The Stillwater Tragedy | Page 2

of one house at the end of a small court--the last
house on the easterly edge of the village, and standing quite
alone--sends up no smoke. Yet the carefully trained ivy over the porch,
and the lemon verbena in a tub at the foot of the steps, intimate that the
place is not unoccupied. Moreover, the little schooner which acts as
weather-cock on one of the gables, and is now heading due west, has a
new top-sail. It is a story-and-a-half cottage, with a large expanse of
roof, which, covered with porous, unpainted shingles, seems to repel

the sunshine that now strikes full upon it. The upper and lower blinds
on the main building, as well as those on the extensions, are tightly
closed. The sun appears to beat in vain at the casement sof this silent
house, which has a curiously sullen and defiant air, as if it had
desperately and successfully barricaded itself against the approach of
morning; yet if one were standing in the room that leads from the
bed-chamber on the ground-floor--the room with the latticed
window--one would see a ray of light thrust through a chink of the
shutters, and pointing like a human finger at an object which lies by the
hearth.
This finger, gleaming, motionless, and awful in its precision, points to
the body of old Mr. Lemuel Shackford, who lies there dead in his
night-dress, with a gash across his forehead.
In the darkness of that summer night a deed darker than the night itself
had been done in Stillwater.

II

That morning, when Michael Hennessey's girl Mary--a girl sixteen
years old--carried the can of milk to the rear door of the silent house,
she was nearly a quarter of hour later than usual, and looked forward to
being soundly rated.
"He's up and been waiting for it," she said to herself, observing the
scullery door ajar. "Won't I ketch it! It's him for growling and snapping
at a body, and it's me for always being before or behind time, bad luck
to me. There's no plazing him."
Mary pushed back the door and passed through the kitchen, serving
herself all the while to meet the objurgations which she supposed were
lying in wait for her. The sunshine was blinding without, but sifted
through the green jalousies, it made a gray, crepuscular light within. As
the girl approached the table, on which a plate with knife and fork had
been laid for breakfast, she noticed, somewhat indistinctly at first, a
thin red line running obliquely across the floor from the direction of the
sitting-room and ending near the stove, where it had formed a small
pool. Mary stopped short, scarcely conscious why, and peered
instinctively into the adjoining apartment. Then, with a smothered cry,
she let fall the milk-can, and a dozen white rivulets, in strange contrast

to that one dark red line which first startled her, went meandering over
the kitchen floor. With her eyes riveted upon some object in the next
room, the girl retreated backward slowly and heavily dragging one foot
after the other, until she reached the gallery door; then she turned
swiftly, and plunged into the street.
Twenty minutes later, every man, woman, and child in Stillwater knew
that old Mr. Shackford had been murdered.
Mary Hennessey had to tell her story a hundred times during the
morning, for each minute brought to Michael's tenement a fresh listener
hungry for the details at first hand.
"How was it, Molly? Tell a body, dear!"
"Don't be asking me!" cried Molly, pressing her palms to her eyes as if
to shut out the sight, but taking all the while a secret creepy satisfaction
in living the scene over again. "It was kinder dark in the other room,
and there he was, laying in his night-gownd, with his face turned
towards me, so, looking mighty severe-like, jest as if he was a-going to
say, 'It's late with the milk ye are, ye hussy!'--a way he had of spaking."
"But he didn't spake, Molly darlin'?"
"Niver a word. He was stone dead, don't you see. It was that still you
could hear me heart beat, saving there wasn't a drop of beat in it. I let
go the can, sure, and then I backed out, with me eye on 'im all the while,
afeard to death that he would up and spake them words."
"The pore child! for the likes of her to be wakin' up a murthered man in
the mornin'!"
There was little or no work done that day in Stillwater outside the mills,
and they were not running full handed. A number of men from the
Miantowona Iron Works and Slocum's Yard--Slocum employed some
seventy or eighty hands--lounged about the streets in their blouses, or
stood in knots