PAGE 12
Savareen’s Disappearance
by
As to Lapierre, the idea was at least as preposterous as either of the others. The jovial landlord of the Royal Oak was on the whole about as likely a man to commit robbery or murder as the bishop of the diocese. He was of a cheery, open nature; was not greedy or grasping; had a fairly prosperous business, and was tolerably well-to-do. On the night of the 17th, he had undertaken to go down town and bring home the absent man, but he had done so at the pressing request of the man’s wife, and out of pure kindness of heart. When setting out on his mission he knew nothing about the altercation at the bank, and was consequently ignorant that Savareen had any considerable sum of money on his person. His first knowledge on these subjects had been communicated to him by Perry, and before that time the man had disappeared. It also counted for something that Savareen and he had always been on the most friendly terms, and that Savareen was one of his best customers. But, even if he had been the most bloodthirsty of mankind, he had positively had no time to perpetrate a murder. The two or three minutes elapsing between Savareen’s departure from the toll-gate and Lapierre’s arrival there had been too brief to admit of the latter’s having meanwhile killed the former and made away with his body; to say nothing of his having also made such a disposition of the black mare as to enable it to be found in Cranberry Swamp on the following day.
After a while people began to ask whether it was probable that any murder at all had been committed. The finding of the coat was an unfathomable mystery, but it really furnished no evidence one way or the other. And if there had been a murder, how was it that no traces of the body were discoverable? How was it that no cry or exclamation of any kind had been heard by old Jonathan, sitting there at the door in the open air on a still night? It was certain that his ears had been wide open, and ready enough to take in whatever was stirring, for he had heard the sound of Count Frontenac’s hoofs as they came clattering down the road.
Such questions as these were constantly in the mouths of the people of that neighborhood for some days after the disappearance, but they met with no satisfactory answer from any quarter, and as the time passed by it began to be believed that no light would ever be thrown upon the most mysterious occurrence that had ever taken place since that part of the country had been first settled. One of the constables, discouraged by repeated failures, ventured in all seriousness to express a suspicion that Savareen had been bodily devoured by his mare. How else could you account for no trace of him being visible anywhere?
By an unaccountable oversight, Shuttleworth had kept no memorandum of the number of the notes paid over to Savareen, and it was thus impossible to trace them.
CHAPTER VII.
“A WIDOW, HUSBANDLESS, SUBJECT TO FEARS.”
The position of the missing man’s wife was a particularly trying and painful one–a position imperatively calling for the sympathy of the community in which she lived. That sympathy was freely accorded to her, but time alone could bring any thing like tranquillity to a mind harrassed by such manifold anxieties as hers. After a lapse of a few weeks Squire Harrington generously offered to take the farm off her hands, but to this proposal she was for some time loath to assent. In spite of her fears and misgivings, fitful gleams of hope that her husband would return to her flitted across her mind. If he came back he should find her at her post. Meanwhile the neighbors showed her much kindness. They voluntarily formed an organisation of labor, and harvested her crops, threshed them out and conveyed them to market for her. Her brother, a young man of eighteen, came out from town and took up his abode with her, so that she would not be left wholly desolate among strangers. And so the summer and autumn glided by.