The Bradmoor Murder (20 page)

The agents carrying the thing into effect had selected a night of storm, one of those nights of early winter when heavy snow was approaching. They had given an emergency signal. It would be easy to do that. Any one of them could have boarded the train as a passenger and given such a signal precisely as the conductor or officials in the rear of the train might have given it. And they could have called the engineer and fireman to the rear of the train, precisely as the conductor might have done. There was no difficulty about this part of the business.

There was no particular difficulty about the other part. The Italian colony operating the plant contained more than one competent engineer. Any one of them could have handled this engine, or any engine. They could cut it loose from the train and run it forward in the absence of the engineer and fireman, especially in a snowstorm in the night. And that was precisely what had been done.

Letington was not misled about it.

He knew what had happened, and when he found the entrances to the tunnel on either side of the shoulder of this mountain shot down
with explosives, as though there had been a landslide, he knew where the engine was.

In fact, the thing was all so simple that the man began to wonder at the circumlocutions of pretended magic that had accompanied it. That, however, would be the Latin mind. But to the hard Anglo-Saxon intelligence it seemed a sort of child's play.

What value, in fact, was to be obtained by all this extravaganza surrounding so evident and practical a fact?

Nevertheless, there was the situation to be met.

The great train could not go over the line, and the engine was sealed up in a tunnel. The work had been done thoroughly.

As I have said, the approaches to the tunnel looked as though they had been covered with a landslide. The persons who undertook this thing carried it out effectively. The shoulder of mountain on either side of the tunnel had been shot down to cover the entrance. It was a big undertaking to clear it, and besides the snow made the work more difficult. It continued to fall. It was one of those heavy
storms that bring winter into this north country.

Letington was very much concerned about this disaster, and he put everybody on inquisition, but of course he could discover nothing.

No one in the whole colony knew anything about it. They had seen nothing; heard nothing.

There was not a word, a gesture, or an incident that he could get hold of that could connect the affair with anybody.

Every man in the colony demonstrated that he was about his usual affairs at this hour. Everybody could establish an alibi. There was not a court in Christendom that could have found a clew to connect anybody in the colony with this affair. There was no one in this Italian settlement who would admit any connection with the affair, with the single exception of the Italian peasant woman. She admitted it.

She came into the office where Letington would be holding his courts of inquiry, and she would stand there and look at him with her strange, ironical smile.

She laughed at his explanation; at the effort
he was making; at his practical solution of the difficulty. He would never get his engine out from under the mountain. She had made that engine to disappear!

And this gave him further anxiety.

He took it to mean that the engine had been destroyed in the tunnel. He was now greatly alarmed. The safety of the train and the contract of the company to secure the daily safe passage over the line would bankrupt the enterprise, already heavily involved. The man saw complete disaster before him.

Of course there was only one thing to do, and that was to uncover the approaches to the tunnel and get the engine out as soon as he could.

Here he was met with a further concern. The Italian labor, which he must make use of, would perhaps either refuse to work or it would hinder his efforts in some way. This meant that the undertaking would go forward slowly; and in the meantime, if the engine were not already destroyed, it would be seriously injured. The tunnel would be damp; the delicate machinery of the engine would be injured by the rust.

At the best he could hope for, there would be great delay, a violation of the contract with the transcontinental line and injury to the machinery.

But could he, in fact, get it out?

Could he depend on the Italian labor for this service?

When he considered the whole matter he was firmly convinced that he could not. But in this conclusion he was conspicuously mistaken. He had not the slightest difficulty with the Italian laborers. They went to work at his direction to uncover the approaches to the tunnel. But the great snow delayed them, and after that was cleared away there were still tons of earth to be removed. It was like making a new cut into the shoulder of the mountain.

Letington was uncertain what to do.

He reported the accident briefly, by cable, to the English company. And then he made out a report of what had occurred. He had to send this report by mail. That would mean practically a month before he had a reply. The answer to his cable was to make no concession to the Italian colony; to put the tunnel in shape, and to go forward with the policy of eviction
as he had been instructed. The English company would make whatever adjustments were necessary with the transcontinental line with which they had their agreement of carriage.

Letington went forward under that instruction.

One of the logging engines pulled the coaches back to the junction with the main line, and they went around in another direction to the main line beyond. In the meantime Letington went forward with the work of opening the tunnel.

This work, as I have said, advanced slowly.

The heavy winter weather continued. Snow fell and had continually to be removed. The shoulder of the mountain at the opening of the tunnel was sheer; the earth kept slipping in. Letington put every man at his disposal to work on the thing, and although he had no reason to complain of either the individual effort or the unity of effort of his crew, the advance was slow.

Neither did he abandon his effort to discover who had been connected with the affair. Every morning at daylight he was with the crew at their work before the tunnel, and every night
he conducted his court of inquiry in the office. The men, the women of the colony were examined; even the children were interrogated; but it was entirely useless.

He never discovered anything.

Everyone professed utter ignorance in the affair. They were just as much astonished and amazed as he was. When he asked them what had become of the engine they merely shrugged their shoulders: How did they know?

And always the sturdy peasant woman was in the room with her strange, ironical smile. What was the use of all these inquiries or this questioning of men and children? She could tell him all about it. What had happened was precisely what she had warned him would happen. Why go forward with his ridiculous efforts to discover the author of this disaster? The author was before him. She had accomplished the thing. It was her work. She admitted it.

She had caused the engine to disappear.

And then she would add her Delphic sentence:

“You will never get your engine out from under the mountain.”

The thing got on the man's nerves, and finally he abandoned any further effort to discover who were the criminal agents in this affair. He closed the office at night, gave up his courts of inquiry and devoted himself to the effort of opening the tunnel.

I suppose a man never made a greater or more persistent effort than Letington did to drive a heading into the tunnel. He was, as I said, profoundly disturbed. He was not puzzled. He knew where the engine was, and the intent of the thing was all clearly before him. But the veiled threat in the continually repeated sentence of the Italian woman more and more impressed him.

“You will never get your engine out from under the mountain!”

That might have two or three meanings. It might mean that the engine was not under the mountain. But that phase of the oracular expression he could at once dismiss. There was no other place that it could be. It could not have been run on over the line. It would have been discovered, of course. The line in a southern direction connected with the transcontinental line ahead. It could not have been
taken in that direction. Nobody could conceal an immense passenger engine on a track. And there was no other place to take it.

When one stops to think about it, what could be more conspicuous than a passenger engine?

One could not put it in one's pocket like a bauble nor tuck it under a board. The thing was, of course, out of the question; besides, here were the ends of the tunnel shot down. This feature of the matter did not concern him. He dismissed it precisely as you or I would have dismissed it. But the thing that did concern him was whether the engine was destroyed.

“You will never get your engine out from under the mountain!”

That would mean either that he would never get the tunnel clear, and therefore could not get it out, or it meant that the engine was, in fact, destroyed, and therefore he would not get it out.

There was anxiety enough in either of these two alternatives.

Of course his first impression was that the woman meant that he would not be able to uncover the openings of the tunnel. She could
very well depend on that. He had only this Italian labor to use for the undertaking, and all of it, he could well assume, would be out of sympathy with his effort.

But, as I have said, he was mistaken in that.

He was looking for some indication of that intent all the time, but he never saw the slightest evidence of it. He had no complaint to make. He observed the men on day and night shifts. He thought, in the beginning, that when he went away from the work at night to sleep he would find in the morning that his night crew had done nothing or that it had done something to impair the work that had gone forward in the day. He was amazed when he found this was not true. The work of the crew at night had been as efficient and apparently as sincere in its efforts as the crew that he handled in the day.

I made a point of this because it had a bearing on the essentials of the story.

It puzzled Letington, and it puzzled me when Sir Godfrey Simon got a little farther on with his narrative. It puzzled me because in this extraordinary story we came continually, it seemed, in contact with things that were what
one would call out of reason or out of the usual experience of men. This was one of the features of it.

The whole story is out of reason.

It is out of the common experience of men. I suppose the profound impression it made on me was merely the cumulative effect of all these details bearing the same aspect. One does not get a great impression of wonder or unreality out of the influence of a single event. It is built up. It is made of a variety of smaller events. It is the converging point of a great mass of trivialities.

I don't give you that as my conclusion.

It was Sir Godfrey Simon's conclusion, and if you want to value the weight of it, think for a moment who he was, who he is to-day; the greatest alienist in England: that is to say, the greatest authority on the orderly procedure of the human mind, or would I better say the greatest authority on the disorderly procedure of the human mind?

At any rate, you understand what I mean.

I mean it was his business, his profession, to discriminate between the normal activities of the mind and those that were not normal. And
he stood above every man in his profession. He has not an equal in the world. Anybody who knows anything about that profession knows that Sir Godfrey Simon is at the head of it.

I think I told you all this in the beginning; that it was some time before I recognized the man when I came into that Dumas Inn with the Garden in Asia behind me. I did not know him for a while. I had a haunting memory of a face. And then, when he told me who he was, I remembered. I think I said that. Here before me at the table was Sir Godfrey Simon, the greatest alienist in England.

This digression is not a matter of inadvertence.

I put it here for a purpose: with a profound purpose, as you will realize in a moment. Carry it in your mind when you note the next thing that happened.

I pass over the long labor of driving a heading into the tunnel. But the point I wish to consider is that when the heading was finally driven,
the engine was not in the tunnel
!

I leave you to realize what Letington thought when he crawled through the opening of the heading and went with a torch to the other end.
The whole tunnel was clear. The headings were driven in practically at the same time. There was nothing in the tunnel!

The thing was absurd, incredible. It was fantastic. It was anything you wish to say. There is no language, in fact, to express the incredibility of such an event.

But there it was.

An immense passenger engine, weighing five hundred thousand pounds, and as big as a peasant's house, had simply disappeared, vanished!

The thing was a vast preposterous impossibility.

You cannot imagine what Letington's impressions were. He was like one before a reversal of the order of nature: trees that moved; animals that uttered words, or anything you like. There was no explanation! You can see that. What explanation could one give? Suppose you had been with him; suppose you had been, in fact, the man himself when you had crawled through the hole of one heading and gone with a torch along that single track, and crawled out into the air through the hole of the other heading, and found nothing in the
tunnel. What would you have thought about it?

But, as I have said, there it was!

A huge piece of machinery weighing five hundred thousand pounds had vanished at the will of a peasant woman burning a ball of aromatic grass!

Letington went back to the office of the company in the little village and sat down.

He did not know what to do.

He did not even know what to say to his English company; what to say to anybody. Who would believe this extraordinary thing? Heatherstone and his board of directors would come to one of two conclusions: that the man was as mad as a March hare or that he was in collusion with the Italians. One could not blame them. This is exactly what you would have thought. You might have thought, of course, that a simple-minded person had been tricked. But Letington was not a simpleminded person.