With that Pete departed with his parcels.
“I’m derned,” said the storekeeper. “I didn’t know that ginger-haired petty larceny beanpole hed thet much decency in him.”
“Well, like he said — the old man’s of his blood.”
“Huh,” observed a less sentimental member of the group, “mebbe he figures comin’ inter the money over the old man’s daughter what the old curmudgeon’s rowed with. Mebbe he figures gettin’ a will out of him favorin’ hisself.”
“Sounds more like him, thet does,” agreed the storekeeper.
“Oh, shucks,” some one protested. “Ain’t none of us thet’s all bad. Shouldn’t wonder he had a good streak in him.”
“Mebbe.”
II
That night the flood rose to its peak. A torrential downpour of rain with crashing thunder and blinding lightning made the night lurid and increased the might of the flowing waters.
At dawn every available police launch and volunteer boat was out on the river engaged in work of rescue. Women, children and men were plucked off the roofs of floating houses and barns, picked up clinging to the trunks of uprooted trees, or taken, soaked, shivering and half starved from hastily constructed rafts. Now and then a corpse was dragged out of the yellow muddy water.
Down the river, some miles from the small town where the miser had lived, was a bridge, and a police boat there came upon a raft held against a steel prop by a lashing of stout rope. It was a well constructed raft with a small shack built upon it, fitted with two bunks, an oil stove and a stock of canned provisions. There were also two empty whisky bottles and two bottles of whisky untouched.
But these details were a matter of after search.
What had brought the police launch hurrying toward the raft was the sight of two human feet incased in soggy woolen house shoes and showing skinny shanks that were naked, sticking out of the swift-flowing waters of the flood.
When the officers sought to drag the body fully into sight they looked at each other in surprise.
“What can make it so heavy?” demanded one.
“Good Lord — he’s got a rope knotted around his neck!”
When they finally got the withered, skinny corpse upon the raft they heaved mightily at the rope. Up came another human foot — bare — and a long, skinny leg. Around the ankle the same rope that was tied about the neck of the aged man on the raft had formed into a slip knot, water soaked so that the rope clung inexorably to the limb.
Now the weight beneath became heavier than ever.
“There’s something bulky tied to the other end of this rope — somethin’ darn weighty. Let’s get that up before we pull this feller’s body out. We’ve run into somethin’ darn queer.”
“Darn queer for certain!”
They heaved at the rope below the long skinny shank around which the rope was noosed and brought up a small black satchel. Old it was, worn and water soaked — a dead weight.
Their eyes grew staring when they had broken the lock and saw that the shabby thing was filled with silver dollars and five, ten and twenty dollar gold pieces! A fortune!
Then they drew the second body completely out of the water — its red hair matted on the gray-white, ugly face with its long nose and weak chin uplifted from the long, bony neck.
“Pete Granger!” exclaimed one of the policemen. “Had him once for pig stealin’. Put him away for three months. Comes from about twenty miles up the river. The old man with the rope around his neck, this bag chockful of money — what the devil do you make of it, anyhow?”
They pondered, but shook their heads, unable to guess.
It was the shrewd, white-haired medical examiner who obtained the first clew and who reconstructed the crime.
“The truth came at the autopsy,” he said. “I then discovered that the old man had not been drowned. He was dead when his body was cast into the water. There was no water in his lungs. And I discovered the fact that he had been strangled to death. But not by the rope tied around his neck. Beneath that were black and blue marks unquestionably made by the fingers of human hands. Strangled to death before he went overboard!
“Then I made inquiry regarding the old man and the nephew, an innate thief, left in sole charge of this old man with his bag of riches beneath the bed from which he couldn’t arise.
“In due course I got all the details. Learned of the statements of the nephew that he couldn’t get the old man to leave the house, although he was repeatedly warning him that the flood waters were creeping up to his very bedroom window. I heard of his assurance that he would stand by, and had built a raft, and when actual peril came-would remove the old man and his money to the raft and drift him down the river to a hospital. And I discovered how he dissuaded any of the townsmen from going out to warn the old man of his ever increasing peril by saying his uncle had a shotgun at his bedside and would certainly fire at them, thinking they had come to rob him of his money. Meanwhile he was probably telling the old man, who couldn’t get up to see for himself, that the flood was a small one.
“Pete Granger was lying all the way. He built the raft all right. And on it, when the time came that night, he forcibly placed the old man and his bag of money. There isn’t a doubt in my mind as to what he meant to do, and in part did. He meant to strangle the old man, chuck him overboard, sink him, and himself proceed down the river on the raft to some place where he could make a railroad connection and then light out for New Orleans and get a ship from there to — anywhere — as far as he could go. By the time the flood waters lifted the swollen body of the old man it would be, he figured, beyond recognition.
“I believe that no sooner had the raft floated a mile or so below the town from whence it started than Pete Granger strangled the old, helpless man, and flung him into the river. He thought he would sink. If he had simply flung him off the raft and let him drown the body would have gone under. But the old man was dead when cast into the river. No water got into his lungs. The body was, therefore, buoyant, and floated down with the flood, keeping pace with the raft.
“You will remember how the lightning flashed all night long. And in these flashes Pete Granger saw the body of the old man he had murdered following the raft. You can see what it did to his nerves. The two emptied whisky bottles will tell you that. Every flash of lightning showed him the corpse of his uncle relentlessly following him — the grim pursuit of a murderer by the corpse of his victim! It would shake the nerve of a man of steel, to say nothing of such a flabby creature as Pete Granger.
“But when the raft approached the bridge, Pete got an idea. He would tie the raft to a steep support of the bridge and let the corpse go floating onward. He would thus be rid of the horrid thing. So he drank his second quart of whisky and fell into a coma.
“Daylight awakened him. The putt-putt of the launches of the police searchers was beginning to sound around the bend in the river below the bridge.
“It was a good thing, he thought, that he had tied up the bridge. He was rid of that damned corpse! And then, to his horror, he found that he wasn’t!
“When he tied the raft it had swung partly around, with the result that the corpse was driven against it with the raft as a barrier to stop the body from floating onward on the flood tide. And Pete Granger saw the terrible thing staring at him, with the police boats not half a mile away!