“There’s your print, Bessie,” he mumbled. “And there’s my print. But whose print’s that? That’s the man. That’s a long slim foot, with nails across the ball. That’s the man. Don’t disturb those tracks. I’ll set the lantern down there. Don’t you disturb ’em.”
There were several of these strange tracks; the clayey soil of the walk, slightly tempered with sand, had preserved them with fatal distinctness; it showed them advancing to the arbor and halting close by the murdered woman. As Bessie stared at them, it seemed to her that they were fearfully familiar, though where she had seen them before she could not say.
“Keep away from those tracks,” repeated Squire Lauson as the two laborers who lived with him came down the garden. “Now, then, what are you staring at? She’s dead. Take her up—O, for God’s sake, be gentle about it!—take her up, I tell you. There! Now, carry her along.”
As the men moved on with the body he turned to Bessie and said: “Leave the lantern just there. And don’t you touch those tracks. Go on into the house.”
With his own hands he aided to lay out his daughter on a table, and drew her cap from her temples so as to expose the bloody gash to view. There was a little natural agony in the tremulousness of his stubbly and grizzly chin; but in the glitter of his gray eyes there was an expression which was not so much sorrow as revenge.
“That’s a pretty job,” he said at last, glaring at the mangled gray head. “I should like to l’arn who did it.”
It was not known till the day following how he passed the next half-hour. It seems that, some little time previous, this man of over ninety years had conceived the idea of repairing with his own hands the cracked wall of his parlor, and had for that purpose bought a quantity of plaster of Paris and commenced a series of patient experiments in mixing and applying it. Furnished with a basin of his prepared material, he stalked out to the arbor and busied himself with taking a mould of the strange footstep to which he had called Bessie’s attention, succeeding in his labor so well as to be able to show next day an exact counterpart of the sole which had made the track.
Shortly after he had left the house, and glancing cautiously about as if to make sure that he had indeed left it, his wife entered the room where lay the dead body. She came slowly up to the table, and looked at the ghastly face for some moments in silence, with precisely that staid, slightly shuddering air which one often sees at funerals, and without any sign of the excitement which one naturally expects in the witnesses of a mortal tragedy. In any ordinary person, in any one who was not, like her, denaturalized by the egotism of shattered nerves, such mere wonder and repugnance would have appeared incomprehensively brutal. But Mrs. Lauson had a character of her own; she could be different from others without exciting prolonged or specially severe comment; people said to themselves, “Just like her,” and made no further criticism, and almost certainly no remonstrance. Bessie herself, the moment she had exclaimed, “O grandmother! what shall we do?” felt how absurd it was to address such an appeal to such a person.