The Secret of Lonesome Cove/Chapter 1

Lonesome Cove is one of the least frequented stretches on the New England seaboard. From the land side, the sheer hundred-foot drop of Hawkill Cliffs shuts it off. Access by water is denied; denied with a show of menacing teeth, when the sea curls its lips back, amid a swirl of angry currents, from its rocks and reefs, warning boats away. There is no settlement near the cove. The somber repute suggested by its name has served to keep cottagers from building on the wildly beautiful uplands that overbrood the beach. Sheep browse between the thickets of ash and wild cherry extending almost to the brink of the height, and the straggling pathways along the edge, worn by the feet of their herders, afford the only suggestion of human traffic within half a mile of the spot. A sharp-cut ravine leads down to the sea by a rather treacherous descent.

Near the mouth of this opening, a considerable gathering of folk speckled the usually deserted beach, at noon of July sixth. They centered on a dark object, a few yards within the flood-tide limit. Some scouted about, peering at the sand. Others pointed first to the sea, then to the cliffs with the open gestures of those who argue vehemently. But always their eyes returned, drawn back by an unfailing magnetism, to the central object.

From some distance away a lone man of a markedly different type from the others observed them with an expression of displeasure. He had reached the cove by an arduous scramble, possible only to a good climber, around the jutting elbow of the cliff to the northward. It was easily to be read in his face that he was both surprised and annoyed to find people there before him. One of the group presently detached himself and ambled over to the newcomer, with an accelerated speed as he drew nearer.

“Swanny!” he ejaculated, “if it ain’t Perfessor Kent! Didn’t know you at first under them whiskers. You remember me, don’t you? I used to drive you around when you was here before.”

“How are you, Jarvis?” returned the other. “Still in the livery business, I suppose?”

“Yes. What brings you here, Perfessor?”

“Holidays. I’ve just come out of the woods. And as you have some very interesting sea currents just here, I thought I’d have a look at them. Nobody really knows anything about coast currents, you know. Now my opportunity is spoiled.” He indicated the crowd by a movement of his head.

“Spoilt? I guess not. You couldn’t have come at a better time,” said the local man eagerly.

“Ah, but you see, I had planned to swim out to the eddy, and make some personal observations.”

“You was going to swim into Dead Man’s Eddy?” asked the other, aghast. “Why, Perfessor, you must have turned foolish. They ain’t a man on this coast would take a chance like that.”

“Superstition,” retorted the other curtly. “On a still day such as this there would be no danger to an experienced swimmer. The conditions are ideal except for this crowd. What is it? Has the village gone picnicking?”

“Not sca’cely! Ain’t you heard? Another one’s come in through the eddy. Lies over yonder.”

Professor Kent’s eyebrows went up, as he glanced toward the indicated spot; then gathered in a frown.

“Not washed up there, surely?” he said.

“Thet’s what,” answered Jarvis.

“When?”

“Sometime early this morning.”

“Pshaw!” said the other, turning to look at the curving bulwark of rocks over which the soft slow swell was barely breaking. “If it were the other end of the cove, now, I could understand it.”

“Yes,” agreed Jarvis, “they mostly come in at the other end, on this tide.”

“Mostly? Always.” The professor’s tone was positive. “Unless my charts are wrong. But this—well, it spoils at least one phase of my theory.”

“Theery!” exclaimed the liveryman, his pale eyes alight. “You got a theery? But I thought you didn’t know anything about the body, till I told you, just now.”

“Oh, my ruined theory has reference to the currents,” sighed the other. “It has nothing to do with dead men, as such.”

“Neither has this,” was the prompt response, delivered with a jerk of the thumb toward the dark object.

“No? What is it then, if not a dead man?”

“A dead woman.”

“Oh! All the same, it shouldn’t have come in on this section of the beach at all.”

“Thet ain’t half the strangeness of it, the way it washed in. Lonesome Cove has had some queer folks drift home to it, but nothing as queer as this. Come and see for yourself.”

Still frowning, Professor Kent suffered himself to be led to the spot. Two or three of the group, as it parted before him, greeted him. He found himself looking down on a corpse clad in a dark silk dress and stretched on a wooden grating, to which it was lashed with a small rope. Everything about the body indicated wealth. The dress was expensively made. The shoes were of the best type, and the stockings were silk. The head was marred by a frightful bruise which had crushed in the right side and extended around behind the ear. Blood had clotted thickly in the short close-curled hair. The left side was unmarked. The eyes were closed and the mouth was slightly open, showing a glint of gold amid very white and regular teeth. An expression of deadly terror distorted the face. Professor Kent bent closely over it.

“That’s strange; very strange,” he murmured. “It should be peaceful.”

“But look at the hand!” cried Jarvis.

Here, indeed, was the astounding feature of the tragedy; the aspect that brought Kent to his knees, the more closely to observe. The body lay twisted slightly to the right, with the left arm extended. The left wrist was enclosed in a light rusted handcuff to which a chain was fastened. At the end of the chain was the companion cuff, shattered, evidently by a powerful blow, and half buried in the sand. As Kent leaned over the corpse, a fat, powerful, grizzled man with a metal badge on his shirt-front pushed forward.

“Them’s cast-iron cuffs,” he announced. “That kind ain’t been used these forty years.”

“What kind of a ship ’ud be carryin’ ’em nowadays?” asked some one in the crowd.

“An’ what kind of a seaman’d be putting of ’em on a lady’s wrists?” growled a formidable voice, which Kent, looking up, perceived to have come from amid a growth of heavy white whiskers, sprouting from a weather-furrowed face.

“Seafaring man, aren’t you?” inquired Kent.

“No more. Fifty year of it, man an’ boy, has put me in harbor.”

“That’s Sailor Smith,” explained Jarvis, who had assumed the duties of a self-appointed cicerone. “Not much about the sea and its ways, good or bad, that he don’t know.”

“True for you,” confirmed several voices.

“Then, Mr. Smith, will you take a look at those lashings and tell me whether in your opinion they are the work of a sailor?” asked Kent.

The old hands fumbled expertly. The old face puckered. Judgment came forth presently.

“The knots is well enough. The lashin’s a passable job. What gits me is the rope.”

“Well, what’s wrong with the rope?”

“Nothin’ in pertic’ler. Only, I don’t know what just that style of rope would be doin’ on shipboard, unless it was to hang the old man’s wash on.”

“Suppose we lift this grating,” Kent suggested.

At this the man with the badge interposed. “Say, who’s runnin’ this thing, anyhow? I’m sheriff here, an’ this body ain’t to be moved till a doctor has viewed it.”

“Of course,” said Kent mildly; “but I thought you might be interested to see, Mr. Sheriff, whether a ship’s name was stamped somewhere on this grating.”

“Well, I don’t want any amachure learning me my business,” declared the official importantly.

Nevertheless, he heaved the woodwork up on edge and held it so, while eager eyes scanned the under part. Murmurs of disappointment followed. In these Kent did not join. He had inserted a finger in a crevice of the splintered wood and had extracted some small object which he held in the palm of his hand, examining it thoughtfully.

“Wot ye got there?” demanded the sheriff.

Professor Kent stretched out his hand, disclosing a small grayish object.

“I should take it to be the cocoon of Ephestia kuchniella,” he announced.

“An’ wot does he do for a livin’?” inquired the official, waxing humorous.

“Destroys crops. It’s a species of grain-moth.”

“Oh!” grunted Schlager. “You’re a bug collector, eh?”

“Exactly,” answered the other, transferring his trove to his pocket.

Thereafter he seemed to lose interest in the center of mystery. Withdrawing to some distance, he paced up and down the shore, whistling lively tunes, not always in perfect accord, from which a deductive mind might have inferred that his soul was not in the music.

Nearer and nearer to high-water mark his pacing took him. Presently, though all the time continuing his whistling, he was scanning the tangled débris that the highest tide of the year had heaped up, almost against the cliff’s foot. His whistling became slow, lugubrious, minor. It sagged. It died away. When it rose again, it was in march time, whereto the virtuoso stepped briskly toward the crowd. By this time the group had received several additions, but had suffered the loss of one of its component parts, the sheriff. Conjecture was buzzing from mouth to mouth as to the official’s sudden defection.

“Whatever it was he got from the pocket,” Kent heard one of the men say, “it started him quick.”

“Looked to me like an envelope,” hazarded some one.

“No,” contradicted Sailor Smith; “paper would have been all pulped up by the water.”

“Marked handkerchief, maybe,” suggested another.

“Like as not,” said Jarvis. “You bet that Len Schlager figured it out there was somethin’ in it for him, anyways. I could see the money-gleam in his eye.”

“That’s right, too,” confirmed the old sailor. “He looked just like that when he brought in that half-wit pedler, thinkin’ he was the thousan’-dollar-reward thief last year.”

“Trust Len Schlager to look out for number one first, an’ be sheriff afterward,” observed some one else.

Amidst this interchange of opinion, none of which was lost upon him, Professor Kent advanced and bent over the manacled corpse.

“Have to ask you to stand back, Perfessor,” said Jarvis. “Len’s appointed me special dep’ty till he comes back, and he says nobody is to lay finger on hide ner hair of the corpse; not even the doc, if he comes.”

“Quite right,” assented the other. “Sheriff Schlager exhibits commendable zeal and discretion.”

“Wonder if he knowed the corpse?” suggested somebody in the crowd.

“Tell you who did, if he didn’t,” said another man.

“Who, then?”

“Elder Iry Dennett. Didn’t none of you hear about his meetin’ up with a strange woman yestiddy evenin’?”

“Shucks! This couldn’t be that woman,” said Jarvis. “How’d she come to be washed ashore from a wreck between last night and this morning?”

“How’d she come to be washed ashore from a wreck, anyway?” countered Sailor Smith. “The’ ain’t been no storm for a week, an’ this body ain’t been dead twenty-four hour.”

“It plumb beats me,” admitted Jarvis.

“Who is this Dennett?” asked Professor Kent.

“Iry? He’s the town gab of Martindale Center. Does a little plumbin’ an’ tinkerin’ on the side. Just now he’s up to Cadystown. Took the ten-o’clock train last night.”

“Then it was early when he met this woman?”

“Little after sundown. He was risin’ the hill beyond the Nook—that’s Sedgwick’s place, the painter feller—when she come out of the shrubbery—pop! He quizzed her. Trust the Elder for that. But he didn’t get much out of her, until he mentioned the Nook. Then she allowed she guessed she’d go there. An’ he watched her go.”

“You say a man named Sedgwick lives at the Nook. Is that Francis Sedgwick, the artist?” asked Kent.

“That’s him,” said Sailor Smith. “Paints right purty pictures. Lives there all alone with a Chinese cook.”

“Well, the lady went down the hill,” continued Jarvis, “just as Sedgwick come out to smoke a pipe on his stone wall. Iry thought he seemed su’prised when she bespoke him. They passed a few remarks, an’ then they had some words, an’ the lady laughed loud an’ kinder scornful. He seemed to be pointin’ at a necklace of queer, fiery pink stones thet she wore, and tryin’ to get somethin’ out of her. She turned away, an’ he started to follow, when all of a sudden she grabbed up a rock an’ let him have it—blip! Keeled him clean over. Then she ran away up the road toward Hawkill Cliffs. That’s the way Iry Dennett tells it. But I ain’t never heard of a story losin’ anythin’ in the tellin’ when it come through Iry’s lips.”

“Well, this corpse ain’t got no pink necklace,” suggested somebody.

“Bodies sometimes gets robbed,” said Sailor Smith.

Chester Kent stooped over the writhen face, again peering close. Then he straightened up and began pulling thoughtfully at the lobe of his ear.

He pulled and pulled, until, as if by that process, he had turned his face toward the cliff. His lips pursed. He began whistling softly, and tunelessly. His gaze was abstracted.

“Ain’t seen nothin’ to make you feel bad, have you, Perfessor?” inquired Temporary-Deputy-Sheriff Jarvis with some acerbity.

“Eh? What?” said Kent absently. “Seen anything? Nothing but what’s there for any one to see.”

Following his fixed gaze, the others studied the face of the cliff; all but Sailor Smith. He blinked near-sightedly at the corpse.

“Say,” said he presently, “what’s them queer little marks on the neck, under the ear?”

Back came Kent’s eyes. “Those?” he said smiling. “Why, those are, one might suppose, such indentations as would be made in flesh by forcing a jewel setting violently against it, by a blow or strong impact.”

“Then you think it was the wom—” began the old seaman when several voices broke in:

“There goes Len now!”

The sheriff’s heavy figure appeared on the brow of the cliff, moving toward the village.

“Who is it with him?” inquired Kent.

“Gansett Jim,” answered Jarvis.

“An Indian?”

“Gosh! You got good eyes!” said Jarvis. “He’s more Indian than anything else. Comes from down Amagansett way, and gets his name from it.”

“H-m! When did he arrive?”

“While you was trapesin’ around up yonder.”

“Did he see the body?”

“Yep. Just after the sheriff got whatever it was from the pocket, Gansett Jim hove in sight. Len went over to him quick, an’ said somethin’ to him. He come and give a look at the body. But he didn’t say nothing. Only grunted.”

“Never does say nothin’, only grunt,” put in Sailor Smith.

“That’s right,” agreed Jarvis. “Well, the sheriff tells me to watch the body. Then he says, ‘An’ I’ll need somebody to help me. I’ll take you, Jim.’ So he an’ the Indian goes away together.”

Professor Kent nodded. He looked seaward where the reefs were now baring their teeth more plainly through the racing currents, and he sighed. That sigh meant, in effect, “I wanted to play with my tides and eddies, and here is work thrown at my very feet!” Then he bade the group farewell, and set off up the beach.

“Seems kinder int’rested, don’t he?” remarked one of the natives.

“Who is he, anyway?” inquired another.

“Oh, he’s a sort of a harmless scientific crank,” explained Jarvis, with patronizing kindliness. “Comes from Washington. Something to do with the government work.”

“Kinder loony, I think,” conjectured a little, thin, piping man. “Musses and moves around like it.”

“Is that so!” said Sailor Smith, who still had his eyes fixed on the scarified neck. “Well, I ain’t any too dum sure thet he’s as big a fool as some folks I know thet thinks likelier of theirselves.”

Others, however, supported the little man’s diagnosis, and there was some feeling against Sailor Smith who refused to make the vote unanimous.

“No, sir,” he persisted sturdily. “That dude way of talkin’ of his has got somethin’ back of it, I’ll bet. He seen there was somethin’ queer about thet rope, an’ he ast me about the knots, right off. He knows enough not to spit to wind’ard, an’ don’t you forgit it! Wouldn’t surprise me none if he was p’intin’ pretty nigh as clus up into the wind as Len Schlager.”

Possibly the one supporter of the absent would have wavered in his loyalty had he seen the trove that Professor Chester Kent had carried unostentatiously from the beach, in his pocket, after picking it from the grating. It was the fuzzy cocoon of a small and quite unimportant insect. Perhaps the admiring Mr. Smith might even have come around to the majority opinion regarding Professor Kent’s intellectual futility, could he have observed the absorbed interest with which the Washington scientist, seated on a boulder, opened up the cocoon, pricked it until the impotent inmate wriggled in protest, and then, casting it aside to perish, threw himself on his back and whistled the whole of Chopin’s Funeral March, mostly off the key.