriment. What an odd girl, he thought. She is actually talking to me like a mother. The twinkling light in the young man's eyes, or something that jarred in his manner, caused Margaret at once to withdraw into herself. She went silently about the room, examining the tools and patterns. Then, nearing the door, suddenly dropped Richard a quaint little curtsy, and was gone. This was the colorless beginning of a friendship that was destined speedily to be full of tender lights and shadows, and to flow on with unsuspected depth. For several days Richard saw nothing more of Margaret, and scarcely thought of her. The strange little figure was fading out of his mind when, one afternoon, it again appeared at his door. This time Margaret had left something of her sedateness behind. She struck Richard as being both less ripe and less immature than he had fancied. She interested rather than amused him. Perhaps he had been partially insulated by his own shyness on the first occasion, and had caught only a confused and inaccurate impression of Margaret's personality. She remained half an hour in the workshop, and at her departure omitted the formal courtesy. After this, Margaret seldom let a week slip without tapping once or twice at the studio, at first with some pretext or other, and then with no pretense whatever. When Margaret had disburdened herself of excuses for dropping in to watch Richard mulled his leaves and flowers, she came oftener, and Richard insensibly drifted into the habit of expecting her on certain days, and was disappointed when she failed to appear. His industry had saved him, until now, from discovering how solitary his life really was. For his life was as solitary, as solitary as that of Margaret, who lived in the Great House with only her father, the two servants, and an episodical aunt. The mother was long ago dead. Margaret could not recollect when that gray headstone, with blotches of rusty green moss breaking out of the lettering, was not in the churchyard, and there never had been any brothers or sisters. To Margaret, Richard's installation in the empty room, where as a child she had always been afraid to go, was the single important break she could remember in the monotony of her existence, and now a vague yearning for companionship, the blind sense of the plant reaching towards the sunshine drew her there. The tacitly prescribed half-hour often lengthened to an hour. Sometimes Margaret brought a book with her, or a piece of embroidery, and the two spoke scarcely ten words, Richard giving her a smile now and then, and she returning a sympathetic nod as the cast came out successfully. Margaret at fifteen, she was fifteen now, was not a beauty. There is the loveliness of the bud and the loveliness of the full-blown flower, but Margaret as a blossom was not pretty. She was awkward and angular, with prominent shoulder blades, and no soft curves anywhere in her slimness. Only her black hair, growing low on the forehead, and her eyes were fine. Her profile, indeed, with the narrow forehead and the sensitive upper lip, might fairly have suggested the mask of Clyti, which Richard had bought of an itinerant image dealer and fixed on a bracket over the mantle-shelf. But her eyes were her specialty, if one may say that. They were fringe with such heavy lashes that the girl seemed always to be in half-morning. Her smile was singularly sweet and bright, perhaps because it broke through so much somber colouring. If there was a latent spark of sentiment between Richard and Margaret in those earlier days, neither was conscious of it. They had seemingly begun, where happy lovers generally end, by being dear comrades. He liked to have Margaret sitting there, with her needle flashing in the sunlight, or her eyelashes making a rich gloom above the book as she read aloud. It was so agreeable to look up from his work and not be alone. He had been alone so much, and Margaret found nothing in the world pleasanter than to sit there and watch Richard making his winter garden, as she called it. By and by it became her custom to pass every Saturday afternoon in that employment. Margaret was not content to be merely a visitor. She took a housewifely care of the workshop, resolutely straightening out its chronic disorder at unexpected moments, and fighting the white dust that settled upon everything. The green paper shade, which did not roll up very well at the west window, was of her devising. An empty camphor vial on Richard's desk had always a clove pink or a pansy or a rose stuck into it, according to the season. She hid herself away and peeped out in a hundred feminine things in the room. Sometimes she was a bit of crochet work left on a chair, and sometimes she was only a hairpin which Richard gravely picked up and put on the mantelpiece. Mr. Slocum threw no obstacles in the path of this idyllic friendship, possibly he did not observe it. In his eyes Margaret was still a child, a point of view that necessarily excluded any consideration of Richard. Perhaps, however, if Mr. Slocum could have assisted invisibly at a pretty little scene which took place in the studio one day, some twelve or eighteen months after Margaret's first visit to it, he might have found food for reflection. It was a Saturday afternoon. Margaret had come into the workshop with her sewing, as usual. The papers on the round table had been neatly cleared away, and Richard was standing by the window, indelibly drumming on the glass with a palette knife. Not at work this afternoon? I was waiting for you. That is no excuse at all, said Margaret, sweeping across the room with a curious air of self-consciousness and arranging her drapery with infinite pains as she seated herself. Richard looked puzzled for a moment and then exclaimed, Margaret, you have got on a long dress. Yes, said Margaret with dignity. Do you like it, the train? That is a train. Yes, said Margaret, standing up and glancing over her left shoulder at the soft folds of maroon-colored stuff which, with a mysterious feminine movement of the foot, she caused to untwist itself and flow out gracefully behind her. There was really something very pretty in the hesitating lines of the tall, slender figure as she leaned back that way. Certain unsuspected points emphasized themselves so cunningly. I never saw anything finer, declared Richard. It was worth waiting for. But you shouldn't have waited, said Margaret, with a gratified flush, settling herself into the chair again. It was understood that you were never to let me interfere with your work. You see, you have. By being twenty minutes late, I finished that acorn border for Stephen's capitals, and there's nothing more to do for the yard. I'm going to make something for myself, and I want you to lend me a hand. How can I help you, Richard? Margaret asked, promptly stopping the needle in the hem. I need a paperweight to keep my sketches from being blown about, and I wish you, literally, to lend me a hand, a hand to take a cast of. Really? I think that little white claw would make a very neat paperweight, said Richard. Margaret gravely rolled up her sleeve to the elbow, and contemplated the hand and wrist critically. It is like a claw, isn't it? I think you can find something better than that. Nope, that is what I want, and nothing else. That or no paperweight for me. Very well, just as you choose. It will be a fright. The other hand, please. I gave you the left because I have a ring on this one. You can take off the ring, I suppose. Of course I can take it off. Well, then do. Richard, said Margaret severely, I hope you are not a fidget. A what? A fuss, then. A person who always wants everything some other way, and makes just twice as much trouble as anybody else. No, Margaret, I am not that. I prefer your right hand, because the left is next to the heart, and the evaporation of the water in the placer turns it as cold as snow. Your arm will be chilled to the shoulder. We don't want to do anything to hurt the good little heart, you know. Certainly not, said Margaret. There. And she rested her right arm on the table, while Richard placed the hand in the desired position on a fresh napkin which he had folded for the purpose. Let your hand lie flexible, please. Hold it naturally. Why do you stiffen the fingers so? I don't. They stiffen themselves, Richard. They know they are going to have their photograph taken, and can't look natural. Whoever does. After a minute the fingers relaxed, and settled of their own accord into an easy pose. Richard laid his hand softly on her wrist. Don't move now. I'll be as quiet as a mouse, said Margaret, giving a sudden, queer little glance at his face. Richard emptied a paper of white powder into a great yellow bowl, half filled with water, and fell to stirring it vigorously, like a pastry-cook beating eggs. When the placer was of the proper consistency, he began building it up around the hand, pouring on a spoonful at a time. Here and there carefully. In a minute or two the inert white fingers were completely buried. Margaret made a comical grimace. Is it cold? Ice, said Margaret, shutting her eyes involuntarily. If it is too disagreeable we can give it up, suggested Richard. No, don't touch it, she cried, waving him back with her free arm. I don't mind, but it's as cold as so much snow. How curious! What does it? I suppose a scientific fellow could explain the matter to you easily enough. When the water evaporates, a kind of congealing process sets in. A sort of atmospheric change, don't you know? The sudden precipitation of the, the, You're as good as Tyndall on heat, said Margaret gemurrly. Oh, Tyndall is well enough in his way, returned Richard. But of course he doesn't go into things so deeply as I do. The idea of telling me that a congealing process set in, when I am nearly frozen to death, cried Margaret, bowing her head over the imprisoned arm. Your unseemly levity, Margaret, makes it necessary for me to defer my remarks on natural phenomena, until some more fitting occasion. Oh, Richard, don't let an atmospheric change come over you. When you knocked on my door months ago, said Richard, I didn't dream you were such a satirical little piece, or maybe you wouldn't have got in. You stood there as meek as Moses, with your frock reaching only to the tops of your boots. You were a deception, Margaret. I was dreadfully afraid of you, Richard. You are not afraid of me nowadays. Not a bit. You are showing your true colors, that long dress, too. I believe the train has turned your head. But just now you said you admired it. So I did, and do. It makes you look quite like a woman, though. I want to be a woman. I would like to be as old, as old as Mrs. Methuselah. Was there a Mrs. Methuselah? I really forget, replied Richard, considering. But there must have been. The old gentleman had time enough to have several. I believe, however, that history is rather silent about his domestic affairs. Well, then, said Margaret, after thinking it over, I would like to be as old as the youngest Mrs. Methuselah. That was probably the last one, remarked Richard, with great profundity. She was probably some giddy young thing of seventy or eighty. Those old widowers never take a wife of their own age. I shouldn't want you to be seventy, Margaret, or even eighty. On the whole, perhaps, I shouldn't fancy it myself. Do you approve of persons marrying twice? No, not at the same time. Of course I didn't mean that, said Margaret with asperity. How provoking you can be! But they used to, in the olden time, don't you know? No, I don't. Richard burst out laughing. Imagine him, he cried. Imagine Methuselah in his eight or nine hundredth year, dressed in his customary bridal suit, with a sprig of sentry plant stuck in his buttonhole. Richard, said Margaret solemnly, you shouldn't speak jestingly of a scriptural character. At this Richard broke out again. But gracious me, he exclaimed, suddenly checking himself, I am forgetting you all this while. Richard hurriedly reversed the mass of plaster on the table, and released Margaret's half-petrified fingers. They were shriveled and colorless with the cold. There isn't any feeling in it whatever, said Margaret, holding up her hand helplessly, like a wounded wing. Richard took the fingers between his palms, and chafed them smartly for a moment or two, to restore the suspended circulation. There that will do, said Margaret, withdrawing her hand. Are you all right now? Yes, thanks. And then she added, smiling. I suppose a scientific fellow could explain why my fingers seem to be full of hot pins and needles shooting in every direction. Tindall's your man, Tindall on heat, answered Richard with a laugh, turning to examine the result of his work. The mold is perfect, Margaret. You were a good girl to keep so still. Richard then proceeded to make the cast, which was soon placed on the window ledge to harden in the sun. When the plaster was set, he cautiously chipped off the shell with a chisel, Margaret leaning over his shoulder to watch the operation. And there was the little white claw, which ever after took such dainty care of his papers. And ultimately became so precious to him as a part of Margaret's very self, that he would not have exchanged it for the Venus of Milo. But as yet Richard was far enough from all that.