Eleven Possible Cases. Maurice Thompson
to the clouding sky. Gloom was so fit for the scene, too, that nobody gave a thought from whence it came. To Gerald Heath the going out of sunlight, and the settling down of dusky shadows seemed a mental experience of his own. He stood bewildered, transfixed, vaguely conscious of peril, and yet too numb to speak or stir. Detective O'Reagan, straightening up from over the body, looked piercingly at Gerald, and then glanced around at the rest.
"Is there anybody here who saw Tonio Ravelli last night?" he asked.
"I did," Gerald replied.
"Where and when?"
"At the same place where I met Eph, and immediately afterward."
"Ah! now we are locating Eph and Ravelli together. That looks like the lunatic being undoubtedly the stabber."
"And we must catch him," Brainerd interposed. "I'll send riders toward Dimmersville immediately."
"No great hurry about that," the detective remarked; "he is too crazy to have had any clear motive or any idea of escape. It will be easy enough to capture him." Then he turned to Gerald, and questioned with the air of a cross-examiner: "Did the two men have any words together?"
"No," was the ready answer; "I don't know that they even saw each other at that time. Eph went away an instant before Ravelli came."
"Did you talk with Ravelli?"
"Yes."
"About what?"
"Not about Eph at all."
"About what, then?"
Now the reply came reluctantly: "A personal matter – something that had occurred between us – an incident at the telegraph station."
"The station where Eph had awakened the girl operator? Was it a quarrel about her?"
"That is no concern of yours. You are impertinent."
"Well, sir, the question is pertinent – as the lawyers say – and the answer concerns you, whether it does me or not. You and Ravelli quarreled about the girl?"
"The young lady shall not be dragged into this. She wasn't responsible for what happened between Ravelli and me."
"What did happen between you and Ravelli?"
The two men stood close to and facing each other. The eyes of the detective glared gloatingly at an upward angle into the pale but still firm face of the taller Gerald, and then dropped slowly, until they became fixed on a red stain on the sleeve of the other's coat. Did he possess the animal scent of a bloodhound?
"What is that?" he sharply asked. He seized the arm and smelled of the spotted fabric. "It is blood! Let me see your knife."
Quite mechanically Gerald thrust one hand into his trousers pocket and brought out the knife which he had taken back from Ravelli, whose blood was on it yet.
The storm was overhead. A first peal of thunder broke loudly. It came at the instant of the assemblage's tensest interest – at the instant when Gerald Heath was aghast with the revelation of his awful jeopardy – at the instant of his exposure as a murderer. It impressed them and him with a shock of something supernatural. The reverberation rumbled into silence, which was broken by O'Reagan:
"There'll be no need to catch Eph," he said, in a tone of professional glee. "This man is the murderer."
Again thunder rolled and rumbled angrily above Overlook, and the party stood aghast in the presence of the man dead and the man condemned.
"Bring him to the telegraph station," O'Reagan commanded.
Nobody disputed the detective's methods now – not even Gerald; and a prisoner as completely as though manacled, although not touched by any one, he went with the rest.
Mary Warriner had taken down the tarpaulin front of her shed when the men approached. In the ordinary course of her early morning doings she would wait an hour to dispatch and receive the first telegrams of the day, and then go to breakfast alone at the table where the engineers and overseers would by that time have had their meal. She was astonished to see nearly the whole population of Overlook crowd around her quarters, while a few entered. But she went quickly behind the desk, and took her place on the stool. The soberness of the faces impressed her, but nothing indicated that Gerald was in custody, and her quick thought was that some disaster made it necessary to use the wire importantly.
"I wish to send a message," said O'Reagan, stepping forward.
The eyes of the girl rested on him inquiringly, and he palpably flinched, but as obviously nerved himself to proceed, and when he spoke again the Irish accent became more pronounced to hear, although not sufficiently to be shown in the printed words: "I will dictate it slowly, so that you can transmit it as I speak. Are you ready?"
Mary's fingers were on the key, and her bright, alert face was an answer to the query.
"To Henry Deckerman, president," the detective slowly said, waiting for the clicks of the instrument to put his language on the wire; "Tonio Ravelli, a sub-contractor here, was murdered last night."
Mary's hand slid away from the key after sending that, and the always faint tint in her cheeks faded out, and her eyes flickered up in a scared way to the stern faces in front of her. The shock of the news that a man had been slain, and that he was a man who, only the previous day, had proffered his love to her, was for a moment disabling. But the habit of her employment controlled her, and she awaited the further dictation.
"His body was found this morning in the furnace of the steam boiler." O'Reagan resumed deliberately, "where it had evidently been placed in a vain attempt to destroy it."
A shudder went through Mary, and she convulsively wrung her small hands together, as though to limber them from a cramp. But her fingers went back to the key.
"The murderer has been discovered," the detective slowly continued, and the operator kept along with his utterance word by word. "He killed Ravelli for revenge. It was a love affair." Here the girl grew whiter still, and the clicks became very slow, but they did not cease. O'Reagan's voice was cold and ruthless: "The motive of the murderer was revenge. His name is Gerald Heath."
All but the name flashed off on the wire. Mary Warriner's power to stir the key stopped at that. She did not faint. She did not make any outcry. For a moment she looked as though the soul had gone out of her body, leaving a corpse sitting there. A grievous wail of wind came through the trees, and a streak of lightning zig-zagged down the blue-clouded sky.
"Go on," said O'Reagan.
"I will not," was the determined response.
"Why not?"
"Because it is not so. Gerald Heath never murdered Ravelli."
Gerald had stood motionless and silent. Now he gave way to an impulse as remarkable as his previous composure had been singular. If there had been stagnation in his mind, it was now displaced by turbulence. He grasped Mary's hands in a fervid grip; then dropped them and faced the others.
"I did not kill the Italian," he said. "He attacked me with my knife which he had stolen. In the struggle his hand was cut, but I took the weapon away from him. He quitted me alive and unhurt. I never saw him again. You don't believe it? Mary does, and that is more than all else."
"The circumstances don't favor you," the detective retorted, "they convict you. You killed Ravelli because you and he were both in love with this young lady."
"Isn't it the rejected suitor who kills the other one for spite?" This was in Mary Warriner's voice, weak, but still steady. "Ravelli loved me, I knew, and I drove him away. Mr. Heath loved me, I believed, and I had not repulsed him. If I were the cause of a murder between them, it should be Ravelli who killed Gerald."
"You detested Ravelli?" O'Reagan asked, with a strange bitterness.
"Yes."
"And you love Heath?"
The answer was no more hesitant than before; "Yes."
"Send the rest of my message," and the detective was boisterous. "Send the name. Gerald Heath is the murderer."
He roughly seized her hand and clapped it on the key.