A Veldt Official: A Novel of Circumstance

At this time, however, it occurred to Lambert that he had custodied this bulky collection of bygone journalism about long enough, wherefore, he wrote to his predecessor suggesting its removal. But the answer he received was to the effect that the cost and trouble of such removal would be too great, and that he might consider these musty old files henceforward his own property, the merit of which endowment being somewhat negative, in that it empowered the recipient to destroy the cumbersome gift; and to such destruction Lambert forthwith resolved to proceed, yet by degrees; for it could not be that among all these records he should fail to find other than a great deal of highly interesting and, from time to time, strange and startling matter. So Lambert would frequently lug in some dusty old file, which, having duly shaken and in a measure cleansed, he constituted a companion to his evening pipe. For reading matter was deplorably lacking in Doppersdorp – the contents of the “public library,” so called, consisting mainly of ancient and heavy novels, soporific and incomplete, or the biographies of divines, sour of habit and of mind narrow as the “way” they were supposed to indicate.

Lambert had his reward, for these old records reaching back a decade – two decades – judiciously scanned, were interesting, undeniably so. There were representative papers issued in the Australian colonies, in New Zealand, in India and America, and in no end of lands beside. Lambert resolved, before accomplishing his projected wholesale destruction, to scissor out such incidents as were worth preserving, and to set up a scrap book; the main difficulty about this resolve lying in the formidable mass of matter from which he felt called upon to select. But while solving this problem, Lambert was destined to receive a shock, and one of considerable power and magnitude.

He was seated alone one evening, looking through such an old file. The paper was an American one, published in some hardly known Western township. Its contents were racy, outspoken, very; and seemed of the nature to have been written by the left hand of the editor, while the right grasped the butt of the ever-ready “gun.” But in turning a sheet of this Lambert suddenly came upon that which made him leap in his chair, and stare as though his eyes were about to drop from his head to the floor. This is what he read: —

“The Crime of Stillwell’s Flat.

Portrait of the Accused.

Sordid Affair.

He Tomahawks his Partner for the sake of Four Hundred Dollars.

The Man with the Double Scar.

Clever Arrest.”

Such were some of the headings in bold capitals, which, distributed down the column, about summed up the facts of the case, but only cursory attention did Lambert at first pay to these. Not by them had his eye been originally attracted, but by the portrait which headed the column. For this portrait, mere pen-and-ink sketch as it originally had been, was a most vivid and unmistakable likeness of Roden Musgrave.

Yes, there it was, the same clear-cut features, the same carriage of the head – the artist seemed not merely to have caught his expression, but even the characteristics of his very attitude. And – surer, more convincing than all – the same double scar beneath the lower lip. Two men might wear the same marvellous resemblance to each other, but no two men could possibly do so to the extent of both being marked with that peculiar double scar. That, at any rate, rendered the identity complete, and beyond all room for doubt.

“The man with the double scar!” repeated Lambert to himself. “Holy Moses! Am I drunk, or dreaming? No. It’s him all right,” passing his hand over his eyes in a semi-dazed manner. “No two people could be so extraordinarily alike, and Musgrave’s is the sort of face that can’t have many ‘doubles’ in the world. Now to see what they say about it.”

Breathlessly he ran his eye down the column. The facts, as reported, fully justified the opening definition of the crime as a sordid one, if proved against the accused; and that there might be no mistake whatever as to the identity of that critically situated personage with the present assistant magistrate of Doppersdorp, he figured in the trial, simply and without disguise, under the name of Roden Musgrave.

With dazed eyes, Lambert read on. Briefly summed up, the heads of the affair were these. Two prospectors established themselves on a claim together at Stillwell’s Flat, a lonely spot beneath a northern spur of the Black Hills. Their names were respectively, John Denton and Roden Musgrave, and both were supposed to be Englishmen. One morning Denton was found in the slab hut occupied by the pair, with his head cleft nearly in twain, and beside him a bloodstained axe, and worse still, his throat was cut from ear to ear. The wandering cattlemen, by whom the discovery was made, described the place as like a slaughter-yard. A ferocious and brutal crime, indeed! The motive? Robbery, of course. The dead man, who was something of a gambler, was known to have taken back from the nearest township upwards of four hundred dollars he had won, and of this sum no trace could be found. The perpetrator? Denton’s partner, of course, who had disappeared.

Had disappeared to some purpose, too; for a long and vigorous search failed to elicit the slightest clue to his whereabouts, and as the searchers were mostly experienced plainsmen, it was concluded that he was no longer above ground, had probably been killed or captured by the Sioux, who were “bad” about there just at that time.

Then, a couple of months later, when the affair was beginning to fade out of mind, possibly eclipsed by some other and similar tragedy such as from time to time occurs to relieve the monotony of life in the “wild and woolly West,” the missing man was unexpectedly arrested on board a Mississippi steamboat – arrested simply and solely on the identification of that double scar, for his description had been so far circulated – arrested and sent back for trial. And lucky indeed for him that a long enough period had elapsed to enable the excitement to die down; for, had he been found during the first days of it, he would probably have had no trial at all. He would almost certainly have been lynched. Not that it could matter in the long ran. The crime was not only a sordid and brutal one, it was also a clumsy one; in fact, about the clumsiest on record. The murderer had knotted the noose round his own neck. No loophole of escape had he, and, this being so, public opinion was, for once, in favour of the law being allowed to vindicate itself. Such vindication there was no need to anticipate in short and summary fashion.

Lambert, his pulses beating, his hands trembling with excitement, rapidly turned over the sheets of the file. What if the report of the trial should be missing? That would be too vexatious. Yet that it had ended favourably to the accused was clear, since here he was. Stay! Had he escaped prior to it being held? Lambert felt that if that were so, why then, he held in his hand not only the prospects and social position of his enemy but the latter’s very life. Yet it could not be, since Musgrave had made no attempt at changing his name. And then, for the first time, it occurred to Lambert to glance at the date of the file. The affair had taken place just ten years previously.

Ten years? Why, the portrait might have been taken that day. Ten years? Ah, the accused might have been found guilty on a lesser count, and sentenced to imprisonment only. That indeed would be the best of all, and Lambert fairly thrilled with delight over the prospect of breaking the news to Mona Ridsdale that the man she had preferred to himself was only an ex-gaol bird who had “done time,” and who would, of course, now that he was unmasked, be promptly kicked out of the Government Service. Would he never find what he wanted? Ah! There it was.

“The Stillwell’s Flat Murder.Trial of the Accused.Lawyer Schofield’s Eloquent Defence.Judge McClellar sums up.Verdict of Acquittal.The boys talk about Lynching.”

Acquittal? Down went poor Lambert’s house of cards, crumpled in the dust. His discovery could not damage his enemy now. Still, as he read the final report of the trial and its result, he thought he saw light. For the acquittal, under the circumstances, and obtained as it had been, amounted to a verdict of “not proven” far more than to one of “not guilty.”

And the way in which it had been arrived at was ingenious. The evidence against the accused was merely presumptive; indeed, it was no evidence at all. He admitted having quarrelled with the deceased and left him, but totally denied the murder. Moreover, he had satisfactorily explained his movements since. Why had he not returned when wanted? Ah, well now. It was not completely outside knowledge that innocent men had before then been sacrificed at times of popular clamour. But there were two cards which the lawyer for the defence held in his hands, and upon which he mainly relied. The axe-blow which had slain the murdered man had split his head nearly in two, yet his throat had been cut. Now the latter act was quite superfluous, was, in fact, an act of deliberate and cold-blooded barbarity, to which his client, even if he did the killing, would hardly be likely to bring himself. The fact of the dead man’s throat being cut pointed to murderers of a very different type. Everybody knew that the tribal mark of the Sioux was cutting the throat, which never failed to distinguish the victims of their barbarity. Well, the Sioux were “bad” around there just then, and Stillwell’s Flat was a lonely place; in fact, it was in following the trail of several Indians who had run off some of their steers, that those very cattlemen had happened upon the spot. True, the man was not scalped, but possibly the Indian murderers had been alarmed, and decamped before completing that revolting essential to their barbarous work.

But the trump card of all, and one most skilfully played by the advocate, was this: – His client had served in the recent Indian war, might not the murderers have marked him out as the object of their vengeance, and have mistaken his partner for him? He had been one of that little band of heroes, under the command of General Forsyth, who only the previous year had “stood off” overwhelming forces of the enemy; and who with no other rampart than their own dead horses, and no other food than the putrefying flesh of the animals, had managed to hold their own for seven days against the fiercest and most persistent onslaughts known to Plains history. Moreover, he was one of those who had volunteered to break through at night, braving certain death, and almost certain death by torture, in order to make his way to Fort Wallace, and bring relief to the besieged handful of scouts. Was this the man to commit such a foul and sordid murder for the sake of a few dollars? Was this man, who had fought so bravely to defend their frontier, to be sacrificed to such a preposterous suspicion, to be allowed to suffer for the crime almost certainly committed by representatives of that savage enemy, to withstand whom he had so often and so freely risked his life? With the battle of the Arickaree Fork fresh in their memories, not one who heard him could be of any two minds as to the sort of verdict he would be given.

This clever drawing of a red herring across the trail of the main issue answered. Lawyer Schofield’s eloquence had its reward. He obtained his verdict, and his client was acquitted.

But it was not a spontaneous verdict, not a triumphant acquittal. Long and earnestly did the jury debate, and when at last the accused walked forth a free man, he was received with a silence that was ominous. The lawyer, of course, was quite right to do his best for his client, and his strong appeal to sentiment was specious, if successful. But nobody believed overmuch in the theory he had sprung. If the Sioux had killed John Denton, they would have run off all his possessions, probably have fired the slab hut, instead of relieving him of his cash alone. Nor would they have left him his scalp. No. To the frontier community that Indian theory would not wash. Justice had been defeated, and Roden Musgrave had few, if any, friends. But when there sallied forth stealthily that night a band of dissatisfied and justice loving citizens, well-armed, and bearing in its midst an ominous coil of rope, the man who had been acquitted that day was not to be found. Nor, in fact, were they destined ever to set eyes upon him again.

This, set forth in a voluminous report extending over many columns, was the substance of what Lambert read, and, as he grasped all the details, he realised that, although powerless to effect material ruin, there was still that about the equivocal nature of the acquittal which would be sufficient to damage his rival irreparably from a social point of view. Throw mud enough and a great deal of it is sure to stick, is a trite axiom. The crime was an exceptionally brutal one, and the bare suspicion of it still clinging to a man was enough. To do him justice, Lambert himself felt a repulsion towards one who could ever have colourably lain under so horrible a suspicion, which was not altogether the outcome of his hatred of this particular individual. What would Mona think of it? What action would Musgrave’s superior take in the matter? Surely no man could continue to hold an official position with such a stigma clinging to him. Musgrave would be called upon to resign, of course. And then an uneasy misgiving assailed the plotter’s mind, and there loomed up ugly visions of suits for slander, defamation, what not. The man had stood his trial and had been acquitted. It would be a ticklish matter spreading the story around.

The more he looked at it the less he liked it. Nothing was easier than to start this kind of ball rolling, nothing on earth more difficult than to stop its progress once it was fairly in motion. Lambert wanted to see the end of this thing; to which effect he resolved to sleep upon it.

Having accordingly slept upon it, he decided that two heads were better than one. If anybody in Doppersdorp were competent to carry this affair through, that individual was Sonnenberg.

Not for a moment did it occur to Lambert that he was about to perpetrate a wholly mean and dishonourable act, or if it did, he excused it on the ground that all’s fair in love and war. Musgrave had cut him out in a certain quarter; Musgrave had had his day; now he, Lambert, was going to have his. He was not quite fool enough to suppose that he could walk into Mona’s heart over, figuratively speaking, the other’s dead body; nevertheless he would tumble down their own fair house of cards, would, in fact, separate them; and from this purpose he never swerved.

Sonnenberg, when put in possession of this new weapon against their common enemy, fairly howled with delight; when he saw the portrait, and read the report of the case, his exultation knew no bounds.

“We have him! we have him, by God!” he yelled. “Ha, ha! I shall get the value of my fifteen pounds now. This is worth fifty of the gun-selling trap.”

“But, wait now. Let’s be careful,” urged Lambert. “It’s an awkward thing, you know, spreading about a story of this kind. Might get ourselves into trouble, eh?”

“Trouble? Trouble be damned! By to-night, or to-morrow at latest, it shall be all over the district. Even if we did render ourselves liable to any action by passing it on – which we don’t – there’s a better way of doing it.”

“What is it?”

“Why, filter it through Chandler. It won’t take long to run through him.”

“By Jove, the very thing!” cried Lambert.

Chapter Twenty Six.

A Sword – Long Rusted

Every small community, permanent or temporary, comprises at least one old woman of the male sex, frequently more than one.

It is difficult to particularise whence this product springs. The average club perhaps is pre-eminently its forcing house, for there you shall find the growth both multifold and luxuriant. Likewise on board passenger ships it thrives and flourishes; indeed, so well known is the type as not to need defining here. In up-country townships, too, its roots strike most congenial soil, and in such surroundings its ramblings not unfrequently tend to bestir the monotony of life, even if they should occasionally meet with rough and violent usage.

Now Doppersdorp was no exception to the universal rule, for that historic place owned a really prize specimen of the male “old woman.” This was a brisk, elderly, dapper individual, the primary article of whose creed was that what he didn’t know was not worth knowing. In aspect he was somewhat Hebraic, with the predatory eye and prominent “beak” of a certain phase of “the tribes.” He was shortish of stature, and wore his curly grey hair brushed up aggressively over his ears and neck, eke a beard of the same hue and texture. By profession he described himself as an “agent,” a nondescript term which might mean anything or nothing, and how he procured the requisite equivalent for the necessaries of life was ever a dark mystery. But that the highest heaven and a fairly sordid section of the lower depths of earth might meet in his individuality, he rejoiced in the name of Michael Chandler.

In saying he knew everything we are short of his merit, for he knew a great deal more than everything. He knew very much more than really existed or had ever happened. You could not mention a name or a place but forthwith would stream copious anecdote either relating to individual or locality, delivered in a darkly mysterious tone. Certain it was that no event concerning anybody could be mentioned in his hearing, but that event became common property throughout Doppersdorp within the space of half a day at the furthest.

He had a spiritual side, too, as befitted one thus named from the angelic spheres. He would deliver himself of highly moral and consoling precepts for the improvement of those who sat daily at Jones’ not too well-appointed board; eke would he invent anecdotes whose first narration had, according to him, moved the most hardened to tears. He was full up with unction, too, and would frequently “expound” from the pulpit of a certain chapel of the “omnium gatherum” persuasion, whence was dispensed Sabbath nourishment to the bulk of English-speaking Doppersdorp. And he loved not Roden Musgrave.

Now the said Michael Chandler, commonly known among the irreverent as “Old Buzfuz,” held the office of librarian of the Doppersdorp public library; wherefore Lambert’s proposal to endow that useful institution with some of the files of newspapers bequeathed him by his predecessor, was hailed with genuine elation. The idea was an excellent one. There was plenty of room, and old records were always most interesting. Perhaps though – er – he suggested, turning on some unction, perhaps – er – Dr Lambert would not mind him looking over some of the files he so very kindly wished to present, just to make sure there was nothing objectionable in them. All sorts of people used the library; all ages and sexes, he explained, with another unctuous gulp.

Lambert could have yelled with laughter. Why, this was the very thing they had intended. So with many protestations to the effect that the other’s scruples did him the greatest credit, and so forth, he loaded up “Old Buzfuz” with three or four previously assorted files, deftly contriving that that of the Bryonville Sentinel should occupy the most prominent place among them, and thus engage attention first.

All was going magnificently. This time the plot could not miscarry. Sonnenberg was half beside himself with vindictive elation. He had got his enemy in the hollow of his hand, and would crush him utterly.

Now, towards evening there came a knock at Lambert’s door, which opened to admit Chandler, looking very solemn and mysterious indeed. Would the doctor kindly step round with him to his rooms? Lambert, affecting the greatest surprise and mystification, was not slow to acquiesce. Then, when Chandler, having carefully locked the door, proceeded to draw forth and spread upon the table the sheet containing the very portrait which had so dumfoundered himself the previous night, he was ready to choke with stifled mirth. The long and unctuous rigmarole wherein the other set forth the painful – the extremely painful – discovery he had so unexpectedly made, was all thrown away. Lambert was struggling hard to preserve his gravity and keep up the assumed mystification; and it was a struggle.

“By Jove!” he cried, “I never was more astounded in my life. Why, you might knock me down with a feather. But, hang it, the thing can’t be genuine. It’s only an extraordinary coincidence – a likeness. A devilish good one, but still a mere likeness.”

“It’s more than that, unless the name is a coincidence too. Look at the name!”

“By Jove!” cried Lambert again, staring with admirably feigned amazement at the paper handed to him.

“When people are so very reserved about themselves it usually means that their past has not been a creditable one – ahem!” ejaculated Old Buzfuz, piously shaking his head. “But this is awful – awful. A murderer, too. A murderer!”

“But, what’s to be done? We’d better destroy the papers and keep it to ourselves – eh?” said Lambert. “You see, the thing ends in an acquittal of a sort. How about actions for libel? I don’t want to risk anything of that kind.”

This was putting matters uncomfortably. “Old Buzfuz” cleared his throat.

“There is no question of anything of that kind,” he said. “You see, Dr Lambert, you offered to present these files of papers to the Doppersdorp public library. Now, besides looking through them myself, it will be my duty to submit them to Mr Shaston, who, as chairman of the institution, has a considerable voice in admitting or excluding its contents.”

“Eh, what?” cried Lambert, in pretended alarm. “Why, it may get Musgrave into trouble. He might get the sack.”

“Any action which Mr Shaston may take rests with himself, not with us. Meanwhile, my duty is plain, and I propose to discharge it unswervingly.”

And “Old Buzfuz” pulled a very long face, heaved a very deep sigh, and looked the other straight in the eyes. These two humbugs thoroughly understood each other now.

A couple of mornings later, Roden Musgrave, emerging from his quarters, was surprised to behold two or three groups scattered on the footway and on the other side of the road, intently but furtively watching his house. He noticed, too, that those composing them turned away as he came forth, as though to disguise their intent. And simultaneously with the quick flash of vision in which he took in all this, his eye was attracted to something on his front door, and if his nerves were momentarily shaken it is little to be wondered at. For right across his door, boldly drawn in charcoal, its head daubed with splotches of red, was a great axe; and underneath this, in red lettering, were inscribed the words,

“Stillwell’s Flat.”

The suddenness of the bolt might well have staggered him – the utter unexpectedness of it. How had this grim skeleton been thus dug up from its far-away and long-covered grave, and dangled here before him? Who had done it? And, as his gaze wandered over the groups, it met that of Sonnenberg, and on the evil countenance of the Jew was a smirk of vindictive triumph. He did not avert his glance.

The sight, however, was of all things the best that could possibly have happened. It acted as a tonic. His nerves completely braced now, Roden turned and deliberately examined the daub, looking it up and down from top to bottom. Those furtive groups began to peer anxiously, eager to see what he was going to do next. They expected to see him blanch, grow agitated, perhaps turn faint; instead of which he stood examining the hideous practical joke, with the ghost of a satirical grin drooping the corners of his mouth. He had not turned a hair.

Then he called a native who was limping along on the other side of the street.

“Tom.”

It was indeed the ci-devant warrior, now the priest’s stable-boy. He trotted across, grinning, and saluted.

“Where are you off to now, Tom?”

The Kaffir explained that he was going nowhere in particular. His master was absent, and times were easy.

“Very well. Go inside and get a bucket and brush, and clean that beautiful drawing off my door, while I’m at breakfast,” said Roden, chucking the boy a sixpence, and strolling leisurely down the street in the direction of the Barkly.