The Secret of Lonesome Cove. Samuel Hopkins Adams
exclaimed the liveryman, his pale eyes alight. “You got a theery? But I thought you didn’t know anything about the body, till I told you, just now.”
“Oh, my ruined theory has reference to the currents,” sighed the other. “It has nothing to do with dead men, as such.”
“Neither has this,” was the prompt response, delivered with a jerk of the thumb toward the dark object.
“No? What is it then, if not a dead man?”
“A dead woman.”
“Oh! All the same, it shouldn’t have come in on this section of the beach at all.”
“Thet ain’t half the strangeness of it, the way it washed in. Lonesome Cove has had some queer folks drift home to it, but nothing as queer as this. Come and see for yourself.”
Still frowning, Professor Kent suffered himself to be led to the spot. Two or three of the group, as it parted before him, greeted him. He found himself looking down on a corpse clad in a dark silk dress and stretched on a wooden grating, to which it was lashed with a small rope. Everything about the body indicated wealth. The dress was expensively made. The shoes were of the best type, and the stockings were silk. The head was marred by a frightful bruise which had crushed in the right side and extended around behind the ear. Blood had clotted thickly in the short close-curled hair. The left side was unmarked. The eyes were closed and the mouth was slightly open, showing a glint of gold amid very white and regular teeth. An expression of deadly terror distorted the face. Professor Kent bent closely over it.
“That’s strange; very strange,” he murmured. “It should be peaceful.”
“But look at the hand!” cried Jarvis.
Here, indeed, was the astounding feature of the tragedy; the aspect that brought Kent to his knees, the more closely to observe. The body lay twisted slightly to the right, with the left arm extended. The left wrist was enclosed in a light rusted handcuff to which a chain was fastened. At the end of the chain was the companion cuff, shattered, evidently by a powerful blow, and half buried in the sand. As Kent leaned over the corpse, a fat, powerful, grizzled man with a metal badge on his shirt-front pushed forward.
“Them’s cast-iron cuffs,” he announced. “That kind ain’t been used these forty years.”
“What kind of a ship ’ud be carryin’ ’em nowadays?” asked some one in the crowd.
“An’ what kind of a seaman’d be putting of ’em on a lady’s wrists?” growled a formidable voice, which Kent, looking up, perceived to have come from amid a growth of heavy white whiskers, sprouting from a weather-furrowed face.
“Seafaring man, aren’t you?” inquired Kent.
“No more. Fifty year of it, man an’ boy, has put me in harbor.”
“That’s Sailor Smith,” explained Jarvis, who had assumed the duties of a self-appointed cicerone. “Not much about the sea and its ways, good or bad, that he don’t know.”
“True for you,” confirmed several voices.
“Then, Mr. Smith, will you take a look at those lashings and tell me whether in your opinion they are the work of a sailor?” asked Kent.
The old hands fumbled expertly. The old face puckered. Judgment came forth presently.
“The knots is well enough. The lashin’s a passable job. What gits me is the rope.”
“Well, what’s wrong with the rope?”
“Nothin’ in pertic’ler. Only, I don’t know what just that style of rope would be doin’ on shipboard, unless it was to hang the old man’s wash on.”
“Suppose we lift this grating,” Kent suggested.
At this the man with the badge interposed. “Say, who’s runnin’ this thing, anyhow? I’m sheriff here, an’ this body ain’t to be moved till a doctor has viewed it.”
“Of course,” said Kent mildly; “but I thought you might be interested to see, Mr. Sheriff, whether a ship’s name was stamped somewhere on this grating.”
“Well, I don’t want any amachure learning me my business,” declared the official importantly.
Nevertheless, he heaved the woodwork up on edge and held it so, while eager eyes scanned the under part. Murmurs of disappointment followed. In these Kent did not join. He had inserted a finger in a crevice of the splintered wood and had extracted some small object which he held in the palm of his hand, examining it thoughtfully.
“Wot ye got there?” demanded the sheriff.
Professor Kent stretched out his hand, disclosing a small grayish object.
“I should take it to be the cocoon of Ephestia kuchniella,” he announced.
“An’ wot does he do for a livin’?” inquired the official, waxing humorous.
“Destroys crops. It’s a species of grain-moth.”
“Oh!” grunted Schlager. “You’re a bug collector, eh?”
“Exactly,” answered the other, transferring his trove to his pocket.
Thereafter he seemed to lose interest in the center of mystery. Withdrawing to some distance, he paced up and down the shore, whistling lively tunes, not always in perfect accord, from which a deductive mind might have inferred that his soul was not in the music.
Nearer and nearer to high-water mark his pacing took him. Presently, though all the time continuing his whistling, he was scanning the tangled débris that the highest tide of the year had heaped up, almost against the cliff’s foot. His whistling became slow, lugubrious, minor. It sagged. It died away. When it rose again, it was in march time, whereto the virtuoso stepped briskly toward the crowd. By this time the group had received several additions, but had suffered the loss of one of its component parts, the sheriff. Conjecture was buzzing from mouth to mouth as to the official’s sudden defection.
“Whatever it was he got from the pocket,” Kent heard one of the men say, “it started him quick.”
“Looked to me like an envelope,” hazarded some one.
“No,” contradicted Sailor Smith; “paper would have been all pulped up by the water.”
“Marked handkerchief, maybe,” suggested another.
“Like as not,” said Jarvis. “You bet that Len Schlager figured it out there was somethin’ in it for him, anyways. I could see the money-gleam in his eye.”
“That’s right, too,” confirmed the old sailor. “He looked just like that when he brought in that half-wit pedler, thinkin’ he was the thousan’-dollar-reward thief last year.”
“Trust Len Schlager to look out for number one first, an’ be sheriff afterward,” observed some one else.
Amidst this interchange of opinion, none of which was lost upon him, Professor Kent advanced and bent over the manacled corpse.
“Have to ask you to stand back, Perfessor,” said Jarvis. “Len’s appointed me special dep’ty till he comes back, and he says nobody is to lay finger on hide ner hair of the corpse; not even the doc, if he comes.”
“Quite right,” assented the other. “Sheriff Schlager exhibits commendable zeal and discretion.”
“Wonder if he knowed the corpse?” suggested somebody in the crowd.
“Tell you who did, if he didn’t,” said another man.
“Who, then?”
“Elder Iry Dennett. Didn’t none of you hear about his meetin’ up with a strange woman yestiddy evenin’?”
“Shucks! This couldn’t be that woman,” said Jarvis. “How’d