CHAPTER X

A Second Murder?

“Mr. McManus,” said Trafford, after they had completed the re-examination of Wing’s private papers at the office and in his safe at home, “was Mr. Wing of a peculiarly secretive disposition?”

“If he had a fault,” McManus answered, “and since he was human, he must have had, it was his excessive frankness and openness.”

“And yet we find him lugging papers on some affair, which he shared with no one, back and forth from office to house, and when not so doing, keeping them locked in a safe in his library to which only he had access. How do you account for this?”

McManus glanced over his shoulder before answering and then dropped his voice almost to a whisper, although they were sitting in the very centre of the great library at the Parlin house, with the door closed.

“I think he was afraid.”

“Afraid!” repeated Trafford, almost thrown off his guard, but instinctively lowering his tone in sympathy with his companion. “Afraid of what?”

“Just about two years ago, he found one morning that his desk at the office had been ransacked. Papers were turned topsy-turvy and packages of papers had been opened and tied up again hastily. The thoroughness with which the search was made showed that the person had a well-shaped purpose, while the fact that a considerable amount of money, which was loose in a drawer, was not touched, proved that it was not robbery. We made every effort to find out the culprit, but without success. We had at one time suspicion of an office-boy, but nothing positive, and Mr. Wing wouldn’t let him be discharged under circumstances that would do him a grave injustice if he were innocent. So we retained him.”

“And he repeated the performance,” Trafford said in a tone of conviction.

McManus looked at him, questioning whether this assertion came from knowledge of the affair or was merely a shrewd guess. Failing to satisfy himself, he went on:

“The performance was repeated, but under conditions that made it impossible for the boy to be guilty. He was away on his vacation.”

“Not shrewd of the culprit. You are certain it was some one in the office?”

“Yes; but we never discovered his identity.”

“And from that time Mr. Wing began carrying these papers back and forth and keeping them in this safe.”

McManus nodded.

“And the desk was never troubled again.”

“How do you know?”

“Was it?”

“No.”

Trafford nodded his satisfaction and proceeded to elucidate:

“When the object was removed and the watcher knew it, he would repeat the search only to cover his identity. Shrewd as he was, he either wasn’t shrewd enough for that or was indifferent. He gave away the fact that he was some one who knew of the removal of the papers.”

“Then you think these papers were what he was after?”

“Most assuredly.”

“And that the removal of them----”

“Became Wing’s death warrant,” Trafford completed the sentence. McManus hesitated and grew pale.

“My God, Trafford; do you see what that leads to?”

“I see what you think it leads to. You think it leads to the conclusion that Wing was murdered by somebody in your office, somebody who has been there at least two years. I think that’s what you lawyers call a _non sequitur_.”

“At the office, the papers might be stolen; here they could be stolen only after the murder of Wing. Why shouldn’t the thief be one and the same in both cases?”

“Because many a man will steal where only one will commit murder. It is possible, of course, that the two may be the same. The probabilities, however, are against it.”

“What follows then?” demanded McManus.

“That the actor in at least one case, and possibly in both, was not the principal; and that the more there are engaged in the affair, the better chance we have of discovery. It is the one-man affair that baffles.”

None the less, when McManus was gone, Trafford summed up the successes of three weeks and found them mortifyingly few. A package of papers missed and not found; an innocent man under suspicion; a woman of prominence proved the mother of an illegitimate child; a thwarted attempt upon his own life; a wounded Canadian apparently wiped off the earth; and a respectable citizen traced on a midnight visit to another respectable citizen at Waterville. It was not on such achievements as these that he had built his reputation.

With the thought of the missing Canadian, his anxiety returned. It was impossible that he had been spirited away to Canada, yet it was undeniable that he was gone. He went out and looked at the river. After two weeks of dry weather the water was falling. On the edge of the falls, rocks showed that a week before were under water. In eddies and shallow places he could see, as with his physical eye, drift and débris collecting, and sometimes in this drift and débris strange matter was thrown up. He had hesitated to do it, but he felt that he had no right to hesitate longer, and so he gave directions for a careful search of the river banks and shallow places from Millbank to Pishon’s Ferry. It was the last chance, and he had refused to consider it until it would be criminal to refuse longer.

That was the physical part of the task, which he could set others to do; but there was another part, and that he took with him to his room in the hotel and spent much of the night with it. All the evening he turned and re-turned it, looking at every side and phase, and then went to bed and to sleep, with the knowledge that more than once that which the most earnest thought fails to unravel becomes by some strange alchemy clear under the magic of sleep. Would it be so with this?

To that query, which came involuntarily, he answered with a doubt.

“I’m fighting my conviction,” he said, almost plaintively, “instead of giving myself up to its free course. I can’t expect to be helped as long as I do that; but I can’t, I won’t believe. A man in my mood can’t solve anything!”

So it came to pass that the night brought him no help, and he rose in the morning without that sense of rest which a single hour’s sleep brings under the stimulus of success.

About noon, a country lad on horseback brought a message from a point some six miles below the village. Obeying the message, he started at once with the coroner and physician.

On a tiny meadow that lay as a crescent of green along the border of cove where the current of the river sweeps in as an eddy, something was drawn up from the water and lay covered in an unrecognizable mass, which none the less had a strange repulsiveness about it. Back of the meadow great trees rose toward the early June sky; before it the river flashed in the June sunshine, and across its waters, the brown earth, dotted with the young corn, stretched away in the beauty of early summer. A few men and boys stood about the covered thing in strange silence, that seemed almost of fear; yet all pressed nearer when, by order of the coroner, the covering cloth was removed.

Trafford and the doctor stooped and made a close examination of the hideous thing. No one spoke above his breath as they waited the report, yet by some strange magic the story of the finding went from man to man. At last the two men rose and went down to the river to wash their soiled hands. The coroner followed them:

“What do you make of it?” he asked.

Trafford waited until the doctor was forced to speak:

“Plainly a Canuck, and I should say a log-driver. Certainly a working man. Been drowned a week and has come from above the Falls. You can see that by the way he’s battered up. That’s when he was whirled round under the Falls. Several bones broken, probably by the rocks, but that smashing of the collar bone came from a blow from above and before he was dead. It may have been that that knocked him into the water. Unless you find some particular mark on him, you won’t be able to identify him, he’s so smashed up. Better send up the river and see if any driver has been missing about a week. Beg pardon, Mr. Trafford, I fear I’m taking the words out of your mouth.”

“Not at all,” the other answered. “I couldn’t have covered my findings better myself, excepting I was less certain about the breaking of the collar bone, whether it was before or after death. If he had gone over the Falls, for instance, head first, might he not have struck a rock and broken his collar bone, so as to give the appearance of its being shattered by a blow dealt from above?”

“It’s not simply that,” said the doctor. “There’s the swelling of the living flesh that could not take place if the blow occurred after death. The injury must have occurred long enough before death to produce this effect.”

“Then it could hardly have been the blow that knocked him into the water?”

The doctor started at the question and, without answering, walked back to the body and re-examined the broken bone and some of the other bruises. Then he came back to where Trafford and the coroner waited him.

“There can’t be any question that the broken clavicle antedates death, and antedates it some few hours. The man may have been injured at some distance from any one and have taken a boat to go for assistance and not been able to control it.”

“He might have done any one of a dozen things,” Trafford interposed impatiently; “but the thing is to find out which one he did do. How did he get this injury, and how did he come to his drowning after the injury; for I take it you’ll admit when death came, it did come through drowning.”

“I think we’ll have to admit that,” the doctor returned.

“Then we have an injury, one, two, perhaps three hours before death; and then death by drowning. If all this was the result of accident, don’t you think he was having more than his fair share, crowded into a pretty small space of time?” It was Trafford’s question.

“You mean,” demanded the coroner, a trifle uneasily, “that we’ve got another murder on our hands before the first one is cleared up?”

“I mean,” said Trafford; “that if we have, it may prove easier to unravel two murders than one.”

They walked slowly back and looked at the face that was gashed beyond human recognition. Was this he who had cried so piteously on Millbank Bridge, “_Sacré; c’est moi, Pierre!_”? If so, what had been the history of the few hours that elapsed before he plunged into the river to the death meant for Trafford? How was that plunge made? Where was the Pierre who had struck the blow on the bridge, and who must be able to tell the story of the man’s drowning? These were the questions which were dinning themselves in Trafford’s brain and imperiously demanding an answer.

The news of the finding of the body spread rapidly through Millbank, but with comparatively trifling sensation. Men were drowned each year in the river. The driving business was full of risks and men fell victims to it each spring. It was not like a murder--a blow from no one knew where, falling no one knew why. This drowning was a thing people were accustomed to expect. They shrugged, wondered if he had a family, and thought little more of an accident that left them “one less Canuck.” A solitary priest, poor and hard-worked, spent the night in prayers for the dead; for these men who come from the North to drive the river are almost without exception faithful children of the Church, which, through her ministry, mourns her bereavement and assails the gates of heaven for admission of the departed soul.

Trafford sat alone in his room at the hotel. He had no doubt that this was the man on whom had fallen the blow which was intended for him. Disabled, so that he could not be concealed or taken away without discovery and recognition, it had been worth the while of those who had failed in their attempt on his own life, to murder the poor wretch, rather than take the chances of his being seen and questioned. Disabled as he was, his condition should have appealed to the hardest heart. He had tried to do faithfully the work given him and, failing, had been done to death for his fidelity. What was this hideous thing that played with murder, rather than let itself be discovered?

As Trafford asked himself the question, he glanced uneasily at his windows. It was here, in this very town, within a stone’s throw of the very place where he sat, that murder stalked--murder that had once sought him as a victim and then had destroyed its own instrument, not trusting the man it had employed. It seemed like a lowering menace, ready to fall without warning, and almost for the first time since he had taken up this profession, he was conscious of the sense of personal fear. This merciless, unseen something, impressed him as standing just beyond the line of sight, watching with unseen eyes, to strike at him again. If it could be uncovered, what would it prove itself, to justify so desperate a chance? If it could not be uncovered, where was safety for himself or for any one who stood as a menace to its purposes?

That the men who had committed these two murders and had tried a third--for he did not for one instant separate them--would stop at no chance, was beyond dispute or question. They had watched and waited on Wing for two years and, apparently, had not struck until every other means of securing what they wanted had failed. When they did strike, they had struck pitilessly and effectively. But they were still on their guard, as the assault on the Bridge and this wanton murder of a wounded man proved. They had gone so far; certainly they would not now retire from the game, nor would they show a scrupulousness they had failed to feel before they had so far committed themselves that retreat was impossible. It was a struggle to the death, with an unseen foe, by a man who at all times stood out as a plain mark. He had the sensation of one who stands with a lamp in his hands and peers into the deeper dark, to catch a glimpse of a foe that he simply knows lies in wait for him unseen.