CHAPTER XIII

The Priest’s Story

They had their dinner that day at Nic’khal’s, at the Forks, eating in the shed that later in the season becomes the “summer kitchen.” The meal was primitive in material and cooking, but the sauce was hunger. An elderly priest, weary-looking and sad, was their sole companion, and he watched them through the meal, with a look that Trafford read as expressive of a desire to have talk with him. So, after the eating was over, Trafford put himself in the way of the clergyman, who quickly availed himself of the chance:

“You are from above?” he asked, and Trafford assented.

“Did you pass the logging camp at the first rapids?”

“I spent the night there,” Trafford answered.

“Was the night disturbed?”

“An attempt was made to arrest a murderer, who escaped into the woods, but not without a severe wound, I think.”

“I have a message for the man who attempted to make the arrest.”

“You can deliver it to me,” said Trafford.

“You say the man was a murderer. I have no wish to know his name; but I am charged only to speak to one man, and I shall know him by a name. You can give it me?”

“If it’s my name you want, it’s Trafford. The murderer attempted first to rob or murder me in the covered bridge at Millbank, before he committed the actual murder,” answered the detective.

“I did not doubt before,” the priest answered, with something of stateliness; “only when a trust is given, one must be certain. The message is that the man who was drowned was not murdered. It was an accident, in which the one barely escaped and was unable to save the other.”

“Even so,” Trafford retorted, “the other might have had a chance to escape, if it hadn’t been for a broken collar-bone, and for that the man who denies the murder was responsible.”

“But it was by mistake he inflicted it,” the priest answered.

“By mistake, because he missed the man he intended to strike and hit his associate in crime. He was in the bridge to rob and probably to murder, and if the death of his companion was directly accidental, it came through a violation of the law and that makes it murder.”

“In the eyes of the law, possibly,” the priest said; “but we look to the intent. The man did not intend to kill his associate. He died as the result of an accident.”

“Are you permitted to give me details?” Trafford asked, wisely avoiding a discussion that might return again and again on itself without actual progress.

“A wounded man found me asleep in a hut where he sought shelter, guided by the Blessed Virgin, I doubt not. I heard his confession. On that is the seal of the Church. He begged me to find you and give you this message, and what he said in that I will strive faithfully to repeat. It is all that I can say. He was not in the bridge to murder the man at whom he struck, but to seize him and take from his person certain papers. He struck in the dark in the direction of a noise made, as he supposed, by the man. He may have struck harder than he intended. At the least, he struck his companion and not the man, and with force sufficient to break the collar-bone. What they had been set to do, they were to do and then return to the woods without being seen. He had now the fear earned by failure, and the certainty that the man, having escaped, would call on the authorities, and he and his companion would be betrayed by the latter’s wound. He, therefore, persuaded him to bear his pain until they could get to a place of safety, and not daring to travel the roads, where they could be tracked, they struck to the river banks above the Falls, and followed these until they found a boat into which they got, turning its head upstream.

“He had only an old and broken oar with which to paddle, but a driver can paddle with a single pole, and they easily reached the middle of the river. Here he turned at a groan from his companion and failed to see a floating log which struck their boat, and, worse still, knocked the oar out of his hand. Before he could recover himself, the boat was in the rapid current above the Falls, and rushing downstream with increasing force. His companion, roused at the growing roar of the waters, seemed to think that it was with intention that this was happening. He begged to be spared, and called loudly for help. The other told him what had happened and that he was powerless to prevent the boat going over the Falls, whereupon the wounded man sprang to his feet, with a prayer to the Virgin and Saint Anne, and leaped overboard, just as the boat touched the white water above the plunge. The other ran to the bow, which was shooting straight out, and stood there for a second of time until he felt it tremble for the dip, at which instant he jumped for the deeper water below the Falls, and by a miracle escaped the rocks at the very base of the plunge. As you know, the water there is very deep, so that although he sank, he did not touch bottom. He floated through the cañon and succeeded in landing just above the railroad bridge. He knew there was no use in looking for boat or companion, and so crept up the bank around the Falls, secured another boat, and finally towards morning landed just below the Bombazee Rips. He set the boat afloat and plunged into the woods. That is all I am permitted to tell you.”

“But it is not all you know,” Trafford said.

“It is all I know. If I heard anything more, I heard it under the seal of confession and know naught of it.”

Trafford pondered on the story for some time, without speaking. The habits born of his profession held him, warning him to avoid hasty conclusion as well for the man as against him. It was his business to get the truth, not to find a confirmation or refutation of a previously formed opinion.

The priest waited without a sign of impatience. At last Trafford raised his head and said:

“I do not think it could have been done.”

“What?” asked the priest.

“The leap from the boat over the falls.”

“I have been told by eye-witnesses that it has been done,” declared the priest.

“I have seen it done,” Trafford said; “but it was in broad daylight, when the man could see, and determine the exact instant for the leap. The boat was a very long one, so that before it dipped, it had shot far out; the man was extremely powerful, and it was, after all, a mere matter of luck.”

“We do not talk of luck,” the priest said, with a touch of sternness in his tone. “We will leave that. You admit it possible, because it has been done. Your man was extremely strong. This man seems to me such also. Your man had daylight to show him the tossing of the waters about him; the anxious faces peering at him; the vanishing shores, and the coming danger. This man had all his senses active and single to the work before him. The flash of white foam was enough to show him, even in the night, where he was. To that his sight was turned, for there was nothing to distract his full attention. He was leaping for life. Instinct would come to his aid. It was possible for the man you saw. I believe it was possible for this man.”

Suddenly a thought struck Trafford. This priest could not reveal the secrets of the confessional; but neither could he prevent what he had heard in confession affecting his attitude towards this man and his story. He looked the priest full in the face and asked, solemnly, almost sternly:

“Do you fully and absolutely credit this tale?”

Without a shadow of hesitation or delay, the priest answered:

“I do, absolutely and fully. In the story I bring you I have not a doubt that you have heard the truth, so far as it goes. You know how the death of the man you thought murdered actually occurred.”

To Trafford’s mind there was left no ground for doubt.

“I accept your story,” he said, “as the story of what actually occurred. Where is the man who told it to you?”

The priest smiled and raised his hand in a sweep of the northern horizon:

“I cannot track the wilderness. If you want him, you must ask the woods to give him up.”

“There is a lad in the gang at the first rapids,” Trafford said, “who came with Victor Vignon from Beauce. Victor, who was his cousin, was to take him back before the Feast of St. John. He relies absolutely on this, and would not believe Victor dead. His name is Étienne Vignon and he needs comfort and help.”

“I will go to him,” said the priest. “The thought is a kind one.”

If the priest dreamed that he was thus finished with the detective, it was because he did not know the nature of the creature.

“From Beauce I think you said the wounded man came,” said Trafford carelessly.

If Trafford thought to surprise the priest, it was proof that he too was ignorant.

“I do not recall having said so,” the priest answered.

“But he was, wasn’t he?” demanded Trafford.

“I did not ask him.”

On the matter of the wound the priest talked freely. It was painful, but not serious. The small bone of the lower right arm was broken, but he had set it and was confident it would improve.

“If the man has been unjustly accused, I hope it may prove so,” Trafford said. “He goes directly home, of course.”

The priest smiled.

“I did not expect to see him again, so had no occasion to know.”

Convinced that the other was absolutely on guard, and that even if he knew anything beyond what he had told--of which Trafford felt considerable doubt--it was not to be extracted from him, Trafford again commended the lad Étienne to his care, and turned to the matter of a conveyance to Carrytunk on the road to Millbank. At parting, he said:

“If I accept your assurance as to the innocence of this man, it is none the less true that some one employed him to rob me, and his companion lost his life because of the attempt. He could not have told of this without telling who that was.”

The priest smiled, but not in a way that encouraged Trafford to hope for information, and the event proved him wise not to do so.

“If he told me aught that I have not repeated,” the other answered, “it was to obtain God’s pardon, not to invoke man’s punishment on any. Its object accomplished, the words passed as they came to the priest and not to the man.”

So Trafford was forced to let him go, none the wiser beyond what the priest chose that he should be; but as they hurried towards Millbank, he tried hard to look at all sides of the story and at last asked his companion:

“What do you think of it?”

“A batch of lies, told to a gossiping priest to be peddled out to us again,” was the curt judgment.

Even this Trafford weighed carefully before commenting on it.

“You evidently think the fellow a shrewd chap.”

“No; any one can see he’s a stupid lout; just the kind of a thing to be used for a dirty job.”

“Yet he had a long enough head to cheat the priest.”

“Then you think the priest believed him?”

“I haven’t a doubt of it,” said Trafford.

Trafford’s judgments had something of the weight of oracles with this man, who was able to see things but not to form opinions; and this curt declaration was to the point and not to be mistaken. For the time being, and for present purposes, it was to be accepted, and having accepted it, the other had nothing to say. But it was not so easy for Trafford. He had, perhaps, to convince some budding doubt that had not found expression either in tone or words.

“To doubt the truth of the fellow’s story, is to believe that he reasoned out the chance of the priest finding us and then deliberately employed what he regards as a sacrament--that is confession--to put in circulation a concocted story for the purpose of deceiving us. I don’t believe he’s that smart; and I don’t believe, with his belief in the Church, he’d dare do it.”

“We seem to be in the business of acquitting everybody,” the other said in a surly tone.

“It’s certainly not our business to convict, but to find out the truth,” Trafford answered. “We aren’t prosecuting attorneys.”

“But our work lies in pointing out the guilty.”

“Yes; but unless we do it as much for the sake of proving the innocence of the innocent as the guilt of the guilty, we only do half the work that we ought to do. I’d rather any time clear a man who is unjustly charged than prove a man, thought innocent, guilty,” answered Trafford.

“Maybe so, but that isn’t the kind of work the world gives you most credit for. If you can hang a man, it thinks you’ve done something big; but if you stop them from hanging a man, they think they’ve been cheated.”

“Well, I guess when all’s said and done, it’s more a question of what we think about the kind of work we’re doing, than what the world thinks of it, that counts. When I’m satisfied with myself--right down honestly satisfied--I find I can let the world think what it’s a mind to.”