THERE was a short cut by which, using a rough back road across the hill, and then a dimly-marked bridle path down the bed of the creek, one could get to Tallman’s ravine in less than an hour on foot. Seth saddled the black mare, and brought her up on the meadow plateau overlooking the gulf, panting and white on breast and barrel with foam, inside fifteen minutes. He had galloped furiously, unable to think save in impatient flashes, and reckless alike of his own neck and the beast’s wind and limbs. He reined up the plunging mare at the very edge of the ravine, where some score of farmers and boys were standing clustered under the trees, watching his excited approach.
As he threw himself from the saddle among them, and looked swiftly from face to face for the right one to speak to first, the attention of the elder bystanders concentrated itself upon the mare. They would have given their foremost thoughts to her anyway, for they were owners of livestock even before they were neighbors, and her splashed and heated condition appealed in protest to their deepest feeling—reverential care for good horseflesh. But there was something more: the mare was strangely, visibly agitated at the sight of the glen before her, and reared back with outstretched trembling forelegs, lifted ears, and distended, frightened eyes.
“By Cracky!” cried Zeke Tallman himself, “don’t it beat natur’! This ’ere mare knaows what’s happened! Look at her! She senses what’s layin’ down there at the bottom!”
“’N’ it they say dawgs has got more instinck than a hoss!” said a younger yokel. He kicked a mongrel pup which was lounging around among the men’s legs, with a fierce “Git aout! yeh whelp, yeh! What d’you knaow abaout it!” to illustrate his contempt for this canine theory.
A third farmer, more practically considerate, took the shivering, affrighted beast by the bridle, and led it away from the gulf’s edge, patting its wet neck compassionately as they went.
Meanwhile Seth had found his way through the group to his brother John, who stood with his back against a beech tree, springing from the very brink of the gulf, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the trampled grass at his feet. A half circle of boys, with one or two girls of the school age, stretched about him at some distance, like the outer line of an open fan, mutely eyeing him as the second most important figure in the tragedy. They separated for Seth to make his way, and made signs to each other that the interest was doubled by his arrival. The brothers shook hands silently and scarcely looked at each other.
There came the sound of a pistol shot from the glen below; somebody said: “There! they’ve killed th’ off-hoss. Ther’ goes th’ best matched team o’ grays in Dearborn Caounty!”
“Have you been down yet, John?” Seth asked softly, as the low buzz of conversation began about them once more.
“No, not yet. I suppose I could if I had insisted on it, but when I got here, twenty minutes or so ago, they told me here that Timms had got his jury together down there, and forbidden anybody coming down till they were through. So I’ve stayed here. Not that I care about Timms, but—I can wait.”
“Let’s go down!” As he spoke, Seth swung himself around the beech, and began the descent, letting himself swiftly down the steep, mossy declivity by saplings and roots. His brother followed. One or two boys started also, but were roughly restrained by their elders, with a whispered “Stay back, can’t yeh! H’ain’t yeh got no sense. Them’s the brothers!”
The scene at the bottom was not unlike what Seth’s fancy had painted it, adding the terrible novelties of the night to a spot he had known from boyhood. Half-shaded even in the noon sunlight by overhanging branches from the towering, perpendicular sides of the glen, the miniature valley lay, a narrow stretch of poor, close-cropped grass, with the spiral, faded mullein stalks, the soft brown clumps of brake, the straggling, bloomless thistles, and even some tufts of glowing golden-rod, which push their way into unfrequented pasture-lands and encompass their sterility. The stream, which once had been a piscatorial glory of the section, but now, robbed of its water and its life by distant clearings, mills and reservoirs, wandered sadly and shallowly on an unnoted course, divided itself here to skirt each side of the gulf with a contemptible rivulet—the two coming together abruptly at the mouth of the low stone culvert, and vanishing into its dark recesses, above which rose, sloping steeply, the high embankment of the road traversing the ravine.
It was over this embankment that horses, carriage and owner had precipitately pitched; it was at its base, on the swail and gravel of the stream’s edge, that the wreck lay, surrounded by a little knot of men. Vertical gashes in the earth down the bank, with broken branches and tom roots, marked the awful track of the descent; the waters of the brook to the right, dammed by the body of the horse killed in the fall, had overflowed the sands and made muddy rivulets across to the culvert.
The Coroner turned with obvious vexation at the sound of the brothers’ approach. “I thought I give word—” he began; then, recognizing the newcomers, added, without altering his peremptory, officious tone: “It’s all right; you can come now, if you want to. The gentlemen of the jury have completed their labors for the present. I was on the pint of adjourning the ink-west.”
The brothers joined the jurors, and dumbly surveyed the spectacle at their feet. One of the grays lay across the rivulet; the other, more recently dead, was piled awkwardly upon its mate’s neck and shoulders, in an unnatural heap. The front portions of the buggy, scratched but not smashed, were curiously reared in the air, by reason of the pole being driven deep into the soft earth, between the horses; the rear wheels and the seat, broken off and riven by the violence of the shock, were imbedded in the marsh underneath. On the higher ground, close in front of the brothers, lay something decorously covered with horse-blankets, which they comprehended with a sinking of the heart.
“He lay in theer, part under the hind wheels ’n’ part under the nigh hoss,” explained the Coroner, with dignity. “The fall was enough to brek his neck twenty times over, let alone the hosses may’ve kicked him on the way down. We hev viewed the remains, ’n’ we’ve decided—
“We ain’t decided nothin’!” broke in one of the jurors, a serious, almost grim-faced farmer, with a bushy collar of gray whiskers framing his brown square jaw. “How kin we decide till we’ve heerd some evidence, ’n’ before the ink-west is threw with?”
“There’s some men’d kick if they was goin’ to be hung. Did I say we’d arrived at a verdict? What I mean is we’ve agreed to adjourn the ink-west now till arter the funeral.”
“Well, why daon’t yeh say what yeh mean, then?” rejoined the objecting juror. “They can’t no cor’ner make up my verdict fur me, ’n’ you’ll fine it aout, tew.”
“The more fool me fur panelin’ yeh!” was the Coroner’s comment.
The brothers insensibly edged away from this painful altercation. A little elderly man, in shabby broadcloth which seemed strangely out of place among the rough tweeds and homespuns of the farmers, detached himself from the group of jurors, and came over to them, with a subdued halfsmile of recognition. It was the Thessaly undertaker.
“Tew bad, ain’t it?” he said glibly, “allus some such scrimmage as thet, on every one of Timms’ juries. He ain’t got no exec’tive ability, I say. I’d like to see him run a funer’l with eight bearers—all green han’s! I told him thet once, right to his face! But then of course yeh knaow I can’t say much. He’s techy, ’n’ ’twouldn’t do fur me to rile him. We hev a kind o’ ’rangement, you see. I hev to be on hand any-way, ’n’ he allus puts me on the jury; it helps him ’n’ it helps me. I kin always sort o’ smooth over things, if any o’ th’ jurors feels cranky, yeh knaow. They’ll listen to me, cuz they reelize I’ve hed experience, ’n’ then there’s a good deal in knaowin’ haow to manage men, in hevin’ what I call exec’tive ability. Of course, this case is peculiar. They ain’t no question abaout th’ death bein’ accidental. But this man you heerd kickin’, this Cyrus Ballou, he’s makin’ a dead set to hev’ Zeke Tallman condemned fur hevin’ his fence up there in bad repair. He ’n’ Tallman’s a lawin’ of it abaout some o’ his steers thet got into Tallman’s cabbages, ’n’ thet’s why——-”
“I suppose we can leave this to you!” John broke in, impatience mastering the solemnity of the scene. “Have you made any arrangements? You know w............