“When he was released I sent an operative, Brown, to shadow him. He was careful enough until he left this city. He went on a freight train. So did Brown.
“But in Springfield Mr. Egan went into a lodging house as a tramp and emerged as a gentleman. My operative found a police officer and had him arrested before he could continue his travels. He had bought a ticket West.”
“Humph!” declared the commissioner. “But still we don’t know—”
“Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” interrupted Reilly, “but we do know. Sure, I’ve been only waitin’ for the medical examiner’s report before I told you how Stewart was killed.
“Two weeks ago, sir, he threatened to shoot Mr. Grafton Duncan if ever he come to the house an’ talked to him like that again. An’ his daughter, Miss Virginia, her that’s in love with Duncan, hears him. Sure, what does she do?
“She knows he always keeps a loaded gun in that desk. But when she was young she used to go hunting with her father. She was told once that if cartridges gets oil on them they’re useless.
“What does she do, I’m askin’ you, sir? She admits it now. One night she takes all the cartridges — them in the revolver, too — and soaks them in machine oil. Thinkin’ to spoil them all for shootin’ if ever her father should lose his head in anger, see? But oil don’t always spoil the cartridge, Mr. Commissioner.
“Sometimes it spoils the load, but not the primer. In the first cartridge Stewart fired last night, only the load was spoiled. The primer goes off, with just strength enough to push the bullet up into the barrel of the gun.
“Then the next cartridge, mind you — it wasn’t reached by the oil at all. It goes off full charge; and with another bullet already in the barrel, the only thing it can do it bursts the gun. It bursts a jagged sliver right out of it, through Stewart’s eye into his head. But he must uv been holdin’ the thing in a damn queer position to uv got it, even at that.”
The commissioner stared at him.
“But, man, if that theory’s true,” he bellowed, “what became of the bursted revolver? Did it evaporate?”
Reilly flushed crimson.
“No, Mr. Commissioner,” he replied mildly. “Bein’ made of good metal, it couldn’t evaporate. But I’m figurin’ that when the first party of police officers come into the room in the dark, one of them must uv struck his foot ag’in’ it accidentallike and kicked it right through that hole in the wall which goes into the chimney.
“I got to thinkin’ it over about supper time, sir — so I goes down cellar an’ digs open the base of the chimney. An’ sure, here’s the forty-five revolver, sir, with the jagged hole burst in it!”
The telephone jangled harshly. The commissioner took it up.
“Police commissioner’s office?”
“Commissioner talking!” he barked.
“This is McQueen, the medical examiner. That Stewart report you wanted — the bullet caliber, you know? Say — that wasn’t a bullet at all; it was a jagged piece of gun-barrel about one-fourth of an inch in width. Defective material, I should say—”
The commissioner sat glancing vacantly from Reilly to the signed statement on his desk. Gradually his frown disappeared.
“W-well—” he opined, “I don’t see but this lets Fraim out altogether, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, sure, sir,” replied Reilly instantly. “ ’Tis plain now that Mr. Fraim had nothin’ to do with it.”
“Reilly, on account of this piece of work you are in line for promotion!” said the police commissioner warmly.
A Drama of High Passions
by Robert W. Sneddon
No more revealing love letters have ever appeared in print than these between prof. Chantrelle and his lovely pupil, Miss Dyer
R. L. Stevenson was still in the city of Edinburgh, still divided between the profession of advocate and writer, when the trial of Eugene Marie Chantrelle for the murder of his wife, Elizabeth, was held in the Court of Justiciary. It did not occur to him, however, to seize upon its harrowing features and convert them into literature as “A Scottish Tragedy.”
Yet here was material ready to his hand, though not a tale of mystery unless it were the mystery of human depravity, not a tale of treasure unless it were the treasure of a woman’s love.
But master romancer in embryo as Stevenson was, he did not discern the romance of this case.
To him, no doubt, as to his bewigged brothers at the bar it was no more, no less than a sordid tragedy of domestic infelicity, a greedy murder for gain, a husband in pecuniary difficulties slaying his wife for her insurance money.
Lost upon him was that dramatic scene in court, which no melodramatic playwright so far as I know has ever dared to lift from the realms of real life onto the stage, of the child of these unhappy parents bearing witness against his father.
There was no appeal to him as a novelist in the revelation of the wild, untamed passion of a conventionally brought up girl, of her surrender to the fascinations of a man and a foreigner many years older than herself.
He did not see pathos in the girl wife clinging to the respectability of a marriage so soon to be loveless, for the sake of her children and to avoid against affronting that dour and stem Scots convention which she had once challenged.
To divorce in those days there was attached almost as much of a stigma as love without wedlock. It was not for honest women. It was almost out of the question for a married woman like Elizabeth Chantrelle.
The case would have delighted Balzac, great historian of that civil warfare between good and evil which rages within the human breast.
Teacher and Pupil
And to us, writer and reader, who are interested in all that concerns humanity, the depths to which it may descend, the heights of divine sacrifice to which it may rise, the case of the Chantrelles is full of drama.
Teachers of foreign languages in young ladies’ academies were then as a rule elderly and broken down foreigners eking out a miserable and tormented existence in a strange land. But the new teacher of French at Newington Academy was a surprise to the young ladies.
He was young, only thirty-two. He was handsome with his dark hair and fetching sideburns, his straight nose, flashing teeth, dancing eyes and vivacious gestures and speech. He had a delightful name, Eugene Marie Chantrelle.
He had the bearing of a soldier. Concealed beneath his sleeve was the scar of a saber cut received while fighting at the barricades as a Communist in Paris in 1851. He had left his country because a Napoleon sat on the throne.
And as he stood at his desk and surveyed the class one young girl drew a long breath and closed her eyes dreamily. Here was the hero of her dreams, the Prince Charming, the Young Chevalier.
Traitorous utterance as it may seem to my birthplace, Scotland though renowned for its gallant men is not renowned for the beauty or feminine charm of its women, stanch and true as they are.
You may spend a week in Edinburgh without seeing a single beauty to equal the many you may see within an hour in any American city. But when an Edinburgh beauty is encountered the man who is free of other loves is ready to swear her fair beyond compare.
And such a beauty was Elizabeth Cullen Dyer. Slender, of medium height, with hair of a golden red, expressive eyes, a complexion clear and painted by nature alone. She was only fourteen, budding into womanhood, when Chantrelle saw her first in his class.