FullReads

III

Ellen and I were very firm to have nothing to do with the boot in the oak tree; and we had two picnics in the hollow and played for hours in the adjoining woods without once looking up. Mary had become very strict with us about scattering papers and eggshells at our out-of-door spreads; and whatever fragments of food were left over she would make into a neat package and hide away under a stone; but in other matters she became less and less precise: as, for instance, she left Ellen’s best doll somewhere in the neighborhood of the hollow oak, and had to go all the way back for it in the dusk; and another time (we had also been to the store at Bartow for yeast) she left her purse that had two months’ wages in it and more, but wasn’t lucky enough to find that.

It was considered remarkable on all hands that Braddish had not yet been caught. Hagan’s heelers, who swung many votes, had grown very sharp with the authorities, and no efforts were spared to locate the criminal (he was usually referred to as the “murderer”) and round him up. Almost daily, for a time, we were constantly meeting parties of strange men, strolling innocently about the country at large or private estates as if they were looking things over with a view to purchase. And now and then we met pairs of huntsmen, though there was no game in season, very citified, with brand-new shotguns, and knickerbockers, and English deer-stalker caps. And these were accompanied by dogs, neither well suited nor broken to the business of finding birds and holding them. There was one pair of sportsmen whose makeshift was a dropsical coach dog, very much spotted. And, I must be forgiven for telling the truth, one was followed, ventre a terre, by a dachshund. My father, a very grave man with his jest, said that these were famous detectives, so accoutred as not to excite comment. And their mere presence in it was enough to assure the least rational that Braddish must by now have fled the country. “Their business,” he said, “is to close the stable door, if they can find it, and meanwhile to spend the money of the many in the roadhouses of the few.”

But I have sometimes thought that the pseudo-sportsmen were used to give Braddish a foolhardy sense of security, so that other secret-service men, less open in method and less comic in aspect, might work unobserved. Indeed, it turned out that an under-gardener employed by Mrs. Kirkbride, our neighbor, about this time, a shambling, peaceful, half-witted goat of a man, was one such; and a perfect red-Indian upon a trail. It was Mary who spotted him. He hung about our kitchen door a good deal; and tried to make friends with her and sympathize with her. But he showed himself a jot too eager, and then a jot too peppery when she did not fall into his nets. Mary told my father, and my father told Mrs. Kirkbride. Mrs. Kirkbride had had a very satisfactory job at painting done for her by Braddish; and although a law-abiding woman, she did not propose personally to assist the law–even by holding her tongue. So she approached the under-gardener, at a time when the head-gardener and the coachman were in hearing, and she said, plenty loud enough to be heard: “Well, officer, have you found a clew yet? Have you pumped my coachman? He was friends with Braddish,” and so on, so that she destroyed that man’s utility for that place and time. But others were more fortunate. And all of a sudden the country was convulsed with excitement at hearing that Braddish had been seen on the Bartow Road at night, and had been fired at, but had made good his escape into the Boole Dogge Farm.