The Stillwater Tragedy | Page 5

nearly moribund for thirty years with asthma. Just before
night-fall he had crawled, in his bewildered, wheezy fashion, down to
the tavern, where he found a somber crowd in the bar-room. Mr. Bodge
ordered his mug of beer, and sat sipping it, glancing meditatively from
time to time over the pewter rim at the mute assembly. Suddenly he
broke out: "S'pose you've heerd that old Shackford's ben murdered."
So the sun went down on Stillwater. Again the great wall of pines and
hemlocks made a gloom against the sky. The moon rose from behind
the tree-tops, frosting their ragged edges, and then sweeping up to the
zenith hung serenely above the world, as if there were never a crime, or
a tear, or a heart-break in it all.

III

On the afternoon of the following day Mr. Shackford was duly buried.
The funeral, under the direction of Mr. Richard Shackford, who acted

as chief mourner and was sole mourner by right of kinship, took place
in profound silence. The carpenters, who had lost a day on Bishop's
new stables, intermitted their sawing and hammering while the services
were in progress; the steam was shut off in the iron-mills, and no
clinking of the chisel was heard in the marble yard for an hour, during
which many of the shops had their shutters up. Then, when all was over,
the imprisoned fiend in the boilers gave a piercing shriek; the leather
bands slipped on the revolving drums, the spindles leaped into life
again, and the old order of things was reinstated,--outwardly, but not in
effect.
In general, when the grave closes over a man his career is ended. But
Mr. Shackford was never so much alive as after they had buried him.
Never before had he filled so large a place in the public eye. Though
invisible, he sat at every fireside. Until the manner of his death had
been made clear, his ubiquitous presence was not to be exorcised. On
the morning of the memorable day a reward of one hundred
dollars--afterwards increased to five hundred, at the insistence of Mr.
Shackford's cousin--had been offered by the board of selectmen for the
arrest and conviction of the guilty party. Beyond this and the
unsatisfactory inquest, the authorities had done nothing, and were
plainly not equal to the situation.
When it was stated, the night of the funeral, that a professional person
was coming to Stillwater to look into the case, the announcement was
received with a breath of relief.
The person thus vaguely described appeared on the spot the next
morning. To mention the name of Edward Taggett is to mention a name
well known to the detective force of the great city lying sixty miles
southwest of Stillwater. Mr. Taggett's arrival sent such a thrill of
expectancy through the village that Mr. Leonard Tappleton, whose
obsequies occurred this day, made his exit nearly unobserved. Yet there
was little in Mr. Taggett's physical aspect calculated to stir either
expectation or enthusiasm: a slender man of about twenty-six, but not
looking it, with overhanging brown mustache, sparse side-whiskers,
eyes of no definite color, and faintly accentuated eyebrows. He spoke
precisely, and with a certain unembarrassed hesitation, as persons do
who have two thoughts to one word,--if there are such persons. You
might have taken him for a physician, or a journalist, or the secretary of

an insurance company; but you would never have supposed him the
man who had disentangled the complicated threads of the great
Barnabee Bank defalcation.
Stillwater's confidence, which had risen into the nineties, fell to zero at
sight of him. "Is that Taggett?" they asked. That was Taggett; and
presently his influence began to be felt like a sea-turn. The three
Dogberrys of the watch were dispatched on secret missions, and within
an hour it was ferreted out that a man in a cart had been seen driving
furiously up the turnpike the morning after the murder. This was an
agricultural district, the road led to a market town, and teams going by
in the early dawn were the rule and not the exception; but on that
especial morning a furiously driven cart was significant. Jonathan
Beers, who farmed the Jenks land, had heard the wheels and caught an
indistinct glimpse of the vehicle as he was feeding the cattle, but with a
reticence purely rustic had not been moved to mention the circumstance
before.
"Taggett has got a clew," said Stillwater under its breath.
By noon Taggett had got the man, cart and all. But it was only Blufton's
son Tom, of South Millville, who had started in hot haste that particular
morning to secure medical service for his wife, of which she had sorely
stood in need, as two tiny girls in a willow cradle