“Well, I kin,” said Tyke, unconsciously raising his voice a trifle. “Got four good witnesses ‘sides myse’f to prove it in court. Know the very day an’ hour when it happened. We all seen the body, and one of us seen him burying her.”
“Body!” exclaimed Gene, jumping up, white to the lips. “Burying!”
“Sit still, man! Keep yer shirt on! We don’t get nowheres carryin’ on with them hysterics. Somebody might be round an’ hear ya. You can’t never tell. You gotta learn to keep quiet ef you wantta hear what I got ta say.”
“Go on,” said Gene with dry lips and stiff articulation. The horror of it froze his senses. In spite of him, his mother’s face came reproachfully between him and the stranger. What had he done to Joyce? How had he been responsible for all this that had happened to her? He was not a bad man. He did not want her inheritance at the expense of her life. He was merely a selfish man. This girl was his own blood and kin, and he was responsible for her safety. Fear sat upon his face. What might come to him when the town heard this?
But the stranger was asking him a question.
With an effort he pulled himself back to attend.
“Just when did you say you seen her last? April? Twenty-four? Yep. That’s the day. Long toward evenin’, wasn’t it? She went down acrost lots to her yant’s grave, didn’t she? What say? You didn’t know that? Oh, I thought—well, it don’t matter. That’s where she went, and he met her thar. Must uv had a date. He was waitin’ there for her. You see, we was doin’ some work there ‘round a lot in the cem’try, me an’ a couppla others, an’ when we got back home, we found we had ta go ‘nother place next day, so we walks back t’get our tools we’d lef’ hid. Seein’ there was somebody there seemin’ to be feelin’ bad—she was cryin’ real hard, an’ he was coaxin’ her—we didn’t like to intrude, so we set awhile under the hedge thinkin’ he’d get away. We knowed him, ya know, a great one with the dames. They always fall fer him, no matter what they are! Pretty soon we see ’em walk away down a piece to the road jes’ as we thought they would, only she was talkin’ fast, an’ cryin’. Still we didn’t think nothin’ of it, knowin’ him an’ all, till suddenly we seen him pick her up strugglin’ and chuck her into a notymobile he had standin’ there, and ‘fore we could sense what was goin’ on, they was off down the road.
“We talked it over an’ we come to the conclusion it was just a little quarrel they was havin’ an’ none o’ our business. But two days after that, Billy, he missed one o’ his wedges, an’ he reckoned he musta lef’ it up to the cemetery, so we all decides to walk up, been a pleasant evenin’, just fer the walk. On the way, we talked about the girl we’d seen an’ decided to look at the headstone an’ see if we could make out if she was a relative of ennybody we knowed. I ain’t from Meadow Brook myself, but I got frien’s buried up there. But when we come in sight o’ the cem’try we seen that there car thar agin, jus’ in the same place, kinda hid-like behind the alders, backed down off the road, an’ we listened an’ heard the ring of a spade. We thought that was strange, an’ we clum the bank an’ stole ‘round to the back of the cem’try where we could see. We hadta go awful still, ’cause he stopped every now an’ agin to listen, but we fin’lly got where we could see, an’ he was diggin’ a grave!”
Gene caught his breath, and Tyke sat watching him cautiously to see just how far he could go with his tale.
“Thur was a long bundle did up in a carridge robe layin’ on the ground, and bime bye when he’d dug a long time, he turns around and he listens, an’ then he snaps on his flashlight an’ turns back the cloth an’ there was ‘er face, jes’ as plain, same girl as we’d seen settin’ on the grave, only dead as a doornail. Her face shone bright in his light, an’ we couldn’t make no mistake. Then he covers up her face an’ snaps off the light and rolls her into the hole, an’ we could hear the dirt bein’ shoveled down in agin, an’ me an’ my pards were weak as little babies. We couldn’t do nothin’, jes’ lay in the grass there an’ never moved till we heard his autymobile chuggin’ down the road. We was ‘most too scared to speak then. An’ we got away acrost the fields an’ never come home till mornin’ we was so plumb scared.
“We was tryin’ to figger out what to do, but next thing we heard the girl had went away visitin’, an’ we figgered it out that what you didn’t know wouldn’t never make you all feel bad, so we kep’ our mouths shet. But here lately, I ain’t been sleepin’ well. Keep a-dreamin’ I see that there girl with her purty white face a-cryin’ out to me fer justice to be done on that there feller, an’ I made up my mind I wouldn’t hold back no longer. I’d tell you the truth, an’ you kin do what you like about it. My han’s is washed clean, enyhow. But if you all want ter prosecute him, it’s a clear case of murder in the first degree, an’ we’ll all stan’ by ya.”
“But you haven’t told me who the man is,” said Gene, his breath coming fast and his eyes taking on a wild look. “Murder! Think of it! To one of our family!”
“Why, I s’posed you knowed, a course. Ain’t he been comin’ here to see her? I knowed he was here the night after he took her away, ’cause I seen him myself, follered him to the gate. Fact, there ain’t been much happened to him sence that I ain’t knowed ’bout. Had him watched, ya know. Can’t take no chances with a feller like that. Why, his name is Sherwood. Darcy Sherwood. Great baseball pitcher. Often had his name in the paper. That kind takes the girls, ya know.”
“Darcy Sherwood! Of course!” said Gene. “Where is he now? I’ll get out a warrant for arrest tonight.”
“Well, that’s the rub,” said Tyke uneasily. “You see, he got away a few days back. He’s been keepin’ close and been away a lot, but he musta got onto it that we had him spotted, fer he made tracks fer Canada. I follered him up there but found he’d left, given a wrong address an’ all that. But he’s back somewheres in this neighborhood. I’m sure o’ that. You jes’ wantta put it in the han’s of the p’lice an’ you’ll get yer party all right, all right! Better not tell who yer witnesses are till ya get him safe an’ sound in jail though. He mighta got onto the fact of who we are an’ cleared out.”
Gene’s mind had run rapidly ahead of the visitor’s words. He was thinking fast what he had to do.
“We must dig up the grave and find the body,” he said, speaking rapidly. “You can locate it, of course.”
“Sure. We can locate her all right; but it ain’t no use diggin’ it up. Didn’t I tell ya that part? This other party, this fourth man I was speakin’ of fer a witness, he ain’t one of my bunch at all. He was just goin’ through the medder adjoinin’ next night after the buryin’, an’ he heard a sound of a spade, and he steps to the hedge curious-like to see who was diggin’ a grave that time o’ night—it was still kinda light—an’ he sees this feller diggin’ her up, an’ presently he takes up the big roll an’ carries it away in a car. Got scared likely. Thought somebody was onto him an’ didn’t dare leave her there. My man went an’ looked in the hole after he was gone, an’ there wasn’t nothing there but broken glass. After that we went, too, an’ it’s all true jes’ as he sez. So he’s got away with it all good an’ slick. He’s an awful slick feller. I knowed him back in France. I got an idea where he may have hid her though. There’s more’n one graveyard round these diggin’s.”
Late that night Eugene let Tyke out the back door, and he stole away into the mists like some creeping thing to hide. But Eugene walked the floor all night, his white face drawn and pinched, his eyes bloodshot and looking like hidden fires. There was something more than revenge working in Eugene Massey’s heart. There was conscience. One cannot have a mother like Mary Massey without having to suffer for it sometime or other if one has wandered away from her teachings.
And all night long, Nan lay in her bed with wide-open eyes and tried to piece together the few words she had overheard from her perch on the back stairs, and make sense out of them—lay and dreaded the coming of the morning.
Chapter 27
One e
vening late in March, Joyce was coming out from the Bible school on the way to her train. She had skipped the second class that evening because she had papers to correct when she got home, and it would keep her up very late if she waited until the late train.
As she came into the street, a gust of wind caught her hat and flung it along the pavement. She darted out after it and, after quite a race, captured it, but not till several large drops of rain had fallen in her face. She turned to hurry toward the station. It was not a long walk, and she usually preferred to do it on foot rather than to wait for trolleys, which were few and far between on that side street. But it was all too evident that a storm was upon her. Dust and papers and litter were being blown along in the gutter, and the wind lifted in wild swoops and banged signs and shutters and any loose object in sight. People hurried to cover, and umbrellas were raised and lowered quickly or the wind seized them and turned them inside out. People in automobiles hurriedly fastened on side curtains, and the street was almost deserted in an instant.
Joyce turned to see if a car was coming, but none was in sight. She held her hat and, ducking her head, hurried on as fast as she could fly, but at the second corner, the wind took her and almost tore her from the sidewalk. It was with difficulty she regained her footing and huddled by some steps with her hand on a building to steady her. Then the rain fell in torrents, and she turned and scurried blindly into an open doorway a few feet away.
Other people had taken refuge there also. They were crowding in, and Joyce was pushed with the throng inside the door, not knowing what kind of a place she was entering. But there were other women in the company, caught in the storm as she was, so she was not frightened. Before she had opportunity to look around and know where she was, a burst of song broke around her:
Free from the law! O happy condition!
Jesus hath bled and there is remission!
Cursed by the law and bruised by the fall.
Christ hath redeemed us once for all.
Once for all, O sinner, receive it!
Once for all, O brother, believe it!
Cling to the cross, the burden will fall,
Christ hath redeemed us once for all.
It was a religious meeting of some sort, right there in the heart of the city!
She pressed in at last where she could stand behind the last row of chairs next to the aisle and see the platform. A piano was there and a girl playing the hymn. A young man was playing a cornet, and there were singers and some men seated in chairs behind a low desk table.
She forgot that she was missing her train in her deep interest in the meeting, and her own voice joined eagerly in the old hymn she had known ever since she could remember:
Now we are free—there’s no condemnation,
Jesus provides a perfect salvation:
“Come unto me,” oh, hear His sweet call,
Come, and He saves us, once for all.
Her eyes swept over the congregation. Men and women and children were there, people of plain dress, mostly, some young, giddy children of the street, some old men in worn garments, a few tired-looking women, not many mighty. Back by the door, caught as herself in the storm, were a few better-dressed people in luxurious furs and velvets, people obviously amused at their surroundings, as they would have been equally amused if they had dropped into an opium joint for the moment or a traveling circus or a Hindu temple or any other foreign environment.
But Joyce felt that she had dropped in on home, and her heart went out in the song:
“Children of God,” oh, glorious calling,
Surely His grace will keep us from falling:
Passing from death to life at His call,
Blessed salvation once for all.
The congregation rustled into their seats with the closing chorus and gave Joyce a full view of the people on the platform. A man with a good voice that could be heard out in the street was speaking now. He said, “Before you go home, I want you to listen to somebody else a moment. A dear brother came to me tonight wanting to tell me what Christ had done for him, and I have asked him if he will tell you what he told me. He says he is not a public speaker, but when I put it to him that he might help somebody else, he consented.”
Someone stepped to the front of the platform and began to speak. A man just in front of Joyce rose up at that instant and put on his overcoat, and she could not see the platform for a moment, but the voice rang into her soul like a song of long ago.
“I don’t like to talk about myself,” said the speaker, “never did, but when your leader showed me a verse in my new Bible that said, ‘If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shall believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved!’ I had to do what he asked, because I believe, and I want to confess.”
Joyce’s heart stood still with wonder and then went flying on in great glad leaps and bounds. There could not be two voices like that one. She stretched her neck to see, and when the man ahead of her sat down, there was Darcy Sherwood standing on the platform, with a new grave look upon his face, and he was saying the most wonderful thing. “I’ve been a sinner all my life, but I never knew it until one day God sent a woman to look into my eyes and ask me what I was doing. I was in the bootlegging business then and doing pretty well. It had never occurred to me that there was anything like what you’d call sin about it. But it began to seem as if somehow God had got into the woman’s eyes and was looking at me. I saw that the breaking of the law of the land that had been made for the good of the land was a sin. I was a lawbreaker and I was a sinner. And somehow that sin grew until it was the heaviest thing I had to carry around.
“I gave up bootlegging right away that night, but somehow that didn’t seem to make any difference. The sin was there just the same, and it grew heavier and heavier on my soul. I never knew I had a soul before that.
“I heard a Bible story read long ago about a blind man, and there was one verse I always remembered. It said, ‘If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.’
“I began to see that was just like me. I had always prided myself on seeing what was right and doing it. I had been a law to myself. But now I saw that was all wrong. I had no right to make my own laws. There had to be somebody wiser than I who could make the laws for everybody.
“I bought a Bible and began to read, and presently I began to see that there was something else back of it all that I hadn’t got at all yet. There was something bigger than federal laws. I had broken the law of the land, and I could go and pay the penalty of that and wipe it out, but there was a higher law, a law of the universe, that my spirit had been breaking, and I didn’t see any way to wipe out that debt, pay that penalty. In fact, I didn’t know that higher law, and how was I to keep from breaking it?
“Then one day I came on a verse that said, ‘And this is his commandment, that we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ.’
“There it was! I hadn’t been doing that, and I was a sinner. I could see how God would be very angry with me about that. God, to be a God, holy and good and all that a real God would be, and I a little creature setting up myself to not believe on Him! It really seemed a reasonable offense. As I thought about it, it seemed greater than killing anybody, or robbing a bank, or forging, or any of the things we count sins in the world. It seemed—well—so contemptible in me. And the more I felt it, the more I didn’t like the feeling, and I kept on reading my Bible.
“My Bible is a pretty nice kind of a Bible. I suppose you all know about it. It is called a Scofield Bible, and it has little explanations and notes here and there that lead you on and that let you in on the meaning of a word in the original Hebrew or Greek and make it a lot plainer to a beginner like me. By and by, after I had worried about my sin a lot, I found that I didn’t need to worry at all—that my sin had all been prepared for, and the penalty paid; that Jesus Christ had set me free from the law of sin and death, and all I had
to do was accept my pardon and go out unburdened.
“Well, there isn’t much more to tell. I took it. You better believe I did! If you had been as unhappy as I was, you wouldn’t have wasted a minute in taking a pardon like that. Why don’t you, by the way, if you never have? It pays. I’m here to tell you, it pays above everything else I’ve ever tried. If you don’t see it, just try it anyway, and you’ll find out.”
The audience rose to join in the closing hymn, and during that and the benediction, Joyce’s heart was in a tumult of joy. She could not see the platform because the two men who stood in front of her were unusually tall, and some people had come in and were standing in the aisle beside her, crowding her from her position, but the instant the benediction was over, she set herself to get up that aisle somehow. However, she might as well have attempted to throw herself out to sea when the tide was coming in. It was impossible to make any progress, and finally she slipped into the backseat and decided to wait. She must see Darcy at any risk, no matter if she lost the next train. She must tell him how glad she was!
There was a crowd around the platform. Likely people had come up to speak to him. His words rang over again in her heart as she waited, her eyes lighted with a great joy. At last the crowd thinned and she managed to work her way through and get to the front, but as she did so, she saw several men going out a door back of the platform, and when she arrived there was but one man left up there, seemingly a janitor, picking up the books. Her heart sank.
“Oh, can you tell me where the speakers have gone? I must see one of them a minute, that last man, Mr. Sherwood!” she cried eagerly.
“Him? Oh, he went while they was singin’, lady, hed to ketch a train. I showed him the way to the station. Good, wa’nt he? Beats all what the Lord does when He gets a chance at a soul—”