The trouble at Pinelands A detective story
I accepted the rebuke. “You’re right. Why, if I’d only thought of this
before, there wouldn’t have been any trouble at the inquest. I’m an old
fool!”
“No bigger fool than your nephew or the constable,” he replied. “If any
one of the three of you had thought to observe that the body was cold,
or had stopped bleeding, you’d have known the man hadn’t been killed
before your eyes. Of course, by the time the coroner got there, it was
too late to fix the time of death exactly.”
Dorothy sighed ecstatically, her face rosy with new-born confidence in
this brusque, saturnine stranger. “What shall we do next?”
“Humph! Wedding was set for Wednesday, wasn’t it? How many invitations
did you send out?”
She looked at him blankly. “Why, about a hundred and fifty; we didn’t
ask everybody. Oh, dear, we can’t have it now, can we?”
“Hardly. Have you sent out notices of postponement?”
“We never thought of that!”
Doctor Somers yawned. “I think you needed me,” he said.
Just then the front door opened, and Peter burst in, white-faced and
trembling.
“Come, Uncle George!” he exclaimed. And then, with a glance of supreme
disfavor at Doctor Somers, “And you, too! Lewis claims you’re a wonder.
I doubt it like blazes, but, if you are, now’s the time to show it. Come
on, get up, man! Hurry!”
We stared at him. Dorothy, paper-white, one hand at her breast, asked
the question that trembled also on my lips.
“Oh, what’s happened? What’s happened now?”
Peter hesitated. His eye caught Somers, leaning back in an armchair,
calmly lighting a cigarette. He could contain himself no longer.
“They’re going to lynch Parker to-night!” He blurted his news defiantly,
as if it had been a bomb to shatter our guest’s indifference. “I just
heard it downtown. A lot of ’em are drinking; they’ve taken the keys
away from Wakefield already; they’re going down to the lockup and get
poor old Parker and hang him!”
CHAPTER XI
PREPARATIONS FOR DEFENSE
Doctor Somers arose slowly, his long, thin arms and legs looking more
frail, more tenuous, than usual. One feared that they would snap, like
pipe stems, under the slightest strain. He did not look in the least
like the man to brave the fury of a mob; but his dark, saturnine face
was quite unmoved.
“Bright lad!” he exclaimed, sarcastically. “Go ahead; frighten the girl
to death, why don’t you?” He patted Dorothy’s arm with unexpected
gentleness. “Now don’t you worry, child; we’ll look after your young man
for you. Nobody’s going to be lynched to-night!”
He beckoned us out, and in the hall he asked Peter if he had a shotgun.
The boy nodded. “I’ll get it,” he said, and ran up the stairs.
Presently he was back, panting, with a repeating shotgun and an
automatic pistol. “Lucky I had two guns,” said he, stuffing a box of
shells into his pocket. “The coroner took the other one. And here,
Somers, here’s an army pistol and some cartridges.” Peter had been a
second lieutenant.
Somers waved it aside. “Don’t want it. Give it to Uhlman, here. I don’t
think we’ll need firearms, but it’s well to be prepared. Now let’s go!”
My nephew’s car still stood in front of the house; we piled in and drove
toward Main Street.
“I take it your constable won’t be much help,” said Somers, “if they’ve
taken his keys so easily.”
Peter snorted. “A big yellow pup!”
“Right! We won’t bother him. Stop at this grocery. Who keeps it, by the
way?”
“Old Mrs. Tracy. But it’s closed.”
“So much the better. Kept by an old woman, you say; any man or boy in
it?”
“No,” answered Peter, wondering. “She’s all alone, and deaf and half
blind into the bargain. People only trade there for charity.”
“Fine!” declared Doctor Somers surprisingly. “Couldn’t be better!” He
twisted his long legs out of the car. “As we came through from the train
I noticed a lot of eggplant in the window.”
“Now, what the deuce----”
But Somers did not stop for questions. Already he had skirted the tiny
shop and was knocking at its back door. When no answer came, he opened
it and walked in. We heard the confused noise of his shouting at poor
old Mrs. Tracy; presently he came back to the car with a grape basket
under one arm.
“What kind of foolishness is this?” demanded Peter, craning his neck.
The basket was full of round, purplish eggplant, a little bigger than a
baseball. “Man, can’t you understand that Lewis Parker is in danger of
his life?”
“I can,” replied Somers, unruffled. “Better than you do, perhaps. I’ve
seen two lynching mobs before. Now don’t ask fool questions, but come
along.”
He obeyed, blindly obedient. The man’s preparations seemed sufficiently
absurd, but he seemed, at least, to know what he was doing, and neither
of us had an idea of the proper steps to take.
“Now a book shop,” ordered our leader. “Stationery store--something like
that. I want some writing paper.”
Without protest Peter drove across the way to Jack Wheat’s. Somers
entered; through the window we watched him selecting stationery as
calmly as if the whole night were before him. At last he came out, a
package under his arm that might have held two hundred sheets of note
paper with envelopes to match.
“They’ll have to do,” he remarked disparagingly. “Don’t be in such a
hurry!” He glanced at his wrist watch, as Peter mumbled some protest.
“They won’t start anything before the town’s safely gone to bed. Not
until midnight, anyhow, I fancy. McGregor, you drive us round to the
lockup and leave us there. Then take the car and hunt up a phone, where
you won’t be interrupted. Try to find the sheriff--he’s a good sort of
officer, I judge from what you’ve said--and tell him there’s going to be
trouble to-night. Then come back to the jail.”
Peter protested unavailingly. The mob might come before he got back;
Uncle George could go; Somers could go. He, Peter, ought to be here to
protect Lewis.
“Shut up and get out! Uhlman can’t go; he can’t drive--can you? And I
can’t go; I’m a stranger. But you can find a phone, and the sheriff’ll
listen to you. Besides, I can do more here than you could. Hurry now;
you’ll be back in plenty of time for the excitement.”
Reluctantly Peter went, after leaving Doctor Somers and me in front of
the lockup. The doctor looked about approvingly. The lockup stood a
little apart from the buildings about it, a tobacco warehouse on one
side and an empty dwelling house on the other. He walked completely
around the ugly brick jail, tried its barred windows with satisfaction.
“Fine,” he announced. “Clear space all around, if it came to a siege.
And the windows are small and well barred; nobody can get in except
through the door. Which is Parker’s window?”
I told him, and he went there and whistled. “Hello, Parker! It’s Somers.
How’s the old doc, anyway? Good! Be in to see you to-morrow; can’t get
hold of the keys just now.”
He came around to the front again and looked up at the arc light in the
street. “Fine!” he repeated. “There’s an excellent light--good enough to
read by.”
Whereon he sat himself down upon the wide jail steps, placed his basket
of eggplant in the shadow beside him, and unwrapped that package of note
paper. “Make yourself comfortable, Uhlman,” said he. “I’m going to be
busy for a while.”
He produced a fountain pen and fell to writing, while I watched him in
amazement. What on earth was he doing? Writing notices to post on the
jail door, to warn off the mob? I could not imagine.
But there he sat, writing busily in a fine, copperplate script, hunched
on the step, with his extraordinary legs coiled under him, his dark,
sallow face calmly intent. The light from the street lamp cast the
shadow of his thin, hooked nose downward over his chin and gave him the
look of a fierce, long-legged bird.
At last Peter drove up. “Couldn’t get him,” he said, guardedly, his
voice bitter with disappointment. “Gone over to the other end of the
county after some negro. And the jail deputy’s got his hands full
looking after the prisoners. He’ll send somebody over later, if he can.
By then it’ll be too late!”
Somers looked up, quite undisturbed. “We don’t need anybody,” he
answered indifferently. “Go park that flivver out of sight and come back
on foot.”
When that was done, he stationed Peter with his pistol at one corner of
the building, and me at the other, with the shotgun. I had asked for
this weapon as being less likely to damage me, and more likely, in my
hands, at least, of doing execution among the enemy than an automatic
pistol, whose workings were strange to me. Then he returned to the
steps, took up his fountain pen and fell to writing again.
And so began a vigil which seemed endless. Though the day had been hot,
the night was cool, as our Southern nights usually are. A little breeze
played about the corners of the jail, sending sharp twinges through my
poor old joints; I shivered with cold and nervousness. I could hear
Peter’s feet shuffling in the sand, and I knew that he, too, was
restless. But between us Doctor Somers sat on the steps, hunched over
his writing, and he did not even look up. His pen traveled rapidly, held
in a hand as steady as a rock; he wrote note after note, all just alike
apparently, and, as he finished each one, folded it methodically and
tucked it into a blank envelope. His calm, untroubled face was bent
studiously over his work, and he never shifted his position; we heard no
sound from him save the steady scratching of his pen, the rustling of
paper, as he folded one note and took up another sheet. For some reason,
it was an eerie sight. I began to have more respect for Doctor Floyd
Somers. He was brave, at any rate.
CHAPTER XII
A FRUSTRATED LYNCHING
The night seemed interminable. The faint evening sounds from Main
Street, a block away, faded gradually and ceased. One after another
buggies and farm wagons creaked away; motor cars roared suddenly into
life and departed in a diminuendo of explosions, or hummed off into the
night; we heard an occasional outburst of laughter, evoked by the
repartee bawled across a block, and at last all was still.
I looked at my watch; almost midnight! Pinelands had gone to sleep--or
had it? Soon, if at all, they would be coming. The faint breeze began to
carry mysterious whispers; in it I fancied hushed commands, threats, the
stealthy creeping of feet over the sand. My nerves tensed and tensed;
the fluttering of moths about the arc lamp fretted me to distraction. A
huge June bug blundered full tilt against its globe and ricocheted off;
the sound seemed thunderous, so that I jumped, barely suppressing a cry.
And always Floyd Somers sat there on the step, long legs curled
grotesquely under him, and wrote and wrote. I wanted to cry out at him,
to grip him by the shoulder and shriek in his ear that a mob was coming;
that murder crept, stealthy-footed, toward us through the still summer
night. Anything to rouse him to a human excitement; to wipe that
impassive, studious absorption from his lean, sallow face.
Wearily I shifted my feet, wondering whether Lewis was asleep. His bunk
was in the cage, three feet inside the window; he could not look out for
the bars. I listened intently for his breathing. Did he suspect, I
wondered? Did he lie there awake, helpless, waiting for the mob to drag
him forth to a shameful death? And suddenly I remembered, with a queer
twinge of shame, that we had forgotten to bring him bed linen. It was a
foolish thought, of course, but I cannot tell you how it distressed me.
Suppose that we failed--that the mob had its way after all. Should I
ever be able to forgive myself that Lewis had been without clean sheets
during his last night on earth?