Part 13

So much for the person. As to the time, the place, and the tools, I have many things to say, which at present I have no room for. The good sense of the practitioner has usually directed him to night and privacy. Yet there have not been wanting cases where this rule was departed from with excellent effect. In respect to time, Mrs. Ruscombe’s case is a beautiful exception, which I have already noticed; and in respect both to time and place, there is a fine exception in the annals of Edinburgh (year 1805), familiar to every child in Edinburgh, but which has unaccountably been defrauded of its due portion of fame amongst English amateurs. The case I mean is that of a porter to one of the banks, who was murdered whilst carrying a bag of money, in broad daylight, on turning out of the High Street, one of the most public streets in Europe, and the murderer is to this hour undiscovered.

“Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus, Singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.”

And now, gentlemen, in conclusion, let me again solemnly disclaim all pretensions on my own part to the character of a professional man. I never attempted any murder in my life, except in the year 1801, upon the body of a tom-cat; and _that_ turned out differently from my intention. My purpose, I own, was downright murder. “Semper ego auditor tantum?” said I, “nunquamne reponam?” And I went down stairs in search of Tom at one o’clock on a dark night, with the “animus” and no doubt with the fiendish looks of a murderer. But when I found him, he was in the act of plundering the pantry of bread and other things. Now this gave a new turn to the affair; for the time being one of general scarcity, when even Christians were reduced to the use of potato-bread, rice-bread, and all sorts of things, it was downright treason in a tom-cat to be wasting good wheaten-bread in the way he was doing. It instantly became a patriotic duty to put him to death; and as I raised aloft and shook the glittering steel, I fancied myself rising like Brutus, effulgent from a crowd of patriots, and, as I stabbed him, I

“Called aloud on Tully’s name, And bade the father of his country hail!”

Since then, what wandering thoughts I may have had of attempting the life of an ancient ewe, of a superannuated hen, and such “small deer,” are locked up in the secrets of my own breast; but for the higher departments of the art, I confess myself to be utterly unfit. My ambition does not rise so high. No, gentlemen, in the words of Horace,--

“Fungar vice cotis, acutum Reddere quæ ferrum valet, exsors ipsa secandi.”

THE CAPTAIN’S STORY.

BY REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.

I have been asked to tell what I know of the case of Joseph C. Wylie, whose mysterious disappearance caused so much excitement in Cincinnati when it occurred. That was in ’58, however, before the war; and I had supposed all trace of the affair had been swept from the public mind by the events which followed. Indeed, I see no reason for reviving it now, except that it bears more fully than any evidence I have ever heard upon the curious matter called spiritualism, and I have thought (though I am only a plain man, not used to dealing in such whimseys) it offers a key to unlock the riddle.

Wylie was a river-hand; ran the Ohio and Lower Mississippi as clerk and captain on several stern-wheelers, so came to be known pretty generally along shore. He was with me as second clerk when the thing happened. I was running the Jacob Strader, one of the largest steamboats on the Mississippi. I took little account of the fellow; he was a small, red-headed, weak-eyed man, shambling lazily about, whose legs and arms seemed scarcely to have gristle enough in them to hold them firmly together.

The only noteworthy trait about him was that he never touched liquor or a card, but found his amusement, instead, in sitting with some of the deck hands below, telling long pointless yarns. I had to stop it at last. That runs contrary to my notions of discipline.

It was in April that he disappeared, like a flea, under my very eyes. The Strader lay at the wharf, at Cincinnati; it was Sunday, about noon; she was to get up steam at seven o’clock next morning. I walked up the levee, and just off the cobble-stones met Wylie. He had a drum of figs in his hand which he had just bought from some pedler on the David Swan, and was going to take home to his little Joe, in Cairo, he said, as he walked alongside of me.

I met John Fordyce, and stopped to get a light of him; Wylie went into a shanty fitted up as a shop for the sale of cigars, newspapers, and the like; he wanted a “Despatch,” he said. The shop was but a single room, opening, front and back, on the wide (and at that hour on Sunday morning), empty wharf; a square, plank-built affair, made to hold the two counters and a stove in the middle. Wylie went into it, as I said, but out of it he was never seen to come alive. I stood talking with Fordyce for some minutes, then called the clerk, and when he did not answer, went in search of him, but found only the boy who tended the shop, asleep under the counter. Wylie was not there, nor on the boat, nor on the wharf. He was nowhere, so far as the sharpest eyes of the Cincinnati police could discover.

The thing staggered me when I had time to take it home and realize that the man was actually gone; spirited away in broad daylight, before my face. It was absurd, impossible; yet it struck me with a sort of horror that did not belong to midnight murder.

They called it murder in the papers; there was a great outcry; but where was the foul play? The boy (a child of ten) had heard or seen nothing; it was impossible that Wylie could have been foully dealt with, and no sound or cry reach Fordyce or me, half a dozen feet off. It was just as impossible that he could have left the shop, unseen by us on the wide, open levee. That he could have gone voluntarily, nobody hinted. The poor fellow had but few ideas beyond his wife and boy, Joe. His trunk on board was found filled with cheap summer clothes for them both, some tinware, a japanned tea-tray, a china mug; trifles which he had gathered up at auctions, and was taking to Cairo to make their little home comfortable. He had made an engagement to go out with the first clerk that afternoon; his clean shirt, collar, and shaving apparatus were all laid out in his state-room.

But that was the last of him. It only remained to gather up these things and carry them with the news to his wife.

I shirked that. I cannot face a woman in trouble. I ordered Stein, who had been a sort of crony of his, to do it. Stein was the steward, and was leaving the boat. He had a good berth offered to him in St. Louis, he said; so that I knew he had time to see Wylie’s widow, and break it gently to her.

If widow she was. If Wylie had died naturally I would have dismissed him from my mind; but the matter rankled there, as I might say, from its very doubt and mystery.

About two years afterward, therefore, when Warrick brought a little boy on board, as the boat lay at Cairo, and told me it was Wylie’s son, I found myself going, again and again, to the part of the deck where the child was playing, feeling pained to notice how coarsely dressed it was, and how pinched, even hunger-bitten, the little honest face.

“Is it going so badly with her?” I asked.

Warrick nodded, saying aloud, “Joe’s shaken with the whooping-cough, Captain. He’s the deuce of a boy for sniffing up all the ailments that are going up and down the river.”

Joe looked up and laughed.

“He had better shake them down into the river again, then,” I said. “Let him and his mother come aboard for a trip or two. Nothing like air off of water for that whoop, the old women say.”

I sent Warrick to urge the plan on Mrs. Wylie. I knew it was not the air that was needed so much as good, wholesome food. Warrick set apart the best state-room for her, and I dropped in myself to see that it was all in order.

In the evening, before we started, Warrick brought her aboard and into the cabin where I was. I found that she had some exaggerated notions about one or two good turns I had done her husband, and a trifle which I had sent to her when he was lost; so, after that, I held aloof from her. I hate philandering. I kept an eye, though, to see how she fared,--on the little body in her rusty black gown, shying round with Joe in the corners, out of the way of the ladies who went sweeping their long dresses up and down.

I soon found, however, that all the men on board who had known Wylie, from Warrick down, vied with each other in treating her with a sort of patronizing respect; even Jake, the black cook, was continually sending up little messes for her and Joe. She was but a poor mouse of a woman, who had made a god of that stupid little weak-eyed fellow, and of his boy after he was gone; take her on politics, or even gossip, anything outside of Wylie and her child, and there was nothing in her. Warrick told me that she had never been outside of Cairo before, and the near village of Blandville, where she had been a sempstress before her marriage; this journey was like a glimpse of a new world to her. I used to see her sitting in a dark corner on deck until late in the night, her eyes strained over the long stretch of shore as we floated by; and I could understand how the heavy, wooded hills, crouching like sullen beasts along the water’s edge, or the miles and miles of yellow cane-brake lying flat and barren in the desolate, homesick twilight of a winter’s day, might have a different meaning to the lonely woman, and to us, who counted them only as “a run” of so many hours.

She was sitting this way one evening on our back trip, when the boat stopped to wood at a place called by the boatmen Dead Man’s Riffle. Warrick was near me, watching her.

“She wears black,” he said, at last. “Now for me,” cutting off a quid of tobacco, “I never believed Joe Wylie was dead. No, it was a bad bit of work, dead or alive,--bad.”

“It is work I would give much to see cleared up, before I die,” I said. Warrick and I were walking up and down the hurricane-deck.

“Would you?” he said, slowly, chewing and glancing up at me,--“would you? There’s a way. But no matter--” stopping short and looking ashamed.

I said nothing. I never urge a man to speak, if he has ever so little mind to hold his tongue quiet. But Warrick had some notion that troubled him. He walked nearer at each turn to the place where a stout, short young woman was sitting, dressed in brown linsey. There was nothing remarkable about her face, which was heavy and dull, if we except a pair of thick, dead, fishy gray eyes.

“Do you see that girl?” he jerked out. “Many of the men aboard would say that she could tell you anything you want to know; the dead are about her all the time, they say. _I_ don’t say it, Captain, mind; I’m not such a fool.”

“I should hope not, Warrick,” I said, gravely, and began to talk of something else. But somehow the matter stuck in my mind. The next day we stopped for freight at Natchez. I went up into the city with one of the passengers. Old Jimmy A. it was,--anybody on the Western waters will know who I mean; for strangers I will only say that A. was one of the most thorough misers I ever knew. He was an extensive stock-broker and speculator in Western lands. When his wife lived he had always consulted her, and abode by her advice in his business. I believe he mourned for the old woman sincerely, though when she died he had taken the ribbon away with which the women had bound her chin and put twine instead, to save a penny.

A. was my companion, as I said. Coming down into the old town a sudden idea struck me.

“These lots are cheap, Mr. A.,” I said. “Buy them and put up good dwellings on them, and your fortune is made. Real estate is going up here daily.”

The old man seized on the plan eagerly, and held me by the coat while he went about the lots, calculating, muttering, chuckling to himself.

“It’s a good notion, very good. This swamp could be drained,--it would bring in eleven per cent, eleven and a half--and a half; I wish I knew what Ann would think of it, poor Ann! I’ve a great mind to go into it; I have indeed.”

It was with difficulty I got the old fellow away and on board in time before the boat put off. It was growing dusk as we stepped off the plank on deck. A. still clung to me, following me up and down, charging me to say nothing of the plan until he had well considered it. As we went up to the outer cabin we met the woman to whom Warrick had directed my notice the day before. She was pacing up and down with heavy, masculine steps; she stood still as we came up; her dead gray eyes fell on A. and rested there with a curious absorbing look; which, perhaps, I should not have seen but for Warrick’s warning.

She remained quite quiet until we had passed and returned; then stooping suddenly to a table before her, wrote on a scrap of paper, and handed it to the old man, walking away after she had done so; every motion lifeless, mechanical, like a clumsy machine of wood set in action.

A. had not seen her, I think, until she thrust the paper into his hand; he stared, pulled at his ragged gray beard, and then peered at it through his spectacles. There was a queer, scared little noise in his throat, like the crow of a chicken.

“Why, Captain, look here! this is--is--” holding out the dirty scrap of paper.

It was a message from his wife. “Do not touch real estate, except to mortgage,” she said. “The drainage of the swamp would eat up four years’ profits.”

(“I thought of that,” he interrupted, quickly.) “Do not withdraw your money from P. C.”

“That is all,” I said. “Who is this woman, Mr. A.?”

“God knows. But no human being alive knew of that P. C. money. _Ann did._” His face was colorless and his teeth chattered. We went to the woman. She was apparently stolid, and but half educated; I saw no sign of cunning, even shrewdness, about her.

“The message had been given to her,” she said. “How, she did not know.”

“From a spirit?”

“She could not say that. She supposed so. They called her a writing medium.”

Afterward she said, “This thing would ruin her,” crying in a feeble, stupid way. She had been an operative in some mill in Cincinnati, we were told, and was discharged in consequence of it. The “manifestations” were followed by attacks of something resembling paralysis, which would soon leave her helpless. I left the old man talking to her.

Warrick came to me that evening. He had heard of the affair. “Captain,” he said, “I’m going to try if no tidings can be had from Joe Wylie. Have I your permission?” I nodded, shortly. Warrick’s broad face was pale and anxious. I sat for a while looking at the closed door of the little office into which they had gone. Then I got up and followed them. The woman (Lusk was her name) was there, Warrick, and the wife of the carpenter,--a shrewd, sensible woman,--who had been a friend of Wylie’s, as most women were.

She and the girl sat facing each other at a table on which flared a dirty oil lamp. Warrick leaned on the back of a chair with both hands, watching the girl’s face.

“She knows what she’s got to do, Captain,” vigorously chewing and spitting, but not lifting his eyes. “I told her to consult her familiar spirit, or whatever it is. Let’s have him up! Let’s know what’s become of Joe, good or bad.”

I had seen Warrick cool and grave when a burning boat was drifting with all aboard right into the rapids; but now he was a coward in every bone of his body; his very voice grew piping and boisterous as the woman turned her square, heavy face toward him, and the gray eyes, which they said saw the dead, fell on his.

For the girl, I observed that she had the appearance of extreme nervous dejection; her breath was uncertain and feeble; her lips blue. I touched her and found that the blood had almost ceased to circulate. Her temples were hot; hands icy cold; the pupils of the eyes contracted. The look was _fastened into_ Warrick. I can describe it in no other way. I shook her, but could not loosen the hold of it. It was as if she drew the life out of his burly big body with her dull eyes.

“Bring up the spirit of Wylie, my woman,” he said, with a loud, uneasy laugh that suddenly died into profound silence.

She shook her head; raised her forefinger slowly, pointing into the shadow behind him.

“What do you see?”

“I see a ship--three-masted--a bark.” (Warrick started, nodding his head with a muttered oath.) “The sea is frozen; the ship is wedged between masses of ice; the sky is like a bronze plane above; there is neither sun nor wind.”

“On a whaler!” burst in Warrick. “I always knew it! I was in just such a scrape, off--Go on, go on.”

“There are two men on deck. One is heavily built, gray-headed; the other is spare, short, with red hair. There is a blood-mark on his chin.”

“Wylie! Alive!”

“Alive. His clothes are gray--”

“He wore gray the day he left,” said Warrick. “But, come to think of it now, he wouldn’t--”

“I was wrong. He wears a sailor’s dress.”

She got up hastily, putting her hand to her forehead. Her face was covered with a cold sweat. “Nothing--nothing! I am sick. Stop--no more,” she gasped.

Mrs. Pallet, the carpenter’s wife, put her arm about her. “I’ll take her to her room, Captain?” looking at me. “There’s no cheating in her, at any rate,” as she led her out. “It’s my belief it’s the Devil’s work.”

Warrick straightened himself and drew a long breath. “Do you think it is the Devil’s work, sir?”

“God knows.”

“It is the truth, whether or no. Wylie always had a hankering for a sea life. He used to listen to my old whaling yarns twenty times over. And I’ve heard lately, Captain, that poor Joe was deep in debt when he disappeared. Some old matters, before he came aboard the Strader. He had a reason for going. But Ellen thinks him dead,--thinks him dead,” stroking his whiskers. “Would you tell her of this now, eh, Captain?” looking up.

“Yes, I would,” after a pause. “It can do no harm. But gently, Warrick, gently.”

It did do harm, however gently it was told. The next day Wylie’s wife came to me where I stood alone, near the texas. Her nose was red from crying, and her eyes angry, which made the rest of her face more hunger-nipped and pale. She touched my sleeve, and then drew off, holding her little boy by the hand.

“Captain Roberts,” she said, in a low, steady voice, “there is a woman on the boat who pretends to have seen my husband alive. If he is alive, he has deserted me. He is dead.”

“Be calm, madam.”

“He is dead. You shall not think ill of Joe.” She was silent a moment, holding her throat with one hand. “If he is alive, he has deserted me, and--I’ll tell you, Captain Roberts, but I never meant to tell any living man. When you brought me and Joe on the boat, I hadn’t touched meat for four months. It took all I could make to keep life in the boy, and barely that. I went out scrubbing when sewing failed me. I scrubbed and whitewashed. I didn’t beg. Do you think Joe would have left me to that? and him alive? He’s dead. There’s some days I’ve went through--if Joe had been on the face of the earth he’d have come to me them days. He’s dead; he’s waiting, somewheres--”

She held little Joe tighter by the hand, looking beyond me--God knows where--into the place where old Joe waited for her, I suppose; the somewheres where the poor starved soul hoped to find the comfort and love of her married life again. I hesitated. “Would you like to see this woman? I will not say that I credit her assertions, but there is a curious--”

She drew herself up, growing pale. “I, sir? No; I only wished that you should do my husband justice. For the woman--no matter. I will not detain you, Captain Roberts.” And so, scarcely waiting for me to speak to the boy, she drew him away with her.

“That cut Ellen hard,” Warrick said,--“hard. These women would rather a man should die any day than cease to care for them. But it’s true. Joe Wylie went on a whaler, sir.”

The girl Lusk went ashore at New Albany, and I saw her no more. She became afterward a noted medium, I believe; and old A., by the way, used to consult her in all of his undertakings, or rather his wife, through her.

The matter puzzled me. I did _not_ believe the spirits of the dead had anything to do with it; though the woman, before she went off the boat, brought me a message from one who has been gone from me this many a year. I will say no more of this. Since she died I have not named her name. I did not believe the words came from her. I did not believe the girl Lusk was an impostor. I thought, as every impartial, cool observer must, that there was a something--not charlatanism--in this matter, and I think, in the end, I got the key to it; but of that you must judge.

The matter puzzled and troubled me so much that I determined to try an experiment, which, perhaps, was cruel. I took Ellen to a medium, without warning her of my intention. Warrick told me of her,--“She has never showed herself in public.” He said, “She takes no pay. That makes me trust her. She’s miserably poor, too; a huckster in the Cincinnati market.”

It was early dawn when I took Ellen to her. She occupied a corner of the market as a fruit and vegetable stall, and as we came near was hanging nets of apples and oranges in front of it, I remember. A skinny, sour-visaged, middle-aged woman, dressed in a sluttish gown and calico sun-bonnet. I noticed the same peculiarity in the eye as in the girl Lusk: they were opaque, gray, dead. The market-house was nearly empty; a few butchers were arranging their meat at some distance inside, or swallowing their coffee at the eating-stalls by the light of a few candles. This woman’s stall was out on the solitary street, however, and the pleasant morning light shone about it.

I made a pretence of buying some fruit. “This is the business for which I brought you ashore,” I said to Ellen.

It was impossible that the woman could have heard me, yet she turned sharply, eying Ellen as she came forward.

“It was for no oranges you come. Why didn’t ye say what you come for? If there’s any dead belonging to ye, I’ll bring ye word from them. There’s spirits all about me; there’s spirits at yer back, there’s spirits fillin’ the street. What’ll you have, my young man?” to a boy who stopped. “Eight and ten cents them is.”

Ellen drew back. “Let us go, let us go,” she said.

At that moment a series of soft double-knocks, as if made by two knuckles of a gloved hand, sounded all about us,--under the pavement, on the roof, on the stall.

“There’s yer change.--I’ve a message for _you_,” suddenly facing Ellen; “there’s a spirit here to speak to you.”

“He is dead, then?” catching both hands together as if to support herself.

The woman took down a greasy card, on which the alphabet was printed, from a nail where it hung, and ran her pencil lightly along it, as the raps continued in swift, soft succession. She spelled out this message:--

“I think of you here. Of you and Joe. You will come to me.”

“Where--how was it done?” I cried.

The woman glanced at Ellen, who leaned against the edge of the block.

“I was murdered; drugged and murdered,” was the answer.

“He is dead. There is no chance any more.” That was all she said, with a strange inconsistency, forgetting her anger of the other day. “There is no chance, no chance,” I heard her mutter, as we went back to the boat; “he’s gone now.”

The blow was as hard as if it had struck her for the first time. I told Warrick the story without comment.

“It goes dead against the other,” he exclaimed. “And yet where did either woman get their knowledge of the business we wanted cleared. The blood-mark on the chin, the possibility that the dead man had been drugged and murdered? There’s truth in it, in all the muddle.”