The Thing in the Woods 5 – Williams · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
The Thing in the Woods 5The Dead Cyclist
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
The Thing in the Woods 5
The Dead Cyclist
WilliamsEnglish
Lennox sent me a note from Queenstown. I wondered, reading the brief cheerful account of his crossing, if he guessed how much I would give to have him cornered for a half-hour's interview. That he could throw considerable light on the puzzle I did not doubt, any more than that he had promptly put the ocean between us with a view to avoiding the very question I wanted to put to him. Anyway he was securely out of reach, and there was no use in wasting speculation.
My motor-cycle had arrived some time ago, but up to now I had not made use of it. It was housed in the carriage-shed, to Peter's great curiosity. Once I had caught him meddling with it surreptitiously, and my lecture, garnished with many lies as to what would happen to him if he pursued investigations, wrought the desired effect on his superstitious mind. Devils offered to Peter the most natural explanation for anything he failed to understand. Having a free morning, it occurred to me to put the engine in order, and Peter, cleaning harness nearby, watched my proceedings with distrustful curiosity.
"Is yoh gwine ride dat 'ar thing, doctah?" he asked me.
"Sure!" I stood up, wiping my grimed hands on a piece of cotton waste. "Don't you think it's a likely thing to scare the ha'nts with, Pete?"
"Yoh talk er de ha'nts, doctah, 'cause yoh ain' done seen 'em. When yoh's done seen 'em, doctah, I raikon yose gwine talk er suthin' eke."
"If I meet one on this, Pete, it'll give him such fits he won't do any han'ting for a week. Give me that monkey-wrench."
He eyed me gloomily.
"Dat ar thing's got a debbil in 'um sure, an' yoh ain' git no better er one debbil by mixin' 'um up wid anuffer--no, sah!"
"Peter," I said, "you are too conservative."
"I d'know dat. I d'know dat! De debbil's de dibbil, an' dar ain' no good yet come er mixin' up wid him. 'Tain' in de Bible nor 'tain' in nature, an' I ain' holdin' wid no such dealin's."
"Well, Pete, I'm going to back my devil against your rabbit's foot, anyhow."
Pete looked suspicious.
"Who's been talkin' 'bout rabbit's foots, doctah?"
"No one. Turn your pockets out, Pete!"
His hand clapped involuntarily to the side of his trousers.
"I got ter put dat harness away, an' I ain' got the time t' be hindered in! Sholy to Gawd, doctah, yoh ain' s'pose I carry no trash like that!"
He straightened himself with dignity, hanging the harness up on its pegs. I finished my job and went into the surgery. I had written to the city for the drug I wanted for Lessing. It arrived yesterday, and I had made up the powders. They were lying on the desk with a rubber band about them, and the packet caught my eye as I came in. I called to Pete.
"I want you to take a prescription over to Mr. Lessing," I said. "You can take the buckboard and bring back that sack of feed from Sliefer's at the same time."
I held the packet out to him. He eyed first it, then me.
"Well?" I said impatiently.
"I'se gwine, I'se gwine. I was thinkin' on'y dis mawnin' how dat feed done oughter be fetched. Yessir, I was sayin' dat out in de car'ge-house. It done oughter be fetched today."
"It'll be right on your road after you leave Mr. Lessing's."
"Yessir, dat so! On'y dat packet, doctah ... I was jest considerin' dat packet. Ef I was to put dat packet in de buckboard longer de feed sack I'd be right scared 'er losing it. It don't seem to me, doctah, dat 'ar packet gwine t' be very safe dat way."
"But you've got a pocket, you old idiot!"
"Yessir, I done got pockets. I was on'y jest a-studyin', doctah. I don' recommend pockets, not when a pusson's got a commission to 'tend to. When a pusson puts suthin' in his pocket, it happens sometime dat a pusson's gwine forget it."
"If it happens to you," I assured him, "I'll find a way of operating on your memory, so you'd better be careful!"
He took the packet without more ado and went off to get the buckboard ready. It was too fine a day to waste about the house, and I had it in mind to take the cycle out for a spin. Telling Mrs. Searle I would probably be away for lunch, I got into my cycling suit and set off.
I followed the road for some distance past the Bend, and then branched off to the right, joining the Pike. The machine was in good running order, and I did some twenty miles before I slowed up finally at a little village with the hope of getting something to eat.
There was the usual hotel and saloon combined, with its array of spruce bushes in tubs before the entrance. I leaned my cycle against the porch and went in to interview the landlord about a meal.
Dinner was by luck just ready. I cleaned off some of the grime of my ride and wandered into the commercial room, which was garnished with horsehair furniture, a mildewed engraving of Washington, and two plates of sticky fly-paper, buzzing and noxious, set out on the soiled tablecloth. There was one other midday guest, a young man in a gray suit who sat watching the struggles of the latest addition to the fly-paper colony while he waited for dinner. I placed him immediately as a newspaper man, and the first dozen words we exchanged, as I took my place opposite to him at the table, proved me right. He had been sent down on the trial of one of those dull and elusive scandals which serve to lighten the papers during the dead season, and had to put in two hours' waiting for his train back to the city.
He had a considerable fund of anecdote which needed only the barest encouragement to set going, and he transferred his interest from the fly-paper to myself with complimentary promptitude. He had a trick of raising his voice a full three tones at the beginning of each sentence, and as his dissertations were lengthy I found myself speculating at to what new and rasping height his voice might next reach.
There was a week-old copy of a local paper lying on the table, and in a pause of the meal he pushed it over to me.
"There's a thing that might interest you, being a cyclist," he said. "What do you make of that kind of an accident?"
I read the paragraph he pointed out. It was the account of an inquest held on the body of a young man identified as one George Powell, salesman in a Philadelphia dry-goods store. He had been found on a stretch of road a few miles beyond Coopersville by a farmer taking an early load of milk to the Coopersville creamery. The handle-bars and front part of his wheel, near by, were damaged, and the broken lamp was picked up a few yards further on. The man was dead, but the curious part, which had evidently struck my acquaintance also, was that there were no injuries found on the body except a single diagonal scratch across the face, which was of sufficient depth to have destroyed one eye and to lay the entire cheek open. This in itself had not produced death, and the coroner's autopsy had revealed no symptom of concussion. The medical officer's verdict had been death from heart failure.
The injuries suggested attack, but there had been no robbery, and though the man's clothing was torn his pockets were apparently untouched. They contained thirty-five dollars in notes, in a pocket-book, some small change, and the papers that had led to his identification.
"Well?" said my acquaintance.
"It looks queer."
He laid a finger on the paragraph.
"You see the body was picked up fifteen yards from the edge of the wood. If anyone had laid for him, they'd have laid right in the woods, where there was cover. But whatever hit him, it hit him before he reached there."
"He might have run into something."
"As what?"
"I don't know." And there struck me instantly the thought that my companion put into words. "If you run into anything on a bicycle, at full speed, it doesn't generally happen that the handle-bars get the worst injury. You see that the front wheel was not much broken. And he was riding toward the woods, and it's going to take a pretty phenomenal shock to throw a man and his bicycle fifteen yards backwards. I'll tell you another thing. I happen to know that stretch of road, because I spent part of last summer near there, with some people. It's a level stretch, cleared both sides, and there isn't anything larger than a stone to run into."
I waited, wondering what he was driving at. He chose a toothpick from the holder and began to employ it, leisurely.
"You'd reckon those things would strike the jury, wouldn't you? But they're so dam' simple down here that they're content to come up against facts like that, and they say: Well, here's a man got killed and we don't know what hit him. Guess we'll let it go at misadventure and go get a drink!' That's their mental attitude, and there isn't anything going to shake them out of it."
"What's your theory?" I asked.
He revolved the toothpick meditatively.
"If I knew, I guess I'd be up against a story that would make every newspaper in the country sit up. There's something queer there, and I'll tell you why, and you'll see just how enterprising these country juries are. Last April"--he raised his voice again, giving the toothpick an extra twirl in emphasis--"precisely the same thing happened to another man, not twelve miles from where this was. He was killed under much about the same circumstances, and the jury then returned the same old verdict, with a caution about the dangers of scorching. I happen to know, because I was down there on some story the time the thing occurred. I saw the man." He paused, and without knowing why I felt my pulses quicken suddenly in anticipation. "He had marks on his body that a wild-cat couldn't have made! He was picked up at the side of the path, among some stiff under-brush, so of course they said the fall did it. I tell you he was ripped, like I've seen a dog's face ripped by a badger. I've seen murder cases and I've seen accidents, but I've never seen the precise accident that would leave that kind of marks."
"You think it was murder?"
"The man wasn't murdered. He hit his head against a stone and died of concussion that time, right enough. But it was near enough to murder, if you assume an assailant who'd strap two-inch steel claws on to his hands." He laughed. "It's an original outfit! But that's what I'm asking you? What's the animal that goes round in these woods that's strong enough to wreck the steel tubing of a bicycle, that attacks with its claws and not with its teeth, and that's quick enough to knock a man down without the chance of a struggle?"
"There were no traces?"
"None. Not a single footprint."
All the while he spoke there had been before my mind the picture of Lessing--Lessing with those inexplicable scratches on his chest. Whatever had attacked these two had attacked Lessing also; that I would swear to. I was conscious that the young man was watching me rather closely.
"Heard something of this before, have you?"
"No. It interests me. But I think you're on a wrong tack."
"How?"
"Man alive, you don't suppose there could conceivably be any animal of that kind loose in the country without people knowing it! Someone would have seen it."
"I guess two people did see it," he suggested.
"If anything escaped from a menagerie there'd be a hue and cry raised. The woods around here couldn't give cover to any animal of that size and ferocity for three months without some track of it being found."
He said: "How about the murders in the Rue Morgue?"
"Those scratches weren't made by a monkey!"
I was unguarded. He looked up sharply.
"You didn't see them."
"You have described them," I reminded him. "Besides, an ape's instinct is to strangle."
"Not necessarily."
"Put the first down as a murder. The second might not have had any connection. There is nearly three months between. The medical officer suggested himself that the injuries might have been caused by falling on the broken bicycle framework."
"Medical officers aren't infallible. They've got to say something."
I laughed. "Well, stick to your escaped simian theory! If a third case turns up we'll see who's right."
I rose, paid my bill and went out, leaving him, I have no doubt, with the impression that I was a particularly hidebound idiot. But I had my own reasons for making no further contribution to his data. I would see this thing through without any assistance from a too enterprising press.
