I could not take my eyes off that man with his broken shoe. There lay the secret. The whole mystery of the fantastic crime in Ratherby Wood centred in that shabby ruffian. What was it?
But Hewitt went on, talking and joking furiously. The men who were not speaking mostly smoked gloomily, but whenever one spoke, he became animated and lively. I had attempted once or twice to join in, though my efforts were not particularly successful, except in inducing one man to offer me tobacco from his box—tobacco that almost made me giddy in the smell. He tried some of mine in exchange, and though he praised it with native politeness, and smoked the pipe through, I could see that my Hignett mixture was poor stuff in his estimation, compared with the awful tobacco in his own box.
Presently the man with the broken shoe got up, slouched over to his tent, and disappeared. Then said Hewitt (I translate):
“You’re not all Lees here, I see?”
“Yes pal, all Lees.”
“But he’s not a Lee?” and Hewitt jerked his head towards the tent.
“Why not a Lee, pal ? We be Lees and he is with us. Thus he is a Lee.”
“Oh yes, of course. But I know he is from over the pawny. Come, I’ll guess the tem* he comes from—it’s from Roumania, eh? Perhaps the Wallachian part?”
The men looked at one another, and then the old Lee said:
“You’re right, pal. You’re cleverer than we took you for. That is what they calls his tem. He is a petulengro,† and he comes with us to shoe the gries,‡ and mend the vardoes.§ But he is with us, and so he is a Lee.”
The talk and the smoke went on, and presently the man with the broken shoe returned, and lay down again. Then, when the whisky had all gone, and Hewitt, with some excuse that I did not understand, had begged a piece of cord from one of the men, we left, in a chorus of kooshto rardies.¶
By this time it was nearly ten o’clock. We walked briskly till we came back again to the inn where we had bought the whisky. Here Hewitt, after some little trouble, succeeded in hiring a village cart, and while the driver was harnessing the horse, cut a couple of short sticks from the hedge. These, being each divided into two, made four short, stout pieces of something less than six inches long each. Then Hewitt joined them together in pairs, each pair being connected from centre to centre by about nine or ten inches of the cord he had brought from the gipsies’ camp. These done, he handed one pair to me. “Handcuffs,” he explained, “and no bad ones either. See—you use them so.” And he passed the cord round my wrist, gripping the two handles, and giving them a slight twist that sufficiently convinced me of the excruciating pain that might be inflicted by a vigorous turn, and the utter helplessness of a prisoner thus secured in the hands of captors prepared to use their instruments.
“Whom are these for?” I asked. “The man with the broken shoe?”
Hewitt nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “I expect we shall find him out alone about midnight. You know how to use these now.”
It was fully eleven before the cart was ready and we started. A quarter of a mile or so from the gipsy encampment Hewitt stopped the cart, and gave the driver instructions to wait. We got through the hedge, and made our way on the soft ground behind it in the direction of the vans and the tent.
“Roll up your handkerchief,” Hewitt whispered, “into a tight pad. The moment I grab him, ram it into his mouth—well in, mind, so that it doesn’t easily fall out. Probably he will be stooping—that will make it easier; we can pull him suddenly backward. Now be quiet.”
We kept on till nothing but the hedge divided us from the space whereon stood the encampment. It was now nearer twelve o’clock than eleven, but the time we waited seemed endless. But time is not eternity after all, and at last we heard a move in the tent. A minute after, the man we sought was standing before us. He made straight for a gap in the hedge which we had passed on our way, and we crouched low and waited. He emerged on our side of the hedge with his back towards us, and began walking, as we had walked, behind the hedge, but in the opposite direction. We followed.
He carried something in his hand that looked like a large bundle of sticks and twigs, and he appeared to be as anxious to be secret as we ourselves. From time to time he stopped and listened; fortunately there was no moon, or in turning about, as he did once or twice, he would probably have observed us. The field sloped downward just before us, and there was another hedge at right angles, leading down to a slight hollow. To this hollow the man made his way, and in the shade of the new hedge we followed. Presently he stopped suddenly, stooped, and deposited his bundle on the ground before him. Crouching before it he produced matches from his pocket, struck one, and in a moment had a fire of twigs and small branches that sent up a heavy, white smoke. What all this portended I could not imagine, but a sense of the weirdness of the whole adventure came upon me unchecked. The horrible corpse in the wood with its severed wrist, Hewitt’s enigmatical forebodings, the mysterious tracking of the man with the broken shoe, the scene round the gipsies’ fire, and now the strange behaviour of this man, whose connection with the tragedy was so intimate and yet so inexplicable—all these things contributed to make up a tale of but a few hours’ duration, but of an inscrutable impressiveness that I began to feel in my nerves.
The man bent a thin stick double, and using it as a pair of tongs, held some indistinguishable object over the flames before him. Excited as I was I could not help noticing that he bent and held the stick with his left hand. We crept stealthily nearer, and as I stood scarcely three yards behind him and looked over his shoulder, the form of the object stood out clear and black against the dull red of the flame. It was a human hand.
I suppose I may have somehow betrayed my amazement and horror to my companion’s sharp eyes, for suddenly I felt his hand tightly grip my arm just above the elbow. I turned, and found his face close by mine and his finger raised warningly. Then I saw him produce his wrist-grip and make a motion with his palm toward his mouth, which I understood to be intended to remind me of the gag. We stepped forward.
The man turned his horrible cookery over and over above the crackling sticks as though to smoke and dry it in every part. I saw Hewitt’s hand reach out toward him, and in a flash we had pulled him back over his heels and I had driven the gag between his teeth as he opened his mouth. We seized his wrists in the cords at once, and I shall never forget the man’s look of ghastly, frantic terror as he lay on the ground. When I knew more I understood the reason of this.
“I FELT HIS HAND TIGHTLY GRIP MY ARM.”
Hewitt took both wristholds in one hand and drove the gag entirely into the man’s mouth, so that he almost choked. A piece of sacking lay near the fire, and by Hewitt’s request I dropped that awful hand from the wooden twigs upon it and rolled it up in a parcel—it was, no doubt, what the sacking had been brought for. Then we lifted the man to his feet and hurried him in the direction of the cart. The whole capture could not have occupied thirty seconds, and as I stumbled over the rough field at the man’s left elbow I could only think of the thing as one thinks of a dream that one knows all the time is a dream.
But presently the man, who had been walking quietly, though gasping, sniffing and choking because of the tightly rolled handkerchief in his mouth—presently he made a sudden dive, thinking doubtless to get his wrists free by surprise. But Hewitt was alert, and gave them a twist that made him roll his head with a dismal, stifled yell, and with the opening of his mouth, by some chance, the gag fell away. Immediately the man roared aloud for help.
“Quick,” said Hewitt, “drag him along—they’ll hear in the vans. Bring the hand!”
I seized the fallen handkerchief and crammed it over the man’s mouth as well as I might, and together we made as much of a trot as we could, dragging the man between us, while Hewitt checked any reluctance on his part by a timely wrench of the wristholds. It was a hard two hundred and fifty yards to the lane even for us—for the gipsy it must have been a bad minute and a half indeed. Once more as we
went over the uneven ground he managed to get out a shout, and we thought we heard a distinct reply from somewhere in the direction of the encampment.
We pulled him over a stile in a tangle, and dragged and pushed him through a small hedge-gap all in a heap. Here we were but a short distance from the cart, and into that we flung him without wasting time or tenderness, to the intense consternation of the driver, who, I believe, very nearly set up a cry for help on his own account. Once in the cart, however, I seized the reins and the whip myself and, leaving Hewitt to take care of the prisoner, put the turn-out along toward Ratherby at as near ten miles an hour as it could go.
We made first for Mr. Hardwick’s, but he, we found, was with my uncle, so we followed him. The arrest of the Fosters had been effected, we learned, not very long after we had left the wood, as they returned by another route to Ranworth. We brought our prisoner into the Colonel’s library, where he and Mr. Hardwick were sitting.
“I’m not quite sure what we can charge him with unless it’s anatomical robbery,” Hewitt remarked, “but here’s the criminal.”
The man only looked down, with a sulkily impenetrable countenance. Hewitt spoke to him once or twice, and at last he said, in a strange accent, something that sounded like kekin jinnavvy.
“Keck jin?”* asked Hewitt, in the loud clear tone one instinctively adopts in talking to a foreigner, “Keckeno jinny?”
The man understood and shook his head, but not another word would he say or another question answer.
“He’s a foreign gipsy,” Hewitt explained, “just as I thought—a Wallachian, in fact. Theirs is an older and purer dialect than that of the English gipsies, and only some of the root-words are alike. But I think we can make him explain to-morrow that the Fosters at least had nothing to do with, at any rate, cutting off Sneathy’s hand. Here it is, I think.” And he gingerly lifted the folds of sacking from the ghastly object as it lay on the table, and then covered it up again.
“But what—what does it all mean?” Mr. Hardwick said in bewildered astonishment. “Do you mean this man was an accomplice?”
“Not at all—the case was one of suicide, as I think you’ll agree, when I’ve explained. This man simply found the body hanging and stole the hand.”
“But what in the world for?”
“For the Hand of Glory. Eh?” He turned to the gipsy and pointed to the hand on the table: “Yag-varst,† eh?”
There was a quick gleam of intelligence in the man’s eye, but he said nothing. As for myself I was more than astounded. Could it be possible that the old superstition of the Hand of Glory remained alive in a practical shape at this day?
“You know the superstition, of course,” Hewitt said. “It did exist in this country in the last century, when there were plenty of dead men hanging at cross-roads, and so on. On the Continent, in some places, it has survived later. Among the Wallachian gipsies it has always been a great article of belief, and the superstition is quite active still. The belief is that the right hand of a dead man, cut off and dried over the smoke of certain wood and herbs, and then provided with wicks at each finger made of the dead man’s hair, becomes, when lighted at each wick (the wicks are greased, of course), a charm, whereby a thief may walk without hindrance where he pleases in a strange house, push open all doors and take what he likes. Nobody can stop him, for everybody the Hand of Glory approaches is made helpless, and can neither move nor speak. You may remember there was some talk of ‘thieves’ candles’ in connection with the horrible series of Whitechapel murders not long ago. That is only one form of the cult of the Hand of Glory.”
“Yes,” my uncle said, “I remember reading so. There is a story about it in the Ingoldsby Legends, too, I believe.”
“There is—it is called ‘The Hand of Glory,’ in fact. You remember the spell, ‘Open lock to the dead man’s knock’ and so on. But I think you’d better have the constable up and get this man into safe quarters for the night. He should be searched, of course. I expect they will find on him the hair I noticed to have been cut from Sneathy’s head.”
The village constable arrived with his iron handcuffs in substitution for those of cord which had so sorely vexed the wrists of our prisoner, and marched him away to the little lock-up on the green.
Then my uncle and Mr. Hardwick turned on Martin Hewitt with doubts and many questions:
“Why do you call it suicide?” Mr. Hardwick asked. “It is plain the Fosters were with him at the time from the tracks. Do you mean to say that they stood there and watched Sneathy hang himself without interfering?”
“No, I don’t,” Hewitt replied, lighting a cigar. “I think I told you that they never saw Sneathy.”
“Yes, you did, and of course that’s what they said themselves when they were arrested. But the thing’s impossible. Look at the tracks!”
“The tracks are exactly what revealed to me that it was not impossible,” Hewitt returned. “I’ll tell you how the case unfolded itself to me from the beginning. As to the information you gathered from the Ranworth coachman, to begin with. The conversation between the Fosters which he overheard might well mean something less serious than murder. What did they say? They had been sent for in a hurry and had just had a short consultation with their mother and sister. Henry said that ‘the thing must be done, and at once’; also that as there were two of them it should be easy. Robert said that Henry, as a doctor, would know best what to do.
“Now you, Colonel Brett, had been saying—before we learned these things from Mr. Hardwick—that Sneathy’s behaviour of late had become so bad as to seem that of a madman. Then there was the story of his sudden attack on a tradesman in the village, and equally sudden running away—exactly the sort of impulsive, wild thing that madmen do. Why then might it not be reasonable to suppose that Sneathy had become mad—more especially considering all the circumstances of the case, his commercial ruin and disgrace and his horrible life with his wife and her family?—had become suddenly much worse and quite uncontrollable, so that the two wretched women left alone with him were driven to send in haste for Henry and Robert to help them? That would account for all.
“The brothers arrive just after Sneathy had gone out. They are told in a hurried interview how affairs stand, and it is decided that Sneathy must be at once secured and confined in an asylum before something serious happens. He has just gone out—something terrible may be happening at that moment. The brothers determine to follow at once and secure him wherever he may be. Then the meaning of their conversation is plain. The thing that ‘must be done, and at once,’ is the capture of Sneathy and his confinement in an asylum. Henry, as a doctor, would ‘know what to do’ in regard to the necessary formalities. And they took a halter in case a struggle should ensue and it were found necessary to bind him. Very likely, wasn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” Mr. Hardwick replied, “it certainly is. It never struck me in that light at all.”
“That was because you believed, to begin with, that a murder had been committed, and looked at the preliminary circumstances which you learned after in the light of your conviction. But now, to come to my actual observations. I saw the footmarks across the fields, and agreed with you (it was indeed obvious) that Sneathy had gone that way first, and that the brothers had followed, walking over his tracks. This state of the tracks continued until well into the wood, when suddenly the tracks of the brothers opened out and proceeded on each side of Sneathy’s. The simple inference would seem to be, of course, the one you made—that the Fosters had here overtaken Sneathy, and walked one at each side of him.
“But of this I felt by no means certain. Another very simple explanation was available, which might chance to be the true one. It was just at the spot where the brothers’ tracks separated that the path became suddenly much muddier, because of the closer overhanging of the trees at the spot. The path was, as was to be expected, wettest in the middle. It would be the most natural thing in the world for two well-dressed young men, on arriving here, to se
parate so as to walk one on each side of the mud in the middle.
“On the other hand, a man in Sneathy’s state (assuming him, for the moment, to be mad and contemplating suicide) would walk straight along the centre of the path, taking no note of mud or anything else. I examined all the tracks very carefully, and my theory was confirmed. The feet of the brothers had everywhere alighted in the driest spots, and the steps were of irregular lengths—which meant, of course, that they were picking their way; while Sneathy’s footmarks had never turned aside even for the dirtiest puddle. Here, then, were the rudiments of a theory.
“At the watercourse, of course, the footmarks ceased, because of the hard gravel. The body lay on a knoll at the left—a knoll covered with grass. On this the signs of footmarks were almost undiscoverable, although I am often able to discover tracks in grass that are invisible to others. Here, however, it was almost useless to spend much time in examination, for you and your man had been there, and what slight marks there might be would be indistinguishable one from another.
“Under the branch from which the man had hung there was an old tree stump, with a flat top, where the tree had been sawn off. I examined this, and it became fairly apparent that Sneathy had stood on it when the rope was about his neck—his muddy footprint was plain to see; the mud was not smeared about, you see, as it probably would have been if he had been stood there forcibly and pushed off. It was a simple, clear footprint—another hint at suicide.
“But then arose the objection that you mentioned yourself. Plainly the brothers Foster were following Sneathy, and came this way. Therefore, if he hanged himself before they arrived, it would seem that they must have come across the body. But now I examined the body itself. There was mud on the knees, and clinging to one knee was a small leaf. It was a leaf corresponding to those on the bush behind the tree, and it was not a dead leaf, so must have been just detached.
The Best Martin Hewitt Detective Stories Page 18
