Can Such Things Be?

In the blaze of a midsummer noonday the old Manton house was hardly true to its traditions.  It was of the earth, earthy.  The sunshine caressed it warmly and affectionately, with evident disregard of its bad reputation.  The grass greening all the expanse in its front seemed to grow, not rankly, but with a natural and joyous exuberance, and the weeds blossomed quite like plants.  Full of charming lights and shadows and populous with pleasant-voiced birds, the neglected shade trees no longer struggled to run away, but bent reverently beneath their burdens of sun and song.  Even in the glassless upper windows was an expression of peace and contentment, due to the light within.  Over the stony fields the visible heat danced with a lively tremor incompatible with the gravity which is an attribute of the supernatural.

Such was the aspect under which the place presented itself to Sheriff Adams and two other men who had come out from Marshall to look at it.  One of these men was Mr. King, the sheriff’s deputy; the other, whose name was Brewer, was a brother of the late Mrs. Manton.  Under a beneficent law of the State relating to property which has been for a certain period abandoned by an owner whose residence cannot be ascertained, the sheriff was legal custodian of the Manton farm and appurtenances thereunto belonging.  His present visit was in mere perfunctory compliance with some order of a court in which Mr. Brewer had an action to get possession of the property as heir to his deceased sister.  By a mere coincidence, the visit was made on the day after the night that Deputy King had unlocked the house for another and very different purpose.  His presence now was not of his own choosing:  he had been ordered to accompany his superior and at the moment could think of nothing more prudent than simulated alacrity in obedience to the command.

Carelessly opening the front door, which to his surprise was not locked, the sheriff was amazed to see, lying on the floor of the passage into which it opened, a confused heap of men’s apparel.  Examination showed it to consist of two hats, and the same number of coats, waistcoats and scarves, all in a remarkably good state of preservation, albeit somewhat defiled by the dust in which they lay.  Mr. Brewer was equally astonished, but Mr. King’s emotion is not of record.  With a new and lively interest in his own actions the sheriff now unlatched and pushed open a door on the right, and the three entered.  The room was apparently vacant—­no; as their eyes became accustomed to the dimmer light something was visible in the farthest angle of the wall.  It was a human figure—­that of a man crouching close in the corner.  Something in the attitude made the intruders halt when they had barely passed the threshold.  The figure more and more clearly defined itself.  The man was upon one knee, his back in the angle of the wall, his shoulders elevated to the level of his ears, his hands before his face, palms outward, the fingers spread and crooked like claws; the white face turned upward on the retracted neck had an expression of unutterable fright, the mouth half open, the eyes incredibly expanded.  He was stone dead.  Yet, with the exception of a bowie-knife, which had evidently fallen from his own hand, not another object was in the room.

In thick dust that covered the floor were some confused footprints near the door and along the wall through which it opened.  Along one of the adjoining walls, too, past the boarded-up windows, was the trail made by the man himself in reaching his corner.  Instinctively in approaching the body the three men followed that trail.  The sheriff grasped one of the outthrown arms; it was as rigid as iron, and the application of a gentle force rocked the entire body without altering the relation of its parts.  Brewer, pale with excitement, gazed intently into the distorted face.  “God of mercy!” he suddenly cried, “it is Manton!”

“You are right,” said King, with an evident attempt at calmness:  “I knew Manton.  He then wore a full beard and his hair long, but this is he.”

He might have added:  “I recognized him when he challenged Rosser.  I told Rosser and Sancher who he was before we played him this horrible trick.  When Rosser left this dark room at our heels, forgetting his outer clothing in the excitement, and driving away with us in his shirt sleeves—­all through the discreditable proceedings we knew whom we were dealing with, murderer and coward that he was!”

But nothing of this did Mr. King say.  With his better light he was trying to penetrate the mystery of the man’s death.  That he had not once moved from the corner where he had been stationed; that his posture was that of neither attack nor defense; that he had dropped his weapon; that he had obviously perished of sheer horror of something that he saw—­these were circumstances which Mr. King’s disturbed intelligence could not rightly comprehend.

Groping in intellectual darkness for a clew to his maze of doubt, his gaze, directed mechanically downward in the way of one who ponders momentous matters, fell upon something which, there, in the light of day and in the presence of living companions, affected him with terror.  In the dust of years that lay thick upon the floor—­leading from the door by which they had entered, straight across the room to within a yard of Manton’s crouching corpse—­were three parallel lines of footprints—­light but definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones those of small children, the inner a woman’s.  From the point at which they ended they did not return; they pointed all one way.  Brewer, who had observed them at the same moment, was leaning forward in an attitude of rapt attention, horribly pale.

“Look at that!” he cried, pointing with both hands at the nearest print of the woman’s right foot, where she had apparently stopped and stood.  “The middle toe is missing—­it was Gertrude!”

Gertrude was the late Mrs. Manton, sister to Mr. Brewer.