The Dead Letter. Metta Victoria Fuller Victor

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      BAFFLED.

      Thus I sat, wrapped in musings, until a policeman, who, it is likely, had long had his eye upon me, wondering if I were a suspicious character, called out—“Take care of your legs, young man!” and I sprung to my feet, as the return boat came into her slip, drifting up and bumping sullenly against the end of the bridge where my legs had been dangling.

      I waited until, among the not numerous passengers, I perceived James hurrying by, when I slipped my hand into his arm quietly, saying,

      “You led me quite a race—what in the world have you been across to Brooklyn for?”

      He jumped at my voice and touch; then grew angry, as people are apt to do when they are startled or frightened, after the shock is over.

      “What business is that of yours, sir? How dare you follow me? If you have taken upon yourself the office of spy, let me know it.”

      “I beg your pardon,” I answered, withdrawing from his arm, “I walked over to the H—— office to meet you, and saw you walk off in this direction. I had no particular object in following you, and perhaps ought not to have done it.”

      “I spoke too hastily,” he said, almost immediately. “Forget it, Richard. You pounced upon me so unexpectedly, you gave me a nervous shock—irritated my combativeness, I suppose. I thought, of course, you had returned to the hotel, and feeling too restless to go back to my little bedroom, there, I determined to try the effect of a ride across the river. The bracing air has toned me up. I believe I can go back and sleep”—offering his arm again, which I took, and we slowly retraced our steps to the Metropolitan.

      I will not pain the heart of my reader by forcing him to be one of the mournful procession which followed Henry Moreland to his untimely grave. At two o’clock of Tuesday, all was over. The victim was hidden away from the face of the earth—smiling, as if asleep, dreaming of his Eleanor, he was consigned to that darkness from whence he should never awaken and find her—while the one who had brought him low walked abroad under the sunlight of heaven. To give that guilty creature no peace was the purpose of my heart.

      James resolved to return to Blankville by the five o’clock train. He looked sick, and said that he felt so—that the last trying scene had “used him up;” and then, his uncle would surely want one of us to assist him at home. To this I assented, intending myself to stay in the city a day or two, until Mr. Burton was prepared to go out to Blankville with me.

      After such of the friends from the village as had come down to attend the funeral, had started for home in the afternoon cars, I went to my room to have another interview with the detective. In the mean time, I had heard some of the particulars of Mr. Burton’s history, which had greatly increased the interest I already felt in him. He had chosen his present occupation out of a consciousness of his fitness for it. He was in independent circumstances, and accepted no salary for what was with him a labor of love; seldom taking any of the liberal sums pressed upon him by grateful parties who had benefited by his skill, except to cover expenses to which long journeys, or other necessities of the case, might have subjected him. He had been in the “profession” but a few years. Formerly he had been a forwarding-merchant, universally esteemed for integrity, and carrying about him that personal influence which men of strong will and unusual discrimination exercise over those with whom they come in contact. But that he had any extraordinary powers, of the kind which had since been developed, he was as ignorant as others. An accident, which revealed these to him, shaped the future course of his life. One wild and windy night the fire-bells of New York rung a fierce alarm; the flames of a large conflagration lighted the sky; the firemen toiled manfully, as was their wont, but the air was bitter and the pavements sleety, and the wintry wind “played such fantastic tricks before high heaven” as made the angel of mercy almost despair. Before the fire could be subdued, four large warehouses had been burned to the ground, and in one of them a large quantity of uninsured merchandise for which Mr. Burton was responsible.

      The loss, to him, was serious. He barely escaped failure by drawing in his business to the smallest compass, and, by the exercise of great prudence, he managed to save a remnant of his fortune, with which, as soon as he could turn it to advantage, he withdrew from his mercantile career. His mind was bent on a new business, which unfitted him for any other.

      The fire was supposed to be purely accidental; the insurance companies, usually cautious enough, had paid over their varying amounts of insurance to those fortunate losers, who were not, like Mr. Burton, unprepared. These losers were men of wealth, and the highest position as business firms—high and mighty potentates, against whom to breathe a breath of slander, was to overwhelm the audacious individual in the ruins of his own presumption. Mr. Burton had an inward conviction that these men were guilty of arson. He knew it. His mind perceived their guilt. But he could make no allegation against them upon such unsubstantial basis as this. He went to work, quietly and singly, to gather up the threads in the cable of his proof; and when he had made it strong enough to hang them twice over—for two lives, that of a porter and a clerk, had been lost in the burning buildings—he threatened them with exposure, unless they made good to him the loss which he had sustained through their villainy. They laughed at him from their stronghold of respectability. He brought the case into court. Alas! for the pure, white statue of Justice which beautifies the desecrated chambers of the law. Banded together, with inexhaustible means of corruption at their command, the guilty were triumphant.

      During this experience, Mr. Burton had got an inside view of life, in the marts, on exchange, in the halls of justice, and in the high and low places where men do congregate. It was as if, with the thread in his hand, which he had picked out, he unraveled the whole web of human iniquity. Burning with a sense of his individual wrongs, he could not look calmly on and see others similarly exposed; he grew fascinated with his labor of dragging the dangerous secrets of a community to the light. The more he called into play the peculiar faculties of his mind, which made him so successful a hunter on the paths of the guilty, the more marvelous became their development. He was like an Indian on the trail of his enemy—the bent grass, the broken twig, the evanescent dew—which, to the uninitiated, were “trifles light as air,” to him were “proofs strong as Holy Writ.”

      In this work he was actuated by no pernicious motives. Upright and humane, with a generous heart which pitied the innocent injured, his conscience would allow him no rest if he permitted crime, which he could see walking where others could not, to flourish unmolested in the sunshine made for better uses. He attached himself to the secret detective-police; only working up such cases as demanded the benefit of his rare powers.

      Thus much of Mr. Burton had the chief of police revealed to me, during a brief interview in the morning; and this information, it may be supposed, had not lessened the fascinations which he had for me. The first thing he said, after the greetings of the day, when he came to my room, was,

      “I have ascertained that our sewing-girl has one visitor, who is a constant one. There is a middle-aged woman, a nurse, who brings a child, now about a year old, every Sunday to spend half the day with her, when she does not go up to Blankville. On such occasions it is brought in the evening, some time during the week. It passes, so says the landlady, for the child of a cousin of Miss Sullivan’s, who was married to a worthless young fellow, who deserted her within three months, and went off to the west; the mother died at its birth,