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Page 25
Here, the other, a little girl, plucked him by the sleeve with such
affright, that he himself took alarm and just giving me one quick
stare out of his wide eyes, grasped his companion by the hand and took
to his heels. As for myself I stood rooted to the ground in my
astonishment. This blank, sleepy old house the home of the notorious
Schoenmakers after whom half of the detectives of the country were
searching? I could scarcely credit my own ears. True I now remembered
they had come from these parts, still--
Turning round I eyed the house once more. How altered it looked to me!
What a murderous aspect it wore, and how dismally secret were the
tight shut windows and closely fastened doors, on one of which a rude
cross scrawled in red chalk met the eye with a mysterious
significance. Even the old pine had acquired the villainous air of
the uncanny repositor of secrets too dreadful to reveal, as it groaned
and murmured to itself in the keen east wind. Dark deeds and foul
wrong seemed written all over the fearful place, from the long
strings of black moss that clung to the worm-eaten eaves, to the worn
stone with its great blotch of something,--could it have been
blood?--that served as a threshold to the door. Suddenly with the
quickness of lightning the thought flashed across me, what could Mr.
Blake, the aristocratic representative of New York's oldest family,
have wanted in this nest of infamy? What errand of hope, fear,
despair, avarice or revenge, could have brought this superior
gentleman with his refined tastes and proudly reticent manners, so
many miles from home, to the forsaken den of a brace of hardy villains
whose name for two years now, had stood as the type of all that was
bold, bad and lawless, and for whom during the last six weeks the
prison had yawned, and the gallows hungered. Contemplation brought no
reply, and shocked at my own thoughts, I put the question by for
steadier brains than mine; and instead of trying further to solve it,
cast about how I was to gain entrance into this deserted building;
for to enter it I was more than ever determined, now that I had heard
to whom it had once belonged.
Examining with a glance the several roads that branched off in every
direction from where I stood, I found them all equally deserted. Even
the school children had disappeared in some one of the four or five
houses scattered in the remote distance.
If I was willing to enter upon any daring exploit, there was no one to
observe or interrupt. I resolved to make the attempt with which my
mind was full. This was to climb the old tree, and from one of the
two or three branches that brushed against the house, gain entrance at
an open garret window that stared at me from amid the pine's dark
needles. Taking off my coat with a sigh over the immaculate condition
of my new cassimere trousers, I bent my energies to the task. A
difficult one you will say for a city lad, but thanks to fortune I
was not brought up in New York, and know how to climb trees with the
best. With little more than a scratch or so, I reached the window of
which I have spoken, and after a moment spent in regaining my breath,
gave one spring and accomplished my purpose. I alighted upon a heap
of broken glass in a large bare room. An ominous chill at once struck
to my heart. Though I am anything but a sensitive man as far as
physical impressions are concerned, there was something in the hollow
echo that arose from the four blank walls about me as my feet
alighted on that rough, uncarpeted floor, that struck a vague chill
through my blood, and I actually hesitated for the moment whether to
pursue the investigations I had promised myself, or beat a hasty
retreat. A glance at the huge distorted limbs swaying across the
square of the open window decided me. It was easy to enter by means
of that unsteady support, but it would be extremely unsafe to venture
forth in that way. If I prized life and limb I must seek some other
method of egress. I at once put my apprehensions in my pocket and
entered upon my self imposed task.
A single glance was sufficient to exhaust the resources of the empty
garret in which I found myself. Two or three old chairs piled in one
corner, a rusty stove or so, a heap of tattered and decaying
clothing, were all that met my gaze. Taking my way, then, at once to
the ladder, whose narrow ends projecting above a hole in the garret
floor, seemed to proffer the means of reaching the rooms below, I
proceeded to descend into what to my excited imagination looked like a
gulf of darkness. It proved, however, to be nothing more nor less
than an unlighted hall of small dimensions, with a stair-case at one
end and a door at the other, which, upon opening I found myself in a
large, square room whose immense four-post bedstead entirely denuded
of its usual accompaniments of bed and bolster at once struck my eye
and for a moment held it enchained. There were other articles in the
room; a disused bureau, a rocking chair, even a table, but nothing
had such a ghostly look as that antique bedstead with its curtains of
calico tied back over its naked framework, like rags draped from the
bare bones of a skeleton. Passing hurriedly by, I tried a closet door
or so, finding little, however, to reward my search; and eager to be
done with what was every moment becoming more and more drearisome, I
hastened across the floor to the front of the house where I found
another hall and a row of rooms that, while not entirely stripped of
furniture, were yet sufficiently barren to offer little encouragement
to my curiosity. One only, a small but not uncomfortable apartment,
showed any signs of having been occupied within a reasonable length of
time; and as I paused before its hastily spread bed, thrown together
as only a man would do it, and wondering why the room was so dark,
looked up and saw that the window was entirely covered by an old shawl
and a couple of heavy coats that had been hastily nailed across it, I
own I felt my hand go to my breast pocket almost as if I expected to
see the wild faces of the dreaded Schoenmakers start up all aglare
from one of the dim corners before me. Rushing to the window, I tore
down with one sweep of my arm both coat and shawl, and with a start
discovered that the window still possessed its draperies in the shape
of a pair of discolored and tattered curtains tied with ribbons that
must once have been brilliant and cheery of color.
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