Can Such Things Be?

A warm, clear night had been followed by a morning of drenching fog.  At about the middle of the afternoon of the preceding day a little whiff of light vapor—­a mere thickening of the atmosphere, the ghost of a cloud—­had been observed clinging to the western side of Mount St. Helena, away up along the barren altitudes near the summit.  It was so thin, so diaphanous, so like a fancy made visible, that one would have said:  “Look quickly! in a moment it will be gone.”

In a moment it was visibly larger and denser.  While with one edge it clung to the mountain, with the other it reached farther and farther out into the air above the lower slopes.  At the same time it extended itself to north and south, joining small patches of mist that appeared to come out of the mountainside on exactly the same level, with an intelligent design to be absorbed.  And so it grew and grew until the summit was shut out of view from the valley, and over the valley itself was an ever-extending canopy, opaque and gray.  At Calistoga, which lies near the head of the valley and the foot of the mountain, there were a starless night and a sunless morning.  The fog, sinking into the valley, had reached southward, swallowing up ranch after ranch, until it had blotted out the town of St. Helena, nine miles away.  The dust in the road was laid; trees were adrip with moisture; birds sat silent in their coverts; the morning light was wan and ghastly, with neither color nor fire.

Two men left the town of St. Helena at the first glimmer of dawn, and walked along the road northward up the valley toward Calistoga.  They carried guns on their shoulders, yet no one having knowledge of such matters could have mistaken them for hunters of bird or beast.  They were a deputy sheriff from Napa and a detective from San Francisco—­ Holker and Jaralson, respectively.  Their business was man-hunting.

“How far is it?” inquired Holker, as they strode along, their feet stirring white the dust beneath the damp surface of the road.

“The White Church?  Only a half mile farther,” the other answered.  “By the way,” he added, “it is neither white nor a church; it is an abandoned schoolhouse, gray with age and neglect.  Religious services were once held in it—­when it was white, and there is a graveyard that would delight a poet.  Can you guess why I sent for you, and told you to come heeled?”

“Oh, I never have bothered you about things of that kind.  I’ve always found you communicative when the time came.  But if I may hazard a guess, you want me to help you arrest one of the corpses in the graveyard.”

“You remember Branscom?” said Jaralson, treating his companion’s wit with the inattention that it deserved.

“The chap who cut his wife’s throat?  I ought; I wasted a week’s work on him and had my expenses for my trouble.  There is a reward of five hundred dollars, but none of us ever got a sight of him.  You don’t mean to say—­”

“Yes, I do.  He has been under the noses of you fellows all the time.  He comes by night to the old graveyard at the White Church.”

“The devil!  That’s where they buried his wife.”

“Well, you fellows might have had sense enough to suspect that he would return to her grave some time.”

“The very last place that anyone would have expected him to return to.”

“But you had exhausted all the other places.  Learning your failure at them, I ‘laid for him’ there.”

“And you found him?”

“Damn it! he found me.  The rascal got the drop on me—­regularly held me up and made me travel.  It’s God’s mercy that he didn’t go through me.  Oh, he’s a good one, and I fancy the half of that reward is enough for me if you’re needy.”

Holker laughed good humoredly, and explained that his creditors were never more importunate.

“I wanted merely to show you the ground, and arrange a plan with you,” the detective explained.  “I thought it as well for us to be heeled, even in daylight.”

“The man must be insane,” said the deputy sheriff.  “The reward is for his capture and conviction.  If he’s mad he won’t be convicted.”

Mr. Holker was so profoundly affected by that possible failure of justice that he involuntarily stopped in the middle of the road, then resumed his walk with abated zeal.

“Well, he looks it,” assented Jaralson.  “I’m bound to admit that a more unshaven, unshorn, unkempt, and uneverything wretch I never saw outside the ancient and honorable order of tramps.  But I’ve gone in for him, and can’t make up my mind to let go.  There’s glory in it for us, anyhow.  Not another soul knows that he is this side of the Mountains of the Moon.”

“All right,” Holker said; “we will go and view the ground,” and he added, in the words of a once favorite inscription for tombstones:  “’where you must shortly lie’—­I mean, if old Branscom ever gets tired of you and your impertinent intrusion.  By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Branscom’ was not his real name.”

“What is?”

“I can’t recall it.  I had lost all interest in the wretch, and it did not fix itself in my memory—­something like Pardee.  The woman whose throat he had the bad taste to cut was a widow when he met her.  She had come to California to look up some relatives—­there are persons who will do that sometimes.  But you know all that.”

“Naturally.”

“But not knowing the right name, by what happy inspiration did you find the right grave?  The man who told me what the name was said it had been cut on the headboard.”

“I don’t know the right grave.”  Jaralson was apparently a trifle reluctant to admit his ignorance of so important a point of his plan.  “I have been watching about the place generally.  A part of our work this morning will be to identify that grave.  Here is the White Church.”

For a long distance the road had been bordered by fields on both sides, but now on the left there was a forest of oaks, madronos, and gigantic spruces whose lower parts only could be seen, dim and ghostly in the fog.  The undergrowth was, in places, thick, but nowhere impenetrable.  For some moments Holker saw nothing of the building, but as they turned into the woods it revealed itself in faint gray outline through the fog, looking huge and far away.  A few steps more, and it was within an arm’s length, distinct, dark with moisture, and insignificant in size.  It had the usual country-schoolhouse form—­belonged to the packing-box order of architecture; had an underpinning of stones, a moss-grown roof, and blank window spaces, whence both glass and sash had long departed.  It was ruined, but not a ruin—­a typical Californian substitute for what are known to guide-bookers abroad as “monuments of the past.”  With scarcely a glance at this uninteresting structure Jaralson moved on into the dripping undergrowth beyond.

“I will show you where he held me up,” he said.  “This is the graveyard.”

Here and there among the bushes were small inclosures containing graves, sometimes no more than one.  They were recognized as graves by the discolored stones or rotting boards at head and foot, leaning at all angles, some prostrate; by the ruined picket fences surrounding them; or, infrequently, by the mound itself showing its gravel through the fallen leaves.  In many instances nothing marked the spot where lay the vestiges of some poor mortal—­who, leaving “a large circle of sorrowing friends,” had been left by them in turn—­ except a depression in the earth, more lasting than that in the spirits of the mourners.  The paths, if any paths had been, were long obliterated; trees of a considerable size had been permitted to grow up from the graves and thrust aside with root or branch the inclosing fences.  Over all was that air of abandonment and decay which seems nowhere so fit and significant as in a village of the forgotten dead.

As the two men, Jaralson leading, pushed their way through the growth of young trees, that enterprising man suddenly stopped and brought up his shotgun to the height of his breast, uttered a low note of warning, and stood motionless, his eyes fixed upon something ahead.  As well as he could, obstructed by brush, his companion, though seeing nothing, imitated the posture and so stood, prepared for what might ensue.  A moment later Jaralson moved cautiously forward, the other following.

Under the branches of an enormous spruce lay the dead body of a man.  Standing silent above it they noted such particulars as first strike the attention—­the face, the attitude, the clothing; whatever most promptly and plainly answers the unspoken question of a sympathetic curiosity.

The body lay upon its back, the legs wide apart.  One arm was thrust upward, the other outward; but the latter was bent acutely, and the hand was near the throat.  Both hands were tightly clenched.  The whole attitude was that of desperate but ineffectual resistance to—­ what?

Near by lay a shotgun and a game bag through the meshes of which was seen the plumage of shot birds.  All about were evidences of a furious struggle; small sprouts of poison-oak were bent and denuded of leaf and bark; dead and rotting leaves had been pushed into heaps and ridges on both sides of the legs by the action of other feet than theirs; alongside the hips were unmistakable impressions of human knees.

The nature of the struggle was made clear by a glance at the dead man’s throat and face.  While breast and hands were white, those were purple—­almost black.  The shoulders lay upon a low mound, and the head was turned back at an angle otherwise impossible, the expanded eyes staring blankly backward in a direction opposite to that of the feet.  From the froth filling the open mouth the tongue protruded, black and swollen.  The throat showed horrible contusions; not mere finger-marks, but bruises and lacerations wrought by two strong hands that must have buried themselves in the yielding flesh, maintaining their terrible grasp until long after death.  Breast, throat, face, were wet; the clothing was saturated; drops of water, condensed from the fog, studded the hair and mustache.

All this the two men observed without speaking—­almost at a glance.  Then Holker said: 

“Poor devil! he had a rough deal.”

Jaralson was making a vigilant circumspection of the forest, his shotgun held in both hands and at full cock, his finger upon the trigger.

“The work of a maniac,” he said, without withdrawing his eyes from the inclosing wood.  “It was done by Branscom—­Pardee.”

Something half hidden by the disturbed leaves on the earth caught Holker’s attention.  It was a red-leather pocketbook.  He picked it up and opened it.  It contained leaves of white paper for memoranda, and upon the first leaf was the name “Halpin Frayser.”  Written in red on several succeeding leaves—­scrawled as if in haste and barely legible—­were the following lines, which Holker read aloud, while his companion continued scanning the dim gray confines of their narrow world and hearing matter of apprehension in the drip of water from every burdened branch: 

“Enthralled by some mysterious spell, I stood
In the lit gloom of an enchanted wood. 
   The cypress there and myrtle twined their boughs,
Significant, in baleful brotherhood.

“The brooding willow whispered to the yew;
Beneath, the deadly nightshade and the rue,
   With immortelles self-woven into strange
Funereal shapes, and horrid nettles grew.

“No song of bird nor any drone of bees,
Nor light leaf lifted by the wholesome breeze: 
   The air was stagnant all, and Silence was
A living thing that breathed among the trees.

“Conspiring spirits whispered in the gloom,
Half-heard, the stilly secrets of the tomb. 
   With blood the trees were all adrip; the leaves
Shone in the witch-light with a ruddy bloom.

“I cried aloud!—­the spell, unbroken still,
Rested upon my spirit and my will. 
   Unsouled, unhearted, hopeless and forlorn,
I strove with monstrous presages of ill!

“At last the viewless—­”

Holker ceased reading; there was no more to read.  The manuscript broke off in the middle of a line.

“That sounds like Bayne,” said Jaralson, who was something of a scholar in his way.  He had abated his vigilance and stood looking down at the body.

“Who’s Bayne?” Holker asked rather incuriously.

“Myron Bayne, a chap who flourished in the early years of the nation—more than a century ago.  Wrote mighty dismal stuff; I have his collected works.  That poem is not among them, but it must have been omitted by mistake.”

“It is cold,” said Holker; “let us leave here; we must have up the coroner from Napa.”

Jaralson said nothing, but made a movement in compliance.  Passing the end of the slight elevation of earth upon which the dead man’s head and shoulders lay, his foot struck some hard substance under the rotting forest leaves, and he took the trouble to kick it into view.  It was a fallen headboard, and painted on it were the hardly decipherable words, “Catharine Larue.”

“Larue, Larue!” exclaimed Holker, with sudden animation.  “Why, that is the real name of Branscom—­not Pardee.  And—­bless my soul! how it all comes to me—­the murdered woman’s name had been Frayser!”

“There is some rascally mystery here,” said Detective Jaralson.  “I hate anything of that kind.”

There came to them out of the fog—­seemingly from a great distance—­ the sound of a laugh, a low, deliberate, soulless laugh, which had no more of joy than that of a hyena night-prowling in the desert; a laugh that rose by slow gradation, louder and louder, clearer, more distinct and terrible, until it seemed barely outside the narrow circle of their vision; a laugh so unnatural, so unhuman, so devilish, that it filled those hardy man-hunters with a sense of dread unspeakable!  They did not move their weapons nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was not of the kind to be met with arms.  As it had grown out of silence, so now it died away; from a culminating shout which had seemed almost in their ears, it drew itself away into the distance, until its failing notes, joyless and mechanical to the last, sank to silence at a measureless remove.