by Otto Penzler
“Ben,” I said, “you didn’t do it, did you?”
“They tell me I did,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.
I don’t know which bewildered me more—what he said or the unconcerned way he said it.
“What do you mean?” I asked him. “And you’d better have a good story to tell me, boy, because you’re in serious trouble.”
“Well,” he said, “in the middle of the night the police and the County Prosecutor walked in on Orville and me, because Uncle Hosea was killed, and after some talking they said I did it. When I got tired of them nagging me about it I said, all right, I did do it.”
“You mean,” I said, “they’ve got evidence against you?”
He smiled. “That’ll come out in court,” he said. “All you’ve got to do is call Orville as my witness at the trial, and you won’t have any trouble. I’m not going to testify for myself, so they can’t cross-examine me. But don’t you worry any. Orville’ll take care of everything.”
I felt a terrible suspicion creeping into my mind, but I didn’t let myself consider it. “Ben,” I said, “have you and Orville been reading law books?”
“We’ve been looking into them,” he admitted. “They’re mighty interesting”—and that was all I could get out of him. I got even less from Orville when I went over to the bank and tried to talk to him about his testimony.
Considering that, you can imagine my state of mind when we finally came to trial. The case was the biggest sensation the town had ever known, the courthouse was packed, and here I was in the middle of things with no idea of what I could do for Ben, and Ben himself totally indifferent. I felt sick every time I got a look at the prosecutor’s smug and smiling face. Not that I could blame him for looking like the cat that ate the canary. The crime was a brutal one, he and the police had solved it in jig time, and here he was with an airtight case.
In his opening address to the jury he threw the works at them. The motive was obvious: Ben Snow stood to inherit a million dollars from his uncle’s death. The method was right there on the clerk’s desk where everyone could see it: an old pistol that Ben Snow’s father had left among his effects years before, and which was found—one bullet freshly discharged from it—right in the kitchen where Ben and Orville were drinking coffee when the police broke in on them. And the confession signed by Ben before witnesses settled things beyond the shadow of a doubt.
The only thing I could do in the face of this was put blind faith in Ben and do what he wanted me to. I had Orville Snow called as my first witness—and my only witness, too, as far as I could see—and then, without any idea of what he was going to say, I put him on the stand. He took the oath, sat down, straightened the crease in his trousers, and looked at me with the calm unconcern his brother had shown throughout the whole terrible business.
You see, I knew so little about the affair that it was hard to think of even a good opening question for him. Finally, I took the bull by the horns and said, “Would you please tell the jury where you were the night of the crime?”
“Glad to,” said Orville. “I was in Uncle Hosea’s house with a gun in my hand. If the police had only gotten to me before they started pestering Ben about this, I could have told them so right off. Fact is, I was the one who killed uncle.”
Talk about sensations in court! And in the middle of the uproar I saw Ben eagerly signaling me over to him. “Now, whatever you do,” he whispered to me, “don’t you ask that this trial be stopped. It’s got to go to the jury, do you understand?”
I understood, all right. I had had my suspicions all along, but for the sake of my own conscience I just didn’t want to heed them. Now I knew for sure, and for all I hated Ben and Orville right then I had to admire them just a little bit. And it was that little bit of admiration which led me to play it Ben’s way. With the prosecutor waiting hangdog for me to ask that the trial be stopped I went back to Orville on the witness stand and had him go ahead with his story as if nothing spectacular had happened.
He told it like a master. He started way back when the desire for his uncle’s money had seeped into his veins like a drug, and went along in detail right up to the killing itself. He had the jury hypnotized, and just to make sure the job was complete I wound up my closing speech by reminding them that all they needed in finding a man innocent was a reasonable doubt of his guilt.
“That is the law of this state,” I told them. “Reasonable doubt. It is exactly what you are feeling now in the light of Orville Snow’s confession that he alone committed the crime his brother was charged with!”
The police grabbed Orville right after the verdict of “Not Guilty” was brought in. I saw him that evening in the small cell Ben had been kept in, and I already knew what he was going to tell me.
“Ben’s my witness,” he said. “Just keep me off the witness stand and let him do the talking.”
I said to him, “One of you two killed your uncle, Orville. Don’t you think that as your lawyer I ought to know which of you it was?”
“No, I don’t,” said Orville, pleasantly enough.
“You’re putting a lot of faith in your brother,” I told him. “Ben’s free and clear now. If he doesn’t want to testify for you the way you did for him, he gets two million dollars and you get the gallows. Doesn’t that worry you any?”
“No,” said Orville. “If it worried us any we wouldn’t have done it in the first place.”
“All right,” I said, “if that’s the way you want it. But tell me one thing, Orville, just for curiosity’s sake. How did you decide which one of you should kill Hosea?”
“We cut cards,” said Orville, and that was the end of it, as far as he was concerned.
If Ben’s trial had stirred up the town, Orville’s had people coming in from all over the county. It was the prosecutor’s turn to look sick now when he faced that crowd. He knew in his bones what was coming, and he couldn’t do a blessed thing about it. More than that, he was honestly outraged at what looked to be an obscene mockery of the law. Ben and Orville Snow had found a loophole in justice, so to speak, and were on their way to sneaking through it. A jury couldn’t convict a man if it had a reasonable doubt of his guilt; a man couldn’t be retried for a crime when a jury has acquitted him of it; it wasn’t even possible to indict the two boys together for conspiracy to commit murder, because that was a lesser charge in the murder indictment and covered by it. It was enough to make any prosecutor wild with frustration.
But this one held himself in check until Ben had finished telling his story to the jury. Ben told that story every bit as well as Orville had told his at the previous trial. He made it so graphic you could almost see him there in the room with his uncle, the gun flashing out death, the old man crumpling to the floor. The jurymen sat there spellbound, and the prosecutor chewed his nails to the quick while he watched them. Then when he faced Ben on the stand he really cut loose.
“Isn’t all this a monstrous lie?” he shouted, “How can you be innocent of this crime one day, and guilty of it the next?”
Ben raised his eyebrows. “I never told anybody I was innocent,” he said indignantly. “I’ve been saying right along I was guilty.”
There was no denying that. There was nothing in the record to dispute it. And I never felt so sure of myself, and so unhappy, as when I summed up the case for the jury. It took me just one minute, the quickest summing-up in my record.
“If I were sitting among you good people in that jury box,” I said, “I know just what I’d be thinking. A heinous crime has been committed, and one of two men in this very courtroom has committed it. But I can take my oath that I don’t know which of them it was, any more than you do, and like it or not I’d know I had to bring in a verdict of ‘Not Guilty.’”
That was all they needed, too. They brought in their verdict even quicker than the jury had in Ben’s case. And I had the dubious pleasure of seeing two young men, one of them guilty of murder, smilingly walk out of that room. As I said, I hated
them, but I felt a sort of infuriated admiration for them too. They had gambled everything on their loyally to each other, and the loyalty had stood the test of fire …
The stout man was silent. From his direction came the sound of a match striking, and then an eddy of expensive cigar smoke drifted under Mr. Willoughby’s nostrils. It was the pungent scent of the present dissolving the fascinating web of the past.
“Yes, sir,” the stout man said, and there was a depth of nostalgia in his voice, “you’d have to go a long way to find a case to match that.”
“You mean,” said his companion, “that they actually got away with it? That they found a way of committing the perfect murder?”
The stout man snorted. “Perfect murder, bosh! That’s where the final, fantastic surprise comes in. They didn’t get away with it!”
“They didn’t?”
“Of course not. You see, when they—good heavens, isn’t this our station?” the stout man suddenly cried, and the next instant he went flying past Mr. Willoughby’s out-stretched feet, briefcase in hand, overcoat flapping over his arm, companion in tow.
Mr. Willoughby sat there dazed for a moment, his eyes wide-open, his mouth dry, his heart hammering. Then he leaped to his feet—but it was too late: the men had disappeared from the car. He took a few frantic steps in the direction they had gone, realized it was pointless, then ran to a window of the car overlooking the station.
The stout man stood on the platform almost below him, buttoning his coat, and saying something to his companion. Mr. Willoughby made a mighty effort to raise the window, but failed to budge it. Then he rapped on the pane with his knuckles, and the stout man looked up at him.
“H-o-w?” Mr. Willoughby mouthed through the closed window, and saw with horror that the stout man did not understand him at all. Inspiration seized him. He made a pistol of his hand, aimed the extended forefinger at the stout man, and let his thumb fall like a hammer on a cartridge. “Bang!” he yelled. “Bang, bang! H-o-w?”
The stout man looked at him in astonishment, glanced at his companion, and then putting his own forefinger to his temple, made a slow circling motion. That was how Mr. Willoughby last saw him as the train slowly, and then with increasing speed, pulled away.
It was when he moved away from the window that Mr. Willoughby became aware of two things. One was that every face in the car was turned toward him with rapt interest. The other was that an iron band was drawing tight around his skull, a gimlet was boring into it, tiny hammers were tapping at it.
It was, he knew with utter despair, going to be a perfectly terrible vacation.
A DILEMMA
S. WEIR MITCHELL
One of the major works of fiction around the turn of the nineteenth century was S. Weir Mitchell’s Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker (1898), but the author’s personal favorite of his many books was The Adventures of François (1898), which contained twenty-four picaresque tales of a foundling, juggler, thief, and fencing-master during the French Revolution.
The early career of Mitchell (1829–1914) was not literary but medical, in which he became famous as a specialist in neurological disorders and was noted for inventing the “rest cure” for nervous breakdowns. He was friends with Oliver Wendell Holmes, who advised him to establish himself as a physician before beginning any serious literary endeavors. Although he published anonymous poems and children’s stories as far back as 1846, his first book of adult fiction did not appear until 1880. His major contributions to the mystery genre, in addition to The Adventures of François, were The Autobiography of a Quack (1900), A Diplomatic Adventure (1906), and The Guillotine Club (1910).
While serving as a physician, he was known to have treated Edith Wharton’s husband, and it was the informed belief of the critic Edmund Wilson that Mitchell advised Wharton to take up writing as a means of relieving the nervous tension with which she lived.
“A Dilemma” was first published in book form in Little Stories in 1903.
A DILEMMA
BY S. WEIR MITCHELL
I WAS JUST THIRTY-SEVEN when my Uncle Philip died. A week before that event he sent for me; and here let me say that I never set eyes on him. He hated my mother, but I do not know why. She told me long before his last illness that I need expect nothing from my father’s brother. He was an inventor, an able and ingenious mechanical engineer, and had made much money by his improvement in turbine-wheels. He was a bachelor; lived alone, cooked his own meals, and collected precious stones, especially rubies and pearls. From the time he made his first money he had this mania. As he grew richer, the desire to possess rare and costly gems became stronger. When he bought a new stone, he carried it in his pocket for a month and now and then took it out and looked at it. Then it was added to the collection in his safe at the Trust Company.
At the time he sent for me I was a clerk, and poor enough. Remembering my mother’s words, his message gave me, his sole relative, no new hopes; but I thought it best to go.
When I sat down by his bedside, he began, with a malicious grin:
“I suppose you think me queer. I will explain.” What he said was certainly queer enough. “I have been living on an annuity into which I put my fortune. In other words, I have been, as to money, concentric half of my life to enable me to be as eccentric as I pleased the rest of it. Now I repent of my wickedness to you all, and desire to live in the memory of at least one of my family. You think I am poor and have only my annuity. You will be profitably surprised. I have never parted with my precious stones; they will be yours. You are my sole heir. I shall carry with me to the other world the satisfaction of making one man happy.
“No doubt you have always had expectations, and I desire that you should continue to expect. My jewels are in my safe. There is nothing else left.”
When I thanked him he grinned all over his lean face, and said:
“You will have to pay for my funeral.”
I must say that I never looked forward to any expenditure with more pleasure than to what it would cost me to put him away in the earth. As I rose to go, he said:
“The rubies are valuable. They are in my safe at the Trust Company. Before you unlock the box, be very careful to read a letter which lies on top of it; and be sure not to shake the box.” I thought this odd. “Don’t come back. It won’t hasten things.”
He died the next week, and was handsomely buried. The day after, his will was found, leaving me his heir. I opened his safe and found in it nothing but an iron box, evidently of his own making, for he was a skilled workman and very ingenious. The box was heavy and strong, about ten inches long, eight inches wide, and ten inches high.
On it lay a letter to me. It ran thus:
“DEAR TOM: This box contains a large number of very fine pigeon-blood rubies and a fair lot of diamonds; one is blue—a beauty. There are hundreds of pearls—one the famous green pearl, and a necklace of blue pearls, for which any woman would sell her soul—or her affections.” (I thought of Susan.) “I wish you to continue to have expectations and continuously to remember your dear uncle. I would have left these stones to some charity, but I hate the poor as much as I hate your mother’s son—yes, rather more.
“This box contains an interesting mechanism, which will act with certainty as you unlock it, and explode ten ounces of my improved, supersensitive dynamite—no, to be accurate, there are only nine and a half ounces. Doubt me, and open it, and you will be blown to atoms. Believe me, and you will continue to nourish expectations which will never be fulfilled. As a considerate man, I counsel extreme care in handling the box. Don’t forget your affectionate
UNCLE.”
I stood appalled, the key in my hand. Was it true? Was it a lie? I had spent all my savings on the funeral, and was poorer than ever.
Remembering the old man’s oddity, his malice, his cleverness in mechanic arts, and the patent explosive which had helped to make him rich, I began to feel how very likely it was that he had told the truth in this cruel letter.
I c
arried the iron box away to my lodgings, set it down with care in a closet, laid the key on it, and locked the closet.
Then I sat down, as yet hopeful, and began to exert my ingenuity upon ways of opening the box without being killed. There must be a way.
After a week of vain thinking I bethought me, one day, that it would be easy to explode the box by unlocking it at a safe distance, and I arranged a plan with wires, which seemed as if it would answer. But when I reflected on what would happen when the dynamite scattered the rubies, I knew that I should be none the richer. For hours at a time I sat looking at that box and handling the key.
At last I hung the key on my watchguard; but then it occurred to me that it might be lost or stolen. Dreading this, I hid it, fearful that someone might use it to open the box. This state of doubt and fear lasted for weeks, until I became nervous and began to dread that some accident might happen to that box. A burglar might come and boldly carry it away and force it open, and find it was a wicked fraud of my uncle’s. Even the rumble and vibration caused by the heavy vans in the street became at last a terror.
Worst of all, my salary was reduced, and I saw that marriage was out of the question.
In my despair I consulted Professor Clinch about my dilemma, and as to some safe way of getting at the rubies. He said that, if my uncle had not lied, there was none that would not ruin the stones, especially the pearls, but that it was a silly tale and altogether incredible. I offered him the biggest ruby if he wished to test his opinion. He did not desire to do so.
Dr. Schaff, my uncle’s doctor, believed the old man’s letter, and added a caution, which was entirely useless, for by this time I was afraid to be in the room with that terrible box.
At last the doctor kindly warned me that I was in danger of losing my mind with too much thought about my rubies. In fact, I did nothing else but contrive wild plans to get at them safely. I spent all my spare hours at one of the great libraries reading about dynamite. Indeed, I talked of it until the library attendants, believing me a lunatic or a dynamite fiend, declined to humor me, and spoke to the police. I suspect that for a while I was “shadowed” as a suspicious, and possibly criminal, character. I gave up the libraries and becoming more and more fearful, set my precious box on a down pillow, for fear of its being shaken; for at this time even the absurd possibility of its being disturbed by an earthquake troubled me. I tried to calculate the amount of shake needful to explode my box.
