Olga woke me with difficulty at seven in the morning.
“Mister Bill’s Asey wants to see you.”
I dressed hurriedly and went downstairs to find Asey Mayo sitting bolt upright in a steamer chair on the porch. Asey was the kind of man everybody expects to find on Cape Cod and never does. He was by my reckoning about sixty years old, because I am fifty, and I knew he had been “voting age,” as they say in the town, when I was a girl visiting my relatives. No one seeing him for the first time could tell whether he was thirty-five or seventy. His long lean face was so tanned from exposure that the lines and wrinkles did not show. His mouth was wide, with a humorous twist about the corners, and his deep-set blue eyes twinkled disconcertingly.
He usually walked with his shoulders hunched and his head thrust forward. As he moved his worn corduroy trousers and flannel shirt flopped as though anxious to catch up with the rest of his spare frame. An old broad-brimmed Stetson set at an angle on his head gave him a strangely rakish look. He almost invariably chewed tobacco, and that habit coupled with his trick of pronouncing no more syllables of a word than were absolutely necessary, made him quite unintelligible to those who didn’t know him.
Although he called himself a mechanic, he had taken a turn at nearly every trade. As steward, cook or ordinary seaman he had sailed over the seven seas in every type of ship. He had made his first voyage on one of the last of the old clipper ships, and before he had settled down in the town he had been mate of a tramp steamer. Under Bill’s grandfather he had built carriages; under Bill’s father he had learned about automobiles. I doubt if he had ever had more than a fleeting glimpse of the inside of a schoolroom, but his knowledge of the world and its inhabitants was vastly superior to that of the average man.
The town cast a critical eye upon him because he belonged to no church and rarely attended any service outside of the Christmas Eve celebration, when he went and lustily sang hymns. He was neither a Mason, a Bison nor an Elk.
But the townsfolk knew that when a garageman pronounced a car fit for the junk heap, Asey Mayo could rejuvenate it. Shortly after we had come to the Cape Betsey’s tiny car had stopped. The local mechanic scratched his head and said that he was dummed if he could do anything. A man brought from Boston confessed that the trouble was too deep-seated even for him. At Bill’s suggestion Asey had looked the car over. Nonchalantly he prodded a wire here, a nut there. He tinkered with a wrench, tapped with a screw-driver.
“Now then,” he said to Betsey, “start her up.” Betsey started her up. The car purred happily. “What was the matter, Asey?” Bill asked.
“Matter?” said Asey. “Wa’n’t nothin’ much the matter ’cept the whangdoodle on the thingumbob wa’n’t touchin’ the whatchamacallit.”
His speech would be impossible for a student of phonetics to record on paper. It resembled no other dialect in the world. Let it suffice to say that he never sounded a final g or t. His r was the ah of New England. His a was so flat that as Betsey said, you couldn’t get under it with a crowbar.
He greeted me as though it were his custom to appear on my porch at seven every morning of his life. “H’lo. Wake you up, did I?”
“Good morning, Asey.” I noticed that the humorous twist was gone from his mouth. “Have you heard about all this? And did Bill do it? And where is he?”
“Yup. Nope. In the pillory,” said he composedly. “In the what?”
“In the pillory, and ’twas lucky ’twasn’t the bilboes.”
“But why?”
“Ain’t no jail.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “you had better begin at the beginning and tell me everything.”
He drew a long breath. “Well, Sanborn he run Boots down. Did it a purpose. I had t’ shoot him. Bill come home an’ found out an’ got mad. Don’t blame him. I was myself. An’ he said he was goin’ to kill Sanborn an’ before I could get to stop him he was off. He come up here an’ asked Sanborn what the hell, I mean—”
“That’s all right. What did Sanborn say?”
“He said he didn’t run over any dog, but if Bill said that he had he’d make rest’ution. An’ he took out a ten-dollar note an’ passes it to Bill. Course Bill got madder an’ left. An’ after he come home I picks up the glasses an’ sees some one out fiddlin’ with the lobster pots I’d just set out, an’ so we took that speed boat o’ Bill’s an’ went out after ’em. Bill’d been usin’ the boat that afternoon an’ like a fool he hadn’t put any gas in her, so by the time we borrered gas from a late quo-haugger cornin’ in from the beds, we’d lost the tide an’ had t’ stay out in the harbor all night in that there mahogany contraption. If we’d used a rowboat like I wanted to we’d been all right now. Anyways, we come in hour or so ago an’ there was Slough Sullivan all dressed up in his reg’mentals waitin’ to greet us. He up and ’rested Bill for killin’ Sanborn. That was the first we got to know about it. An’ then he went an’ put Bill in the pillory.”
“What pillory? And why?” Betsey, who never rose before half past ten, stood in the doorway, sleepy-looking but completely dressed.
“Well, Bill said he hadn’t done it, an’ Slough he went on about Bill’s threatenin’ to kill Sanborn an’ something about a sardine tin, an’ seems like as if he had’t all doped out that Bill he was the murderer. Bill said all right, if Slough wanted to ’rest him, he was welcome to do it, but what was he goin’ to do with him after he had ’rested him. Slough says he’s goin’ to take him up-county an’ get him indicted. An’ Bill says he can’t on account of it’s bein’ Saturday. So Slough says, I’ll put you in jail then.”
Asey smiled. “We ain’t had no jail here for twenty-thutty years, an’ Bill told him so. An’ he says that the best thing Sullivan can do is to take his word he won’t try to go off anywheres an’ run away.”
He stopped short and sniffed the air. “If that’s coffee I smell I think I’d kind of like to have some. You go get me a cup, Betsey, like a good girl. I won’t go on till you get back.”
Betsey brought out a tray and the three of us sat and drank coffee as casually as though we were guests at a garden party. Emma and Dot probably had cause to laugh as they came out and saw us, though at the moment I didn’t see anything very funny about drinking coffee with what amounted to a hired man at that hour of the morning. Briefly we acquainted them with the gist of Asey’s remarks.
“Well,” continued Asey, “Sullivan he couldn’t see that at all. Says he, you’ll be takin’ that shiny new car of yours an’ beatin’ it away as soon’s I leave you; else you’ll run off in your speed boat.”
“ ‘Humpf,’ says Bill, ‘how ’bout givin’ me a pair of handcuffs an’ a ball an’ chain? Or maybe,’ says he real sarcastic-like, ‘maybe you could use the pillory that they put up for the ter-ter-’ oh, that three-hundredth birthday party that the town had.”
We snickered.
“But Sullivan don’t see anything hum’rous in that. He thinks it’s a fine idea, so he ups and does.”
“You mean to say that he put Bill Porter in the pillory for every one to see and throw things at?”
“Yup,” said Asey, helping himself to another biscuit. “Your girl makes real good biscuits, Miss Prue, an’ I know a lot about biscuits. Yup. That’s what Sullivan did, all right. Only I don’t guess that there’ll be any throwin’. I’m sure of that. I left Joe Bump there for to watch out.”
“What good will the village idiot do?” Betsey demanded.
“Well, I give him that long whip Jimmy got out in Californy. Joe Bump knows how to slash it so’s ’twill cut paper at fifty feet. An’ I made a sign an’ stuck it up sayin’ that the first feller t’ start anything would get a feel of that lash. An’ I gave Joe Bump five dollars an’ told him what t’ do. For less’n five dollars Joe’d cut the King of England into ribbons.”
We laughed in spite of ourselves.
“What about Bill?” I asked. “How is he?”
“Real chipper, Bill seemed. Only he don’t feel that way one bit. I left him settlin’ how he was t’ live till Monday mornin’. That’s when Sullivan says he’s goin’ t’ take him up to the court, but I kinder think he’ll take Bill out sooner’n he thinks. Bill says he wants an umberill for to keep the sun off, an’ I left some money at the dog-cart to see he got fed.” Asey chuckled. “He was kind of worrin’ ’bout sanitary arrangements when I left him, but I reckon necessity’ll show him some way out.”
“But isn’t he terribly uncomfortable?” I asked. “The boy who stood in it for the ‘Punishments’ tableau at the pageant had a stiff neck for days afterward.”
“Bill’s taller, an’ I stuck a couple boards under his feet. No, he wa’n’t sufferin’ none.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“Well, Miss Prue, Bill told me to come to you an’ tell you everything, an’ he said you an’ me was t’ find out who done this by Monday mornin’. You see, if Sullivan gets that crazy boy indicted, an’ I don’t see no reason why he won’t less’n we do something, there’s goin’ t’ be an awful lot of trouble to get him out of this. Course we all don’t think he did it, but I guess most every one else will judge by ’pearances. Folks most usually do. An’ we just got to get the one who did it before anything more happens to Bill.”
“Did you let Jimmy know?”
“Yup. Sent him a telegram on the way up.”
“Asey ought to know about the sardines,” Emma suggested. “Whether they were the ones that Bill bought or not.”
“I’m ’fraid they are, all right. They’s only ’leven tins in the pantry now, an’ it says twelve on the bill. Whatever other faults Slough Sullivan’s got, he gives full measure in sardines as well as everything else, flour or butter or what all. Every one’s got to have some redeemin’ feature about him, an’ that’s Slough’s. He’s honest even if he is kind of dull. If he says he give Bill twelve tins, he did. Bill he told Slough that when he set out t’ commit a murder he didn’t usually eat no sardines on the scene o’ the crime, before or after, let alone carryin’ the things with him an’ then leavin’ the can behind.”
“What did Sullivan say to that?”
“Told some story about a feller in Boston who’d left things behind so as to make people think some one else had made him the goat in a murder. Said that was what Bill’d done. Said it didn’t make no difference to him when ’r if ’r how ’r where Bill ate or didn’t eat ’em. All he cared about was the tin bein’ there.”
“I wonder how they got under the table, then, if Bill didn’t bring them,” Betsey remarked.
“Bill swears he didn’t. I guess likely it was spirits, but most likely two-legged ones. That’s just one of the things Miss Prue and me has got to find out.”
“But,” I wanted to know, “can Sullivan do a thing like this?”
“You mean, can he put Bill in the pillory? He has. No one can’t accuse him of not gettin’ results. He’s got him secured by the neck an’ wrists.”
“Couldn’t we get detectives?”
“Sure we could. I asked Bill if we hadn’t better, but he said no, that they’d get here when they felt like it and then they’d take a couple of weeks to get the lay of the land and find out all about the local scandals an’ by the time they got anywhere Bill’d be behind solid steel bars.”
“Does he expect us to track down whoever did this? Is the boy crazy?”
“Nope, he’s got sort of batty notions, but I shouldn’t go so far’s to call him plumb brainless. I guess you ’n’ me can dig out facts as easy as any one else. Sullivan he found what he thought was the murderer in a hour or so. We got about two whole days to start in an’ find the real crim’nal. An’ I’d say offhand that we’d got as good brains as he has. That reminds me. I thought of one thing a’ready. By to-night this’ll be head-lines in every paper there is. It happened too late to get into the mornin’ ones, but it’ll be all over the place to-night. So I brought something along with me.”
He went out to the side of the cottage where he had parked Bill’s new car. From the rumble seat he extracted six great coils of rope, an ax and a bundle of poles that looked suspiciously as though they had started out in life by holding up beans.
“What,” Emma asked, “is all that for? A mass hanging?”
“No’m. I’m goin’ to string it around this cottage here, on account of what if I don’t you’ll be sleepin’ trippers all over your front piazza. They’s goin’ to be plenty of people down this way before the day is over an’ not all of ’em is goin’ to stay down there on the beach road an’ look up, even though that’s where they b’long. You all better come an’ help me.”
We felt foolish, but we helped him string a cordon of rope about the cottage. While we worked I asked Asey why he was using the new roadster.
“Lucinda’s a good car, but she’s temp’rmental. I got a feelin’ we’re goin’ to have some ridin’ to do, you an’ me, before we get through this here job, an’ you might’s well ride in style an’ comfort.”
“I’m glad you think we’re going to get through with it,” I remarked. “You seem very sure.”
“Well, might’s well be a little confident. Every one can’t get to Corinth, but you can read the signposts, as the feller said.”
“Why did Bill pick out you and me to get to the root of this matter?”
“He ’lowed as how you an’ me were the only people he feels sure didn’t do it.”
I reflected on that and commented on Asey’s foresight in the matter of the ropes.
“Well, ounce o’ prevention’s worth a pound o’ cure. Besides, they ain’t no sense in a pack of women folks bein’ bothered by a lot of old men with comic remarks t’ make an’ women in khaki pants starin’, an’ a lot o’ kids throwin’ papers around.”
“But you were clever to think of it,” I said fatuously. “Humpf. Nothin’ but common sense. Common sense, Miss Prue, that’s my maxim.”
For the first time I realized he had been calling me by the name the family had used long ago. It had been a good twenty-five years since any one had shortened Prudence into Prue. I stopped my wondering into the past.
“What shall we do first, Asey?”
“Well, I cal’late we’re goin’ to find out more about this Sanborn man. Then we’ll find out more about that sardine tin. Then,” he lowered his voice and jerked his head toward the other three, “then we’re goin’ to look into matters nearer home. Don’t look so amazed like. Refined people do murders sometimes. Only we got to learn more about Sanborn first. We’ll do that this mornin’, I reckon, an’ that might maybe give us something to go on.”
“How do you know we’ll find out anything about Sanborn?”
“Easy as pie. Bill telegraphed that Harlow boy in Cambridge yesterday mornin’ before anything happened at all. He was sort of cur’us to find out about him on general principles. Yup, we got a lot to do to-day. We just got to find out everything by Monday bright an’ early.”
I looked at him quickly. He was perfectly serious. There was even a certain finality about the way he made that statement, as though he had no doubt whatever in his mind but what we would. I was beginning to understand why Bill depended to such an extent on this tall raw-boned man. Was it Shaw or Wells who said of New Englanders that they were “fine and bleak”? Certainly there was a fineness in Asey which I had never suspected.
“You think so?”
“Sure, Miss Prue. I seen the Porters in scrapes afore this. They always seem to get themselves out all right.”
“You mean, I suppose, that you always get them out,” I remarked.
Asey smiled. “Most usually I have help. Now, you an’ me is goin’ to start out.”
“Start out where?” asked Betsey, coming up. “Can we go too?”
“Nope. Ain’t no need for you to come trapsin’ around to-day. You go up-town an’ every man-jack will start pointin’ an’ talkin’ about you, an’ you might’s well stay here.”
Accordingly I stepped into the front seat of the gleaming low-hung roadster, and Mr. Mayo and I drove off. Emma watched us with a twinkle in her eye. I knew she was thinking of the wager we had made the night before.
“First we’ll go see Bill. Then to the post-office an’ then to the telegraph office, an’ then we’ll interview Mrs. Howe,” Asey planned out loud. “Sanborn was probably there yesterday. Say, did Betsey’s friend Dot or your friend Mrs. Manton ever know Sanborn?”
“Dot did, but not Emma.”
“She know he was goin’ to be here?”
“She said she didn’t.”
“Hm. Did you ask ’em down or did they wangle an invitation off you?”
“We asked them,” I said indignantly. “Why?”
“Oh, I just thought that this here hot weather might give any one a real nice chance to ask themselves where they knew Sanborn was goin’ to be if they had any idees about killin’ him.”
I had not thought of that. “But,” I objected, “no one knew that Sanborn was going to be here. He came to town from the Chatham Bars Inn on Tuesday, intending to spend just the night, at least that was what he told Betsey on Wednesday when she met him. Then he decided he liked the place so much that he made up his mind to stay. The hot weather didn’t begin till Tuesday or Wednesday. And how would any one know, besides?”
“That new proprietor of the inn has flossy notions.” Asey bit off a chunk of chewing tobacco. “He puts all the names of folks who stay there into the papers. If Sanborn came on Tuesday, then it was in Wednesday’s paper, and the heat-wave talk began in Wednesday’s paper too. Didn’t any one ask if they could come to see you for the weekend?”
“We got nine telegrams,” I informed him.
“Kind of a lot, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but nothing out of the ordinary. Once last year we got sixteen.”
“Who was they from?”
“I really don’t remember all of them. Betsey might.”
“Any one you remember as being sort of strange?”
“Why, no.”
“Wasn’t any from any one who you didn’t know very well or didn’t expect to hear from?”
“I’m getting old and doddering, Asey. Yes, there were two that we particularly noticed.” I told him of our system of drawing lots and how we seemed unable to get any combination other than John Kurth and Maida Waring. I explained about their divorce and subsequent estrangement.
“May be a little far-fetched, but we’ll look into the matter later. Can’t never tell in things like this how important coinc’dences are.”
He turned the car on to the strip of state highway that served as the main street of Wellfleet. Both sides were lined with the typical collection of small-town emporiums. There were icecream parlors, the grocery where Sullivan presided, a news-stand, a bowling alley and the inevitable gasoline stations. Opposite that focal point, the post-office, was an open lot. It had been on this spot that the town had given what Asey called its three-hundredth birthday party. Here the pillory and stocks and bilboes still stood.
The street was unduly crowded and Asey gave a display of steering which would have done credit to any New York taxi driver. He drew up in front of the post-office and coaxed the car into a parking space which I should have considered inadequate even for Betsey’s vehicle.
I looked over to the lot, where, surrounded by at least a hundred gaping people, Bill Porter stood with his head and wrists protruding from a wooden framework. I was struck by the abnormal silence. There was a thin buzz of voices, but it was a very thin buzz indeed. Joe Bump sat on a camp stool next to Bill. He gripped with both hands the long handle of an enormous whip whose length lay coiled neatly at his feet.
Asey caught a small boy by the arm.
“Anything happened, bub?”
The youngster grinned.
“Pete Barradio, he tried to throw a rotten tomato, but Joe hit him before it left his fist, and he slashed his face open like it’d been cut by a razor. I don’t guess any one’ll bother him or start anything more. They don’t dast.”
Asey’s blue eyes twinkled for a second. “Let’s see what Bill’s got to say.”
We made our way to the edge of the crowd.
Bill waved a fist at us. “Morning, Snoodles. Hi there, old-timer.”
“Are you all right, Bill?”
“Doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances, Snoodles.”
“I wouldn’t be too chirky if I was you,” Asey advised him. “Has Slough been around again?”
“Uh huh. He’s convinced I’m suffering like a Christian on a rack. I put on a pained face and told him I’d prefer the third degree. He was delighted and went away satisfied I’d break down and confess all by noon. Said if I’d confess he’d take me down. He thinks this’ll bring me into a repentant frame of mind.”
“Had anything to eat?”
“Yes. Joe here fed me a hot dog and a glass of milk. I’m going to have a Western sandwich for a light lunch soon. A man in my position gets hungry. Very hungry. Have you found out anything yet?”
Asey shook his head. “Nope.”
“Well, you two had better get going if you want to see this worthy young man without shackles and a stiff neck for the rest of his life. It’s all up to you.”
“Don’t you worry now,” said Asey anxiously. “We’ll fix you up all right. Come along, Miss Prue.”
“Hey,” Bill called after us. “Who’d you suppose I saw going by here a minute ago? He wasn’t looking this way, but I howled after him. I guess he didn’t hear me though.”
“Whom,” I accented the pronoun slightly, “did you see?”
“There, there, Snoodles. Whom. Well, it was that tall dark fellow who used to be Maida Waring’s husband. The one who went to school with Jimmy. What was his name?”
“Kurth, you mean?”
“Yes, Johnny Kurth.”