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82.3





THE MYSTERIES OF ANN


COPYRIGHT, 1925,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1925.
Printed in the United States of America


bis 2442
T
THE MYSTERIES OF ANN





C۴۲.
Wahr
2-12-26
167430
THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
EMMA HALE, a little old maid, something over
fifty, sat crocheting a doily, at a front window of
the old gray house where she and Ann, her sister,
twelve years older, lived alone together. This
story is not about Emma, though she is mentioned
first, but sometimes a story-teller makes it a point
of pride to get his scene setting into one sentence,
and so begin neatly. Emma was a high-shouldered
slenderness of a person with faded pink cheeks and
the twitching animation that had once been gayety.
She loved bright colors, and to-day she wore a pink
delaine that had been new, though of another cut, in
the days when the century itself was young, and she
looked smilingly content, not apprehensive, as she
often was, when her more eccentric sister gave her
cause for wonderment. Ann, sitting by the center
or
[1]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
table, bent over a book laid flat before her, and
Emma reflected that, although novel reading was
a foolish waste of time, it did nobody any real
harm, and kept Ann from the more conspicuous
oddities that made the neighbors talk. There you
have them, two New England old maids, tagged
with the accepted commonplaces of narrow shoul-
ders, worn fingers and hungry faces the prattling
newer psychology fastens upon as significant of
something or other, it hardly knows what; and yet
there was something in them perhaps a little differ-
ent from the accepted genus, something that was
human before it was "New England.”
Emma kept glancing up at Ann and then drop-
ping her eyes again to her work. She wished Ann
would speak. It was terrible dull to sit in the room
with anybody and not have 'em say a word for an
hour right on end. Finally she ventured the ques-
tion she thought a triumph of artifice: it was so
wide and wavering, like a signal flag, Ann could
vas S
O
[2]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
vas
answer or not as she chose and it was exact enough
to prove Emma knew perfectly well what she was
up to.
“What you doin??” enquired Emma. “Readin’?”
Ann looked up, keeping a forefinger on her place.
“I got to finish this,” she said absently. “I want
to take it back.”
Emma went on crocheting. She also kept on
thinking about Ann, how queer the neighbors
thought her and how queer she really was. She
probably looked queer, too, though Emma was
so used to her looks that she had to judge them
through the neighbors' eyes. She herself was
devoted to Ann, and it hurt her deeply, in a dull
inward way, to know her sister was being dis-
approved of or smiled at, either her pursuits or
her manners. Ann was always too busy with her
own varied concerns to spend even a fleeting
thought on public opinion, but her neighbors were
never tired of talking her over. The reason may
Tas
vas
eason
[3] :


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
have been that she throve cheerfully under the
elastic term, odd. One thing about her, was that
she never settled down to anything. Though so
advanced in life, she could not yet stay put. She
was always, with an energy those homekeeping
women failed to understand, “on the go.” After
she had, with a smashing sort of vigor, done her
share of the housework—the heavier part, because
Emma was not so strong-she was likely to be
seen striding off on her long legs to the small diver-
sions a country region affords. And these quests
of hers were strange, the women asserted, oftenest
the sittings of court in the county town, sometimes,
though with less enthusiasm, a flitting to camp
meeting, and more than once she had made a two
days’ excursion to see if a night-blooming cereus
would really bloom. The unknown, the untried,
these beckoned and beguiled her. She made no
discrimination, it seemed, in the legal cases she sat
through with an alert ear and furrowed brow, but
[4]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
IU-
Jers
attended large and small alike. Anybody, the
neighbors said, might be tempted to follow a mur-
der case, but there did seem to be something
coarsely like menfolks in sitting by while arson and
petty larceny were dealt with. Some of her tramps
were not on such easily comprehended quests as
even the lure of camp meeting and night-blooming
flowers. Often they led her through swamps
where sweet flag, cowslip and thoroughwort grew.
And yet she seldom came home with any gathered
spoils. And that in itself bore out their theory of
her. She was simply, they said, possessed to “go.”
And when it came to her regular business of dig-
ging ginseng to sell, she pressed farther afield, they
averred, than any woman ought to in these days
when 'most anybody would make way with you
for a silver thimble. Once Mrs. Sheriff Holt men-
tioned that possibility to Emma, in those very
words, and Emma, who had not a responsive
fancy, said perplexedly:
[s]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
as
“Ann ain't never had a silver thimble. Me
neither. I always wisht we had.”
But she earned more in one ginseng trip, it was
understood, than Emma by a month's crocheting.
Emma's round doilies the antique shop, three miles
out on the state road, bought for small sums and
sold to its motor customers, and so many did she
make that sometimes, when she had worked a long
afternoon stabbing her needle in and out, she saw
them whirling before her eyes. The two managed,
between them, to rub along, and if they ceased to
make good, in their different ways, it was con-
cluded that their old cousin, Jason Hale, might do
something for them: not, however, until the last
gasp, for Jason was “nigh.” He lived half a mile
up the road, in the meager comfort of a man re-
solved to spend no more than he must, and served
by a housekeeper, Selina Rule, a waif of a woman
with a dexterous housewifely hand and a twitch-
ing face, the latter not so much a result of nervous
[6]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
disorder as overflowing energy. She was much
younger than Jason, who was now over seventy,
but for some reason she had escaped the suspicion
attached to housekeeping females seeking to entrap
the solitary male. Perhaps that was because
of her self-effacement and absorption in her work;
perhaps nobody had so wild a fancy as to imagine
any woman as even calculatingly amorous of
Jason. She was devoted to his comfort, as she had
been to his wife's and, in spite of his niggardliness,
no such food as she set before him was seen in any
other house of the region. Her pies were of a
flakiness, her biscuits light with art, and yet Jason
bolted them without a word, and when they had
passed his lantern jaws he seemed to forget them
altogether, for he grew no fatter and was not even
concerned about the cost, knowing Selina to be a
careful woman who made an egg go a marvelous
way. But then, they said, Jason didn't care about
anything but his patch of peonies, and these he
TOM
as
[7]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
WO
worshiped, especially in bloom time. In Emma
and Ann, though they were his only kin, he showed
no interest, however the neighbors might hint that
the girls were getting on in years and poor as a
crow. The only approach he had made to them of
late was to urge Emma to sell him the wood lot
that stood in her name, for a price, so the all-
knowing surmised, a good many hundred dollars
below its worth. But what could you expect?
He'd always been ready to skin a flint, and a man
wasn't going to change when he was over seventy
and living on borrowed time. He had really
come round Emma, gone to see her one day when
Ann was off on one of her jaunts; he had then,
they understood, told Emma she could sell him
the wood lot or not as she pleased, but it was
now or never, and she had signed the agreement
he had ready for her and taken the money he paid
down to bind the bargain. Precious few dollars he
must have paid, so the neighbors guessed; that was
vas
[8]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
all it was likely to be, but Emma was caught,
just the same. So the talk ran on, and, when any
side issue failed, the collective mind would settle
upon the ever fruitful topic of the queerness of Ann.
It must be said again that Ann was very queer
indeed, and she looked her queerness to the full.
Her tanned leathery face wore an aspect of hav-
ing endured a long time, through buffetings of
wind and sun, and her brown eyes gazed out from
under puckered brows in an inquiring wonder.
She was as straight, the neighbors said, as a yard
o' pump water, and as thin as a rail. Children
were tolerant of her, all except the young Moreys,
who depended on stealing her melons when they
were on the road to ripeness, though Mirandy,
the youngest and most daring, did realize that
if there were no Ann there would be no melons
to steal and accepted her on that score. To young
men and women she was more or less funny.
They hardly ever referred to her, being a care-
[9]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
S
lessly accepted oddity, but she was always “old
Ann Hale.” There was no lack of kindness in
this; she merely seemed to them to have no vital
connection with life itself except as occupying
a very small spot in it which nobody else could
possibly want, and they could hardly imagine
she was ever anything but old. She would have
to be old, she was so different. There were her
trampings about when other women of her age
were knitting or making cake, and think how she
spent her evenings, poring over that everlasting
calico covered algebra, and doing sums on her old
school slate! They, boys and girls, had had to
be punished and kept in for not doing their algebra
right, and here was she, 'most old enough to die,
doing it for fun. And then they would yawn
and listen a moment to their elders talking over
Cousin Jason and Emma's wood lot, before their
minds sheered off to topics really important, like
the movies or secondhand Fords.
[ 10 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Again, on this September afternoon, Emma,
hungry for familiar speech, looked up at Ann,
and now Ann closed her book and smiled and
answered her. At least, she answered what she
knew to be in Emma's mind.
“Yes,” she said, “I'm goin' over to the libr’y.
I can return this now an' pick me out another
One."
She went to the back entry closet and took
down her old brown coat and the battered hat
which had been her father's and, to Emma's
mortification, served her spring and fall, slipped
into the coat, pulled the hat well over her eyes,
caught up the book and was away down tho
path into the road. Emma laid her crocheting
on her knee and watched her from the window,
with a sigh. There was always a distinct drop
in temperature when Ann went away. She could
charge the domestic atmosphere, without meaning
to she could raise a breeze. The afternoon went
[11]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
wa
WS
flat without her, and Emma kept on crocheting
with a lagging hand.
On this September afternoon, Mrs. Sheriff Holt,
who was the neighborhood news center, opened
the topic of the Hale wood lot to Annette Flem-
ing, whom she met upon the road. Annette
was the district school-teacher and much beloved.
She was the Hale girls' niece and very affectionate
toward them, as well as idly scornful over Aunt
Ann's especial activities, the mysterious mania
for algebraic idiocies, the unaccountable passion
for finding out by formula how many shingles
it would take for a barn of a given size or how
many apples a boy nine years old could eat between
now and sunset. Annette could teach algebra
to admiration, but a pretty sense of humor went
with her defiant wit, and few things seemed
to her more ridiculous than the assumption of
x and y. Now, standing there in the road with
the hot September sunshine touching up her
[ 12 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
as
eason
OW.
yellow hair and the dull tones of her blue dress,
she was as lovely as the day. She had all the
tanned rich sturdiness of the ripening season
as well as the promise of June. Mrs. Holt, portly,
upstanding, with fine pale hair and a network
of red veining over her nose, reflected that she
herself must in her girlhood have looked much
as Annette did now. She almost said so, though
in other words.
“I had an elegant suit o' hair, that color for
all the world,” she thought, “an' my cheeks were
as red as a rose.”
But what she did was to ask:
“How under the sun do you s'pose your Aunt
Emma come to let that lumber lot go for so much
less 'n it's worth?”
“I suppose,” said Annette, a little coldly,
“she didn't know how much 'twas worth.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Holt, indiscreetly pursuing
the question, “but there's your Aunt Ann. She's
[ 13 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
got a great headpiece, an’ Emma never says her
soul's her own if Ann tells her not to. Ann 'd
ought to look into it 'fore it goes any further.”
“I guess my aunts understand each other pretty
well, when it comes to that,” said Annette, with
dignity. “They don't need anybody to tell 'em.”
She went on along the road, not even, as Mrs.
Holt remarked, troubling herself to speak of the
hot weather or say good-by, and Mrs. Holt
stood looking after her, thinking how high she
held her head, and that, after all, the hair on
it was not more than a third as thick as hers had
been the day she met Hermie Holt. It was amaz-
ing, the hair Mrs. Holt had in those days, when
she sued Elmer Peterson for breach of promise
and came on Hermie Holt at camp meeting the
very next Sunday that ever was. Annette needn't
have taken her up so short for just showing an
interest. She had meant to go home and have
an early supper, but Annette's tight-lipped reserve
[ 14)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
saw
had nettled her, and she turned in at the Hale
sisters' gate. Emma was still at the front window,
her head bent more droopingly over her work,
now that Ann's going had left the room so large
and still. She heard the gate and looking, saw
Mrs. Holt, dropped her doily on the table and
hurried to the door. It was a marvel how the
belief in happiness, the love of life, surged up in
her with the slightest hint of change. Emma
had never ceased to find the world a wonderful
spot, full of varying hopes. She had never met
anything of an exciting nature face to face, but
she never budged from her conviction that, in
some form, there was a pot of gold and a rain-
bow's end. With the obstinacy of gentle natures,
she cherished her hungers and found in them the
promise of fruition.
Mrs. Holt, seeing her at the door, noted the
pathetic travesty of style in the pink delaine,
wondered how she could so forget her age and
SO
[15]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
CI-
humble condition, and mentally commented: “Poor
toad!” Emma looked to her as if she had come
out of the year one.
“I'm real glad to see you,” said Emma, in her
sprightly voice which was, through all its quaver-
ing, sincere. “Come right in.” She stepped
back into the front room where she had been
sitting. “You take this chair an' I'll take mine.
I've got my crochetin' all over the lot.”
Mrs. Holt sank into a chair with the relief of
heavy matter finding an adequate base.
“What you doin'?” she inquired. “More o'
them doilies? What under the sun folks want
so many of 'em for I never could make out.”
“Why, it's to set tumblers on an' preserve
dishes, I s’pose,” said Emma, taking up her work
and catching the fine thread over her worn fore-
finger. “Henry Griffin says he guesses all the
towns from here to the mountains must be carpeted
with my doilies, the way they sell.”
тер
[ 161


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Mrs. Holt leaned forward in her chair and
fixed a sharpened gaze. If she could not find
out the inner reasons for a lumber lot's going
for less than its worth, here was at least one
unsolved question to set her teeth into.
“That reminds me,” said she. “I dunno whether
Henry Griffin's goin' with Annette or not.”
Emma looked up at her in a sudden beseeching
apprehension. She knew Mrs. Sheriff Holt and
that she herself was no match for her. But Ann
had left her undefended, and she must do her
best.
“I dunno's I know either,” she replied, with
some dignity.
“Folks said,” Mrs. Holt pursued, her small
eyes gleaming in the ardor of the chase, "folks
said at the time you sold your wood lot Henry
Griffin was ready an’ willin' to take it off your
hands an' put in a steam sawmill an' see how
much he could make on it for him an' you, too.”
V
[ 17 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Emma found her hands trembling. She dropped
a stitch and sought for it frowningly.
“I wish,” she said, under her breath, “folks
would let me alone about that wood lot. Seems
if they were possessed to make a handle of it.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Holt reasonably, “I can't
help thinkin' Henry'd have done the best he could
for you, goin' with Annette so—I s'pose he is
goin' with her?—an' it's plain to be seen you
bit your own nose right off sellin' it to your Cousin
Jason the way you did”—
"I ain't sold it,” said Emma, goaded into a
weak defiance. “Not so to speak. The deed
ain't passed, an' that land stan's in my name same's
it has for the last fifteen year.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Holt, with her air of trium-
phant cross-examination, “why ain't it passed?
You've signed an agreement an’all, an' there's
money been paid over, an' the deed's only a matter
o'time. If the deed ain't made out, why ain't
S-
[ 18 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
it, when it's got to be an’ might as well be fust
as last?"
“I'll tell you why it ain't,” said Emma, respond-
ing to the spur. “Ann was kinder surprised when
she found out what I'd done, an' when Cousin
Jason come an' hounded me on about passin' the
deed I kinder broke down an' had to have camphire
an' Ann told him to leave the house an' he ain't
been in sence.”
“You don't think,” said Mrs. Holt, in high
delight over these new revelations and seeing
herself spreading them forthwith to great ac-
claim, "you don't think he's give it up?"
“No, I don't,” said Emma. “That ain't Cousin
Jason, givin' anything up. You know that as
well as I do. Ann said so herself. She said 'twas
the camphire bottle that finished him. She said
'twas my breakin' down an’ he'd had enough o’
that to home, 'fore his wife died, an' it kinder got
on his nerves. O forever! there's Ann."
[19]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
At that moment the front door opened and
Ann stepped in. Emma could have cried aloud
in joy. Her deliverer! her defender! Ann would
know what to say. But Ann at the moment
seemed disinclined to say anything. She was,
for some reason not yet apparent, absorbed in
thoughts of her own.
“How do?" she said to the visitor, with a per-
functory nod. “Nice day, ain't it?”
Without stopping to take off her coat, she
stepped to a card table at the side of the room and
laid down three books she had brought. They
were covered with brown paper darkened and
shiny through use. Now she did slip off her
coat, but she paused on the way to hang it up
when Mrs. Holt enquired curiously:
“Ann, what under the sun you readin', these
days? Hermie spoke of it only yesterday. “There
goes Ann Hale,' says he, ‘passel o’ books under
her arm. She's been on the road the whole durin'
TATT
[ 20 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
.
time sence the new lib’ry was opened. What's
she readin' of?' says he. 'Suthin' about algebra,
I s’pose.” There was contempt in her tone when
she said "algebra,” evidently Hermie's contempt
for the unknown strengthened by what she herself
might reasonably feel.
But Ann was not offended. She paused by
the door, her old brown coat over her arm and
the soft hat now at a rakish angle, for she had
put up a hand to take it off and thought better
of it, remembering her hair was a crow's nest, and
how Emma hated to have her look so unkempt
before a neighbor. She liked to please Emma,
when she could, in these outward things that
seemed to her so foolish, though often she forgot
it when the need came. She stood there, evidently
considering what Mrs. Holt said and finding the
matter echoing in her own mind.
“Why,” she began, “fust time I went, I found a
book there—only by accident I found it—an' I
[21]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
picked it up an' turned a page or two an' I couldn't
lay it down.”
Mrs. Holt gazed from one sister to the other
in a growing curiosity. Ann, she saw, was deeply
affected, and so was Emma, though in a different
way. Emma was crocheting with a savage energy,
if a creature so neutral could be moved by vin-
dictive passion, and her cheeks were deeply red.
Her hands trembled at their darting strokes and
the tears came into her eyes.
“What was it?” Mrs. Holt asked curiously.
“Was't that book that was mentioned Sunday
about Foreign Missions an' the Far East?”
“No,” said Ann, still thinking her own thoughts
and answering from the surface of them. “'Twas
about a man that was found settin' murdered in
his chair right to home, an' how they made up
their minds who done it.”
“Forever!” said Mrs. Holt, in amazement.
“What they call a mystery story. They advertise
R
[ 22 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
'em so. I don't see what there was about that
to make such a handle of. None o' them books
are true.”
“'Twas terrible interestin',” said Ann, with
that look of intense speculation still on her face.
“I took it so's to read the rest of it”—
“An’ set up half the night till ’twas finished,”
said Emma resentfully. “I'd wake up an' see the
light goin' an' think somebody's breakin' in or Ann
was took with suthin', an' so it's been ever sence."
“You don't mean,” said Mrs. Holt, bending
her amazed look on Ann, “you've took to that
kind o' trash for a reg’lar diet?”
“There's lots o' books same kind as that is,”
said Ann, as if out of a dream. “Some of 'em
ain't quite so interestin' an' some of 'em's more.
An' they're all about folks that are murdered or
you think they be, or folks that's shut up or laid
by the heels somehow, an' how the knowin'
ones trap the guilty ones an' find 'em out.”
[ 23 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“It's nothin' but wrongdoin', when it comes to
that,” said Mrs. Holt. Her lips tightened until
they made no more than a scar across her plump
face. “If you call that good for anybody to be
studyin' of, day in an' day out, I don't, that's all.”
“Oh,” said Ann, eagerly ready to put her right,
“it ain't what's done that's so interestin'. It's
how they find it out."
Emma's fingers were trembling so that she
could not hold her needle to advantage, and let
her hands drop in her lap.
“An’so it's been ever sence,” she repeated,
beginning to rock back and forth in quick staccato
strokes. “An’if anybody's goin' to sell anything-
whether it's a piece o' crochet or a piece o' timber
land—they've got to make up their minds them-
selves, because they can't get a word o' counsel,
folks are so taken up tryin' to study into ways o'
findin' out a murder in a book.”
She had told her secret. She knew she had,
[ 24 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
if you kill anybody right off quick when you're
mad an' ain't never thought of it before, you'd
do it all sorts o’ ways. I shouldn't be surprised
at that. But when you've got an enemy an'
want to pay him back for suthin' or he's made a
will an' you want to inherit—why, I can't for
my life see why you don't plan it out as neat as
you'd go about any other job, an' when they
tried to ketch you they might whistle for 't.”
Mrs. Holt’s pale eyes were staring. Emma,
chiefly occupied now in thinking how foolish
she had been to give her little secret away, was
crocheting tearfully. She was used to Ann's
wild speculations. Sometimes, knowing she could
find no answer Ann would consider seriously,
she hardly listened. But this was different.
“Why, Ann Hale,” said Mrs. Holt, “you don't
mean you set down an' mull over ways o' makin'
'way with your fellar men? Seems to me that
comes pretty nigh breakin' the law.”
[ 26 ]


: THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“I've thought an' thought,” said Ann abstract-
edly, “how ’twould be if there was anybody I
had a grudge ag’inst an' I wanted to git 'em
out o' the way. I bet,” she concluded, in a flash
of triumphant self-approval, “I could carry it
through without makin' any such halfway job
of it. I could do it as neat as wax.” Then she
smiled a little and looked from one to the other
in a half shamefaced deprecation. “Fact is,”
said she, “I did se' down last night after Emma'd
poked off to bed an' begun to plan one out.”
If she wanted to produce an effect she had
done it. There could be no doubt about that.
In the two faces bent upon her there was nothing
less than horror. Ann read it so and tried to
assuage it.
“But I didn't get very fur,” said she. “Trouble
was, I couldn't think up anybody I wanted to
git out o’ the way, an' whenever I'd try to, it
seemed so funny I couldn't git nowhere.”
as
[ 27 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Funny! Puttin' your fellar creatur's out o’
the world funny! Well, Ann Hale, I must say it
beats me.”
“I thought o' one an'another,” said Ann,
relishing her own grotesque humor. “I thought
o’you, Mis’ Holt—"
“Me?” echoed Mrs. Holt, half rising from her
chair. “Why, I dunno but I'm ’most afraid o’you.”
“An' then I thought how you come over an’
set up nights when Emma had the lung fever,"
said Ann, “an' I says to myself, "Well, she's a
good soul, come to git right down to 't, an'
try as I would I couldn't see myself puttin' you
out o' the way.”
But now Emma awoke to the significance of
Mrs. Holt's emotion. She spoke with unwonted
vehemence.
“Ann, for heaven's sake don't you let Mis'
Holt think you're out o' your head. Here she's
come in to see how Cousin Jason got round me
[ 28 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
about the lumber lot, an' you're as much as tellin'
her if I'm half-witted you're worse. Next you
know the Sheriff'll be round here an’ we shall
both be shut up.”
“Cousin Jason!” cried Ann, in a tone of triumph.
“He's the very one.”
"The very one!" echoed Mrs. Holt, in augmented
horror. “The one for you to put out o’the way?
an' your own cousin, too!”
“Why,” said Ann, “don't you see?” She
had the patience of the mind bemused by one
idea. “The way I'm goin' to plan it out is how
I'd do it if I was put to't to do such a thing. Now
see here. I do the deed. An' I'm goin' to be hauled
up for it, ain't I? Everybody's goin' to pitch
upon me. An' the reason they do it is because
I'd got somethin' ag’inst him. An’ I have, ain't
I? He's bejuggled Emma an' made her put her
name to suthin' sayin' she'll sell her wood lot.
They wouldn't pitch on her—"
[ 29 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“No. I guess they wouldn't,” said Mrs. Holt
scathingly. “Emma never'd hurt a fly.”
“But,” continued Ann triumphantly, “ they
would on me. I'm a kind of a queer dick an' they
know it. Nobody can foretell what I'd do. I'm
goin' to set it all down 'fore I'm a minute older.”
Her coat had slipped to the floor and, with her
hat still further awry from an unconsidered push
she had given it in the effort of thought, she rose,
went to the old-fashioned desk in the corner and
took from it a worn account book and a pencil.
“Here's the book father kep’ his butter an' eggs
in,” she said absorbedly. “There's two or three
leaves at the back. I don't want to use my slate,
things git rubbed out so, an' this'll be consid’able
of a job. There!” She sat down with the book
on her knee and her pencil poised in air. “Now
fust thing I'd put in the story would be how I
found out Cousin Jason come round Emma an’
made her sign an agreement to sell the lot, an'
es
[30)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Tas
was T
how I went an' talked it over with him an' told
him it couldn't stand an' beseeched him to give
me the paper back, an' how he ta’nted me with
havin' no more sense than she had, an' I got mad
an’ we had it back an' forth an' Seliny Rule was
in the next room stirrin' up bread an' she heard it.”
Now she was writing busily and Mrs. Holt
stared at her in a complete amaze.
“Why, Ann Hale,” said she, “you ain't been
through any such thing as that, have you? Been
an’ asked Jason to give it up?"
“No, no,” said Ann, writing laboriously.
“There! here's how it stands, so far. Words. We
had words. Seliny Rule, witness. I'll be but-
tered,” said she, with a new access of inventive-
ness, "if I don't have him take out the agreement
you signed, Emma, an' shake it in my face, an'
me try to snatch it an’ when I can't I'm so mad
I go over afterwards an' git in through the shed
door-they're always terrible careless about lockin'
[31]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
that door that goes into the barn-an' he'll come
on me an' that's when it'll be done."
Emma had laid aside her work in its little oval
basket, as if she expected to find no further use
for it. She stared at her sister with wild eyes from
a blanched face. Mrs. Holt also stared. But she
was not without words.
“Ann Hale,” said she, “the best that can be
said for you is that you're out o’your head.”
Ann was not listening. Her brow was wrinkled
in despair.
“But I'm doin' what all the rest of 'em do,”
she cried. “I'm havin' the murder committed
'fore it's half planned out, an' that's jest what
I'm tryin' to prove anybody needn't do. No!
look here! this is what I'll do. I'll git in an' steal
the agreement, an' I won't have Jason find me,
but I'll have him find out the agreement's gone.
Then I'll have him come over here, mad as a hor-
net, an' call me out into the shed—my sakes!”
[ 32 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
she paused to cry despairingly, herself taken aback
by the consequences she had evoked, “how's
anybody goin' to make way with anybody right
under their own roof, so to speak, an' then git
'em off the premises 'fore they're found?”
“You better think it over,” said Emma wither-
ingly, and with a rush of emphasis so unexpected
that Mrs. Holt glanced at her in surprise. “You
keep such actions off these premises, that's what
you do, unless you want me to jump into the well.”
“The well!” echoed Ann musingly. “I wisht
we had an old well. I could tole him out there
an’ somehow or another see to it he fell in.” For
a moment she pondered while the others stared.
Then a new look flamed into her face and eased
all its lines to a tranquil satisfaction. “I've got
it,” said she. “Easy as Tilly! Don't you know
that big door in Jason's upper story barn where
he stan's by the hour lookin' down on his pinies
there below?"
[33]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Yes,” said Emma unwillingly, as if testimony
even on so small point might have consequences
she could not foresee. “He'll stan’ there, off
’n’ on, some part o' the day, leanin' on that bar
acrost the doorway.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Holt impulsively, testifying
she knew not why, “to ease his lame foot.”
“That bar,” said Ann, “could be loosened.
Anybody could take a screw-driver in their pocket
an’ ease up the screws at both ends, an' he'd lean
on it heavier 'n' heavier. The more his foot ached
the heavier he'd lean, till all of a sudden 'twould
break under him. It's a twenty foot drop, an'
besides, he's got a weak heart. Seliny told me
so."
Mrs. Holt had been staring at her during this
exposition as if she had become suddenly aware
of some high-powered ghost, the Danish King's
or one of the brood materialized by the witches'
caldron. Now she rose ponderously.
[34]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Well,” said she, “I give up beat. I'm goin'
home.”
She stood a moment swaying to get her poise,
and Emma, standing, waited for her and then
followed her tremulously to the door. Emma
had hoped that when they were out of hearing
she might offer something in extenuation of Ann.
But what could she say? not that she implored
Mrs. Holt to refrain from spreading the tale of
Ann's aberrations. That would be a deeper
humiliation than leaving a bad matter to work
itself out as it might.
“You come up when you feel to,” she remarked
weakly, and Mrs. Holt responded with the usual
formula:
“Yes. You come down.”
Then Emma closed the door and returned to
the sitting-room where Ann sat in cataleptic
stillness, her pencil raised. Her face still glowed
with delight in a problem solved. Emma stood
W
usua
[ 35 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
and looked at her. Was this her sister, sufficiently
unaccountable before, but now an avowed crim-
inal—at least in thought?
"I guess,” said Ann, glancing at her and smil-
ing, as if assured of sympathetic agreement, “that's
the best way, the one I said.”
“Ann,” said Emma piercingly, as if she recalled
her to mere sanity, “don't you tell me you're
plannin' to make way with Cousin Jason Hale.”
“Why, no,” said Ann, still patiently. “Course
I ain't. Only it's like doin' a sum. Don't you see
'tis? I never knew such stories were made up
afore, but now I see they be I'm possessed to find
out if I can't do it myself an' kind of improve on
'em, so to speak. For you mark my words, Emma
Hale, if anybody's goin' to kill anybody an' has
time enough to plan it beforehand, there's no
need o’ bein' found out. Now I'm goin' to clap
on my coat an' take father's old screw-driver an'
go up an' see how tight them screws be.”
C
C
[36]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“My soul an’ body!” said Emma, clasping her
little worn hands. “Then you be goin' to loosen
that bar so's Cousin Jason'll fall down there an’
break his neck?”
“Why, no,” said Ann, still in unmoved patience.
“But I've got to see if anybody could do it, ain't
I? Ain't I got to prove my sum? I've got to test
it every step as I go along, an' Jason's gone to
the street this afternoon. I met him an' Seliny."
She went through the kitchen and into the shed
and Emma heard her bang the lid of the chest
where their father had kept his tools. She had
taken father's old screw-driver, and Emma had
no imagination to assure her Ann was merely
confirming her plot, from point to point. Even
Ann’s assertion showed vaguely, through a haze.
To her mind, Ann was simply going to loosen the
screws and let Cousin Jason down on the stones
in the peony patch. Emma ran to the window
to watch her through the gathering dusk and
[37]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
e
then turned away again. She could not bear to
see that hurrying form, striding with what capable
dignity she knew, on its way to kill Cousin Jason.
She retreated to the middle of the floor and stood
there with clasped hands, listening for Ann's
return. Afterward she thought she prayed. As
if her prayer were answered without delay, there
came steps on the path and the front door opened.
Her heart beating loudly, she turned to meet her
sister. Two persons entered, Annette and Henry
Griffin. Henry was a tall, brown fellow, with
a grave and steady manner. He lingered behind
Annette, to let her talk, but his brows wrinkled
slightly as if he were in doubt of the wisdom of
her speaking at all. Annette was, Emma saw
with discouragement, high as ninety, and Emma
had, she helplessly reflected, enough to bear, this
day, without that.
Annette paused in the doorway of the sitting-
room. She wore her tight motor cap and the
[38]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
bright blue sat charmingly on her yellow hair.
Emma understood that Henry had been taking
her for a ride in his old Ford, and, bent though
her mind was upon Ann, she had an eye to her
besetting wonder why Henry Griffin didn't ask
Annette to marry him or stop the neighbors'
mouths by letting her alone. Yet she thought
she knew, as perhaps the neighbors also did.
Henry was alone in the world, and he had a proud
determination to make his own way. He was
not going to pledge himself to anything, even to
a home for Annette.
“Aunt Emma,” said Annette imperiously,
“what's Aunt Ann gone over to Cousin Jason's
for?"
Emma, with an unaffected pathos, wrung her
hands, à gesture suited to this homely stage.
“Don't you ask me,” she returned. “She'll
be back along in a minute. You wait an' ask her.”
“She was going into the upper barn by the
was
[39]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
the lumber lot. The whole neighborhood would
be told how much Henry Griffin wanted it to
further his marriage with Annette Fleming, and
because he hadn't been smart enough to speak,
Jason Hale had stepped in and snatched away
the bargain from under his nose. “There's a good
deal more to it than that. Aunt Emma, what's
she gone over there for?”
"Oh,” said Emma, torpid with bewilderment
over Ann and the things that might be said and
the things that would upset the apple cart, “she's
goin' to fix it so’s to kill your Cousin Jason.”
“Kill Cousin Jason? ” Annette repeated, and
Emma noted, with a weary effort at concentration,
how her brows and Henry's wrinkled up just
alike, as they stared at her. “How do you mean
kill him?"
“Why,” said Emma, “she's goin' to see if she
could, if so be she wanted to, same as 'tis in them
books she reads the whole durin' time.”
[ 41 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
OT
“Trash!” said Annette, turning briefly to Henry.
“You've seen her coming away from the library
with two at a time, and she sits up half the night
over 'em and next day carries ’em back for more.”
“I don't see what you're aimin' to prove,"
said Henry painfully. All his mental processes
beyond the line of his daily work were tortuous
and slow. “She ain't out of her head, is she?”
“No, I guess not,” said Emma wearily. “No
more’n she ever was, when it comes to that. But
she seems to think there's better ways o' killin'
folks than anybody's tried, so fur, an’ she's pos-
sessed to see what they be.”
“Well,” said Annette, turning to Henry with
the conclusive air the children of District Number
Three found so convincing, “there's one sure thing.
You and I've just got to go over to Cousin Jason's
and get her away from there, whether or no.
Come along. Aunt Emma, we'll bring her home
in the car.”
[ 42 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
She turned, with one of her decisive motions,
and Henry, bent, hat in hand, followed her. When
Henry had on his best clothes, they subdued him
to the air of a country funeral.
Emma stood listening while they chugged away
and it seemed to her life had never been more
trying. Ann, in spite of her eccentricities, un-
avoidable as the freaks of the weather, was her
mainstay and her strength, and here had Ann,
her mental habit inexplicably changed by foolish
books from the library, presumably gone out of
her head. It was enough to make a body faint
to think of. She felt wabbly inside and her whole
being turned toward a cup of tea. Besides, it
was supper time. She would set the table and
make the tea at once. But when she had spread
the cloth and had the kettle boiling, there was
again a step in the porch and Ann opened the
door and came in, shut it behind her and threw
off her hat and coat. Emma, whose heart had
as
[ 43 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
taken on its usual placid pace while she steadied
herself by accustomed tasks, found it again pump-
ing hard. She looked furtively at Ann, to see
if she had resumed her ordinary aspect. She was
not reassured. Ann was still frowning in thought,
still completely absorbed. She sat down at the
desk, took out her little book and pencil and,
while she pondered, tapped her foot impatiently.
“Supper's 'most ready,” Emma ventured.
“I've cut us a slice o' that ham.”
This roused her sister, but not to the considera-
tion of ham.
“Emma,” said she, “it's harder 'n I thought.”
“What is?” asked Emma.
“Makin' up them stories. An' killin' anybody,
when it comes to that. You go right along as
slick as a mice an' then you're tripped up. I dunno
how 'tis, but it's so."
Apparently Ann, in her own person, was meet-
ing Nemesis, of whom she had never heard.
V
[ 44 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
the shed run an' lo’ye! the kitchen door was open,
same's it always is. An' I went in an' there wa’n't
a soul there except the cat layin' on the old lounge,
an' I went along into the settin' room an' up to
the desk”—
“My soul!” cried Emma, “you ain't been
meddlin' with Cousin Jason's desk? Why, that's
breakin' an' enterin. I dunno what anybody
might do to you.”
“I opened all the little drawers,” said Ann,
"an’ the paper wa’n’t there. An' then I remem-
bered one o' the drawers wa’n’t so deep as the
rest; don't you remember that was gran’ther's
desk an’ he used to show us that little cubby
hole an’ sometimes we'd find a peppermint there
or a mite o' flag root? Well, I pulled it out an'
there in the cubby hole was a bundle o' papers,
an’ I took 'em an' run over 'em an', as I'm a livin'
woman, there was that paper, your name on it,
an' witnessed an' all.”
[ 46 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
ment dies, too. So I set there thinkin' it over an'
I thought should I have Cousin Jason come in
an' find me rummagin' in his desk an' we'd have
words an' I'd fling the screw-driver at him? You
know I had father's screw-driver in my hand.
But somehow I didn't want to do that. Fust
place, Seliny'd be with him; but I guess the real
reason was the room looked so peaceable, the
cat asleep there an' all, an' I didn't want to bring
any such hurrah boys into it.”
“There!” cried Emma, plucking up spirit under
the first gleam of hope that afternoon, “you see
what awful things they be you've got into your
head. Now le's have our tea."
"So I got up an’ went along out to the barn,”
said Ann, “an' I says to myself, “I'll see if that
bar acrost the door's screwed on tight an’ whether
you could loosen the screws so they'd give way
if anybody leaned his weight on it.' An' what
do you s'pose I found?”
TS
CC
[ 48 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
SI
u was
“I s'pose,” said Emma bleakly, at last carry-
ing the teapot to the table, “I s'pose you met
Cousin Jason face to face, an' he asked you what
under the sun you was doin' prowlin' round his
barn.”
“No, I didn't,” said Ann. “I found the bar
wa’n't screwed in. 'Twas nailed with two o'
them big spikes same as there is out in father's
nail box, an' what to do then I didn't know.
It's an easy matter to loosen up a screw, but
how's anybody goin' to meddle with a spike o'
that length an' not have it known? An' I stood
a spell an' mulled over it, an' then I thought I
heard that rattlin' spoke in Cousin Jason's wheel
comin' over the hill, an' I put for home.”
Now she did perhaps catch the fragrance of the
tea and, laying her note-book aside, sat down at
the table. They ate and drank in silence and
finally Emma, heartened by her tea, ventured a
didactic word.
[ 491


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Well, now you've carried out what you wanted
to,” she said, “an' you found 'twas a kind of a
fool's arrant, I hope you'll settle down an' stop
readin' them books for a while an’ put your mind
on your work.”
Ann cut her ham as if she held a poniard and
saw herself dealing with a world of enemies, but
she said nothing.
“Ann,” Emma ventured again after a silence,
still more emboldened by her second cup which
was stronger than the first, “you know the folks
that make up them mystery books?”
“Yes,” said Ann hopefully. It seemed, for the
moment, as if Emma might really be taking an
interest.
“Well,” said Emma, timidly now, for she was
always shy before Ann's foolish yet impressive
mentality, “when they've made up a mystery,
you don't s'pose they go round killin' folks an'
puttin' 'em in wells an’ the like o' that, to see if
as
[50]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
'twas goin' to work out right, do you? Seems to
me that would be a pretty go-round, an' they'd
find themselves in jail.”
“That's it,” Ann responded, in triumph. “They
make up things an' they don't prove 'em, an'
that's why some of 'em are such folderol. They
wouldn't prove.”
“There!” said Emma, rising from the table
and judiciously seeking to recall her sister to the
peaceful atmosphere incident to their evening
meal. “We've had a good cup o' tea an’ we can
set down an' rest us up 'fore we go to bed. I'll
do the dishes an' you put away father's screw-
driver, so's not to have it knockin' round, an'
take your slate an' pencil an do a sum. I guess
you can find a sum to do if you only put your
mind on it.”
She had not recommended putting away the
screw-driver in the interest of order, but because
it seemed wiser not to have it lying about to re-
[SI]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
mind Ann of her foolish adventure, and now she
paused in carrying the cups to the sink, arrested
by Ann's look of dismay.
“Why,” said Ann. “Why!” She went to
her coat where it hung by the entry door, plunged
her hand into one pocket after another and then
turned to her sister in the same wild disorder.
“You could,” said Ann, “knock me down with
a feather. It's all true.”
“What's true?” asked Emma.
“It's so,” Ann reiterated. “When you're plan-
nin' a crime, you think you'll be terrible smart
an' cover up your tracks. But there's suthin'
ag’inst you, suthin' you don't take note of. It's
so in the books, but I thought 'twa’n’t common
sense to have it so in life. But what do you s’pose
I've done?”
“I dunno,” said Emma. She felt her hands
trembling and set the two cups down softly on
the table again. She could not guess what shock
[52]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
ve
sense
Ann might still have in store for her, and the
cups were the luster she always had a sense of
sin in using every day. “You ain't been an'
killed Cousin Jason after all?”
“No,” said Ann grimly, “but I've done what's
harder to explain. I've left father's screw-driver
in the settin' room on Cousin Jason's desk.”
The significance of this did not strike Emma
at once. She took up the cups again and car-
ried them to the sink with a steadier hand.
“'Twas kinder careless,” said she, “but there's
no harm done. All you've got to do is to go over
there tomorrer an' tell Seliny you left it an' say
you want it back ag’in. Father never liked to
have his tools layin' round, an' you can tell her
so.”
“I don't care nothin' about the screw-driver,”
said Ann, “nor Seliny, nor Cousin Jason neither,
if he's the one that finds it. Don't you see, Emma
Hale, it's my story I care about. I've done jest
[53]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
with it because he'll have fell out the barn door
an' he'll be dead.”
Now indeed was Emma quite distraught.
“Then,” said she, “after all this go-round an’
sayin' it's only for a story in a book, you have
loosened up that bar on the door an' you're waitin'
to hear Cousin Jason's fell out an' killed himself.
My suz! I wish I never'd lived to see this day.”
But Ann's patience did not fail her.
“No, no, Emma,” said she. “Cousin Jason's
in the story, now, same as I be. We're actin' it
out together. He don't know it, but so 'tis. An'
so fur as the story's concerned, I've left the screw-
driver where 'twill be evidence ag’inst me, an’
as for him, he's fell out o' the winder an' there's
an end o' him.”
Emma's feet had never found the path to the
land of licensed fancy which is imagination, and
she could only repeat hopelessly:
“There 'tis. Jest what I said. You've willed
ts ។


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
him to die, an' if you ain't killed him who has?
that's what I want to know!”
Ann had neither eyes nor ears for her. She had
sat down by the table with her little book, and
was frowningly inserting a word here and there
as the involutions of the plot led her this way and
that. Once only did she speak, and that absently.
“I s'pose,” said she, “the thing to do when I
found the bar wa’n’t screwed on was to come
home an' git a fine saw-father had a prunin'
saw, you know, that wa’n’t much wider ’n your
hand. Kind of a nice little saw 'twas. Every-
body's possessed to borrer it.”
“Well,” said Emma, in a conclusive way of
setting that matter, at least, to rest. “The saw's
borrered now an' ain't never been brought home.”
“I know that,” said Ann judicially, “but don't
I know who borrered it an' where it's kept? An’
couldn't I ha’ took it an' sawed the bar 'most
through? Then I could ha' heard Cousin Jason
[56]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Sa
W
comin' an? slipped the saw down behind them
old boards side o' the door, an never see any
way to come back an' git it. An' he'd ha’ fell,
an' pitch-poled down an’ the saw'd ha' been dis-
covered an' they'd ha’ laid it all to me.”
But by this time Emma found a bitter silence
her only refuge, and at nine o'clock she took her
way to bed, leaving Ann still frowning over the
little book.
In the morning Ann was haggard and hollow-
eyed, but Emma found her manner slightly more
cheerful. Either a solution had come to her in the
night or she had given up the foolish business,
and Emma felt a momentary relief. After break-
fast Ann went at the household tasks with a whirl-
wind velocity and this, Emma knew of old, was
to get them out of the way in order that she might
settle herself to childish occupations. And so
it proved. When the dishes were washed and
the kitchen swept, Ann heaved a sigh of satisfac-
[57]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
esaw
a
Tas
tion and sat down to her little book. Emma
took her crochet work from the oval basket and
also sat. She gave a glance about the orderly
room, a glance full of pride in its neat serenity.
Unless Ann had a spell of some sort, connected
with saws and screw-drivers and murdered cousins,
she foresaw a very pleasant day. And it was a
pleasant day, though a quiet one. Ann wrote
in her little book, bit her pencil, frowned at the
wall and once went out and strode up and down
the yard, like one possessed, as Emma put it to
herself, though only as an aid to lagging thought.
The evening also was colored by the little book,
and Emma went to bed rather dolefully for lack
of companionship, but hoping daylight would
bring a change. And when, next day, after they
had finished breakfast and begun their chores,
the door was flung open and Annette burst in,
the change was upon them. The sisters, startled,
looked up at Annette, and she made no attempt
[58]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
to reassure them. She seemed to be beside herself.
Emma was the first to voice the strangeness of
seeing her abroad at half-past eight in the morning,
when she should have been in school.
“Ain't there no session?" she asked. “This
ain't Saturday, is it?”
Annette stood there before them, blowzy of
disordered hair and pink from running. Her
lips trembled so that her teeth chattered upon
he words.
“Yes,” said she, “I s'pose there'll be school,
il' ever I'm there to open it. But I don't know as
I shall be, such a day as this—” Here she seemed
to bite upon the words and stopped, and Emma
saw her hands clench with all their force, as if
she found them trembling and was angrily deter-
mined to be calm. And now Emma knew there
was something very much the matter. She laid
her crochet work in the oval basket and got up,
trembling.
Saw
as
[59]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
An alert expression, indeed a look almost of
delight ran over Ann's face and waked upon it a
vividness her niece was accustomed to see there
after the solving of some stiff algebraic problem
or, as it had happened perhaps twice in the tran-
quil neighborhood life, when Ann came home
from court and reported a judge's summing up.
But Ann was not going to be communicative
without reason.
“Tain't for me to tell what I done,” she re-
marked, adding, with a sly intelligence, “Don't
ye know what they tell ye? “Whatever you say
may be used ag'inst ye.”
“O, my soul!” said Annette. It almost seemed
as if, following Aunt Emma, she might groan.
“I knew it. I could have taken my oath that's
just what you'd say. Has Aunt Emma told you?
Did she tell you how Henry and I came here that
day to see what you'd gone over to Cousin Jason's
for? "
se
[61]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
san
Ann considered a moment. Evidently she was
going to answer nothing without due thought.
“No,” said she, at length.
“Did she tell you,” persisted Annette, “that
we went over there after you? Well, we did,
and we should have stopped for you, only we
saw Cousin Jason had got home, and I thought
if he found you in his barn you could settle it
between yourselves.”
“Yes,” said Ann pleasantly. Her shrewd eyes
danced. She was seeing herself and Annette in
the story and enjoying it all with the capacity
of the creative mind.
But Annette was going on. They could see
that what she had said thus far was nothing to
what she was going to say now.
“What do you suppose,” said she, “has hap-
pened to Cousin Jason?”
Emma gasped. Annette heard the sound, but
her perplexed and accusatory glance was upon
vas
wa
[ 62)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Ann. As for Ann, she did open her lips to speak.
She was still in the story and she knew perfectly
well what Annette, also in the story, was going
to say. But realizing at the same instant that
what she said in turn would be used against her,
she closed her mouth and waited.
“Cousin Jason,” said Annette, “is dead. He
fell out of that upper barn door this morning
and broke his neck.”
[ 63 )


Annette looked from one sister to the other,
partly from a desire for adequate comment, and
chiefly in a wild interrogation of Ann, who had
somehow, if only in a prophetic fantasy, come
too near the fact. But what she found in Ann's
face amazed her more than any perturbation
she might have expected. Emma fell back into a
chair and seemed, in a way, to sink out of con-
scious existence. She sat there with her mouth
open and her childish brow corrugated into lines
of interrogation. But Ann! her look was one of
unfeigned delight. She who had been sitting rose
from her chair and slapped her little notebook
down on the table with a triumphant finality,
as if, the deed being concluded, she had no more
need of notes. Her face, indeed, shone as Annette
had never seen it save once when, at a school
examination, she strode to the board, took the
se
[64]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
chalk from the hand of a halting pupil, and, with
the dash and abandon of virtuosity, did an inter-
minable sum.
“You don't tell me,” said Ann, as if she begged
to be reassured of a happy certainty, "he's been
an’ fell out o' that barn door, same’s he'd ought
to?"
“Same as he ought to?” Annette shrieked at
her. “Cousin Jason fell out and killed himself
and you say he ought to. What do you mean
by that?”
“Why,” said Ann, still with that shining face,
“it's the way I planned it for the story. An'
I'll be switched if it ain't movin' along jest as the
story moves. I'm as limp as a rag.”
“Camphire!” breathed Emma, as if Ann's weak-
ening suggested that restorative to her dazed
mind. “There in the corner cupboard, right on
the upper shelf.”
Annette stepped absently to the cupboard, her
[ 65 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
eyes still bent upon Ann as if she were loth to
leave perusal of that telltale face, took the camphor
bottle in the same perfunctory way and gave it
to Emma. Then she turned back to Ann.
“Don't it mean anything to you,” she said,
“to have Cousin Jason fall out there and be picked
up as—as he was? Why, he's dead, Aunt Ann.
Cousin Jason's passed away. Don't that mean
anything?”
“Why, yes,” said Ann, but still cheerfully and
with great earnestness. “Course it's a solemn
thing to be took away so in a minute, without
warnin’ as it were, but I ain't got to that yet.
I can't git my mind off the story, an' it's comin'
out as I figured it would. Why, Annette, you
can't think—you can't think"
Here she stopped, choked by the impossibility
of voicing, even to her own inarticulate mind,
the joy of the creative intelligence when it finds
itself justified by the event, nature confirming
[66]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
now
art. But now Emma's voice made itself faintly
heard.
“Where do you s'pose,” she said, scarcely
above a whisper, “where do you s’pose that
screw-driver is?” For her mind was laboring
after Ann's, in an uncomprehending loyalty. If
Ann had planned a thing, it must, she hopelessly
felt, be a thing to be reckoned with.
“That's it,” said Ann joyously. “That's the
next move. It'll be found, an' the detectives'll
read the name on it-you know 'twas burnt into
all father's tools-an' he'll see 'twas father's.”
“Detectives!” echoed Annette amazedly.“Where
do you think you're going to find detectives here
in this neighborhood? Aunt Ann, these mystery
stories have turned your brain. You'll have to
control yourself or you'll get queer.”
“No, no,” Ann explained, patiently as she
had to Emma in like perplexity. “I don't mean
detectives as you might say here, but in the story.
e
[67]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
That's where they be, in the story. The story's
what I'm providin' for.”
And it was true that she could not persuade
her mind away from it. Hazily in the far mental
distance, lay Cousin Jason, dead, and so, although
she had never found him pathetic in life, invested
with a new dignity. But here, dancing before
her in the beguilingness of its unreal yet brilliant
light, was the story, the act of a divine art.
At that instant the door opened and they started
with one motion and turned to it with the response
of nerves thrilling under highest tension. A little
round man stepped in and closed the door behind
him, tightly as if the action were significant, as
if he had come on a secret errand and took pre-
cautionary measures of shutting out a listening
world. He was an irascible little man, with round
blue eyes under bushy brows, a high color and
full lips he had a way of smacking at the beginning
of significant words. This was Sheriff Herman
Tas
[ 68 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
vas awar
was
Holt. No one knew for what plentiful lack of
equipment he had attained that office, but every-
body was aware that his wife cried aloud in the
market place, as it were, until folks were tired,
as the neighborhood said, of hearing her clack,
and bestowed it on him to get rid of her. And
after all, it seemed to result in bestowing it on
her, for she swept up evidence like crumbs on the
floor, wherever there was à suspicion of guilt,
and even mortified him in public by her ability
to “meddle and make.” Hermie hated to be
sheriff. He wanted instead to raise prize hens,
but a sheriff he was and scowled himself silently
along his difficult way. He did not magnify his
office, but he did regard it with a worried gravity,
and to-day he wore the suit of black he always
tried to assume in the performance of his duties.
As a neighbor, none of these women feared him;
they would have laughed at the possibility. But
when their eyes took in his aspect as he stood
[69]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
before them clad in that official black, they felt
the metaphorical significance of it and their eyes
challenged him anxiously. He had a peremptory,
staccato form of speech which, he secretly hoped,
might have an intimidating effect upon prisoners,
and it was with an even exaggerated form of it
that he addressed himself at once to Ann.
“You know,” he said, “about your Cousin
Jason. At least, I s'pose you know it. Been
told, have you?”
“Yes,” said Annette, in a small voice steadied
into nonchalance. It was absurd, she reminded
herself, to be afraid of Hermie Holt, when she
had his children in school and they were the most
backward in the entire district. “I told her.”
But he did not intermit his interest in Ann.
His gaze had not wavered.
“You better speak up,” said he, not unkindly.
“But it's only fair to tell you what you say may
be used ag’inst you.”
[ 70 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
U were
Ann gave a little cry of pure delight.
“That's it,” said she. “That's what they always
say. If I'd known you were comin' I should ha’
hoped you would, but I never s’posed it would
pop into your head.”
Here she stopped, fearing she had told him what
small potatoes she considered him. A city detec-
tive or the judge of a court or counsel learned in
the law would use the phrase, but it was incredible
that he should know it-he, Sheriff Hermie Holt
here in Haddon.
“Well,” said he curtly, “you know what's
happened?”
“Yes,” said Ann eagerly. She wondered, with
some anxiety for him, if he would know enough
to proceed as the books would have him. Hermie
would probably never have his mental poise
and adequacy so anxiously regarded as they were
at that moment. “Oh, yes! Jest as Annette
says. She come in an' told us.”
NO
[ 71 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Was
And now Ann was remembering how foxy a
criminal would try to be. She also must be foxy,
if he went on. And he must go on. He was inside
the story with her and they must both go on.
Now he spoke, but not so patently in his official
manner, the manner that went with the black
clothes. It seemed as if some anxious softness
had overtaken him and he hoped to save her.
“Ann,” said he, “can't you think what sent me
over here, soon as I heard what happened down
to your Cousin Jason's?”
Ann could indeed think and that joyously, but,
as a criminal, she must conceal her mind.
“No,” she said boldly. “Unless, we bein'
relations so, Emma an’ me, you thought you'd
come an' tell us.”
“Do you remember,” said the Sheriff porten-
tously, “a certain conversation you had with
your sister an’ my wife on the afternoon of the
twentieth, this month-day before yesterday, in
[ 72 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
fact—wherein you stated your belief that your
Cousin Jason had injured your sister in the matter
of a lumber lot, an' that it would be easy to put
him to death in the way his death actually oc-
curred?”
“No,” said Ann, enjoying herself and playing
up to the story, “I don't remember no such a
thing."
The Sheriff turned to Emma, now too lax in her
chair even to sway back and forth as she had in
her first moments of excitement but sniffing at
the camphor bottle with abandon.
“Do you,” said he, in his professional voice,
“remember the conversation I have mentioned?”
“O my Lord!” moaned Emma. “O my suz!”
“Answer me,” said Sheriff Holt. “Did you
hear this conversation or did you not?”
Both Annette and Emma were thinking the
same thing: that it was ridiculous to be afraid
of Hermie Holt whose wife ruled him with a rod
[73]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
of iron and whose children were behind in their
books. But they were afraid. For now Hermie
was the Law.
“Yes,” said Emma, at length, because he con-
tinued to glare at her with his bushy brows drawn
down over his eyes like frowning palisades. Now
she did, in conclusion, pluck up a faltering spirit.
“If anything o' the sort was said, it wa’n’t by me.
But if Mis’ Holt says I was here I was, an' if she
said any such thing was said, I s'pose I heard it.”
This was rare courage in Emma. It amounted
to a defense of her sister, and Ann understood it
as such and glowed over it.
“That's all right,” said the sheriff darkly.
“You'll have to speak plainer in a court o' law.
Now you,” said he, turning to Annette. “Have
you heard any such talk as that?”
Annette, at the moment of his attack upon
Aunt Emma, had determined to remember he
was only Hermie Holt. So she held her head high
was
[ 74 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
was
He knew very well that he had negligible qualities
as a man and that, in marital discussions and
among the neighbors, he was often lightly re-
garded. But as a sheriff he tried to bear himself
with a difference, as his tone of voice and his
black broadcloth bore testimony. He turned
himself to Ann.
“You understand how ’tis,” he said. “If I
hadn't had word of the way you've been plannin'
to compass your Cousin Jason’s death, I shouldn't
ha' made any handle of it. Any man might pitch-
pole down there where he did an' broke his neck,
an’ no wonder. You could break your neck fallin'
off a chair, if you fell that way. But with what
I've heard, an' your plannin' it out an all, I've
got to take steps. I shall be authorized. There'll
have to be a Grand Jury, for all I know, to bring
in a verdict whether there's any case. An' it's
my belief, Ann Hale, you'll have to be locked up
an' I shall have to do it.”
( 76 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
At this conclusion his official gaze melted into
genuine sorrow, but Ann was, mysteriously to
him, the more joyous.
“'Course you will,” said she. “Crowner's
'quest.”
For this was an old-fashioned neighborhood,
and an inquest was still known as coming under
crowner's ’quest law.
“Well,” said he, after a moment's heavy thought,
“I'll be goin' now. I shall have to take down my
wife's evidence, an' I'm a kind of a slow penman.
An' I sha’n’t consult nobody else, not yet any
ways. I've got to find out where I be. Ann!”
he paused at the door and regarded her with a look
of honest compassion. “Ann Hale,” said he,
“I never should ha’ thought it of you, never in
this world. You'd be one o' the last!”
“Yes,” said Ann. “Course I should. An’
that's what makes it so interestin’An' I ain't
made up my mind yet whether I done it or whether
[77)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
IS-
I didn't do it. Any ways, I've got to be a sus-
pect—that's what they call 'em-an' I can make
up my mind about that later on, when I see how
things go.”
For now again she was living entirely in the
story. But how could his striving mind compass
that? Was she, he wondered, trying to throw
him off the scent, or was she entirely daft? What-
ever might be in her head, he shook his own
solemnly in repudiation of it and went away.
But halfway down the path he heard his name,
and turned to see Ann flying after him. She came
up to him breathless, not so much from running
as with the turmoil of her fancy.
“What should you think,” said Ann, “was the
best thing for me to do?—best for the story, you
know. If you've told me you're goin' to arrest
me, had I better stay an' brazen it out, or should
you think anybody'd better disappear?”
That was a possibility he had not contemplated.
[ 78 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
was
vas
He would never have warned an ordinary crim-
inal that he might be nabbed by the law and
Sheriff Holt in a black suit, but Ann Hale was
different. Ann Hale was a neighbor, a fixture
like the town clock. Perhaps in certain unex-
pected emergencies and without his wife at his
elbow, Sheriff Holt was as unprepared as his
own children when they found themselves con-
fronted by vulgar fractions. But if she could
say such a thing, if she could think it, she must be
warned of consequences.
“Look here,” said he, “if you're goin' to play
any such tricks on me, I better take you into
custody now.”
“No,” said Ann earnestly, “you can't take me
up now. I've got too much to do, to think out
which way it better go. Mebbe you'll have to
take me up in the end. But I can't decide whether
'twould be best to run off, or wait a spell. You
see I ain't made up my mind whether I'm me,
ea
[ 79 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
myself, same as I be now, or whether I'm a young
girl scairt ’most to death, havin' suspicion fallin'
on me so. That's what they say, you know,
'suspicion fall.? Now what do you say? be I me,
or be I a young girl, young as Annette, so to speak?
S’pose Annette done it. What would she be
doin' now?”
The sheriff gasped.
"Annette?” said he. “She that we've put our
children under, our teacher that we depend on to—”
“Certain,” said Ann cheerfully. “Now you
jest look at it from that p’int an' you'll find it's
real helpful. That's what Annette does with
fractions. She takes an apple an' cuts it up, an’
even then some o' the little numbskulls don't_»
Here she stopped abruptly, remembering that
the numbskulls were chiefly the offspring of Sheriff
Holt. “Anyways, you take Annette.”
“I don't see,” said the sheriff, “what Annette's
got to do with it. You don't mean to accuse
O
[ 80 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
UL
Annette o' puttin' your Cousin Jason out o' the
way?"
“That's it,” said Ann, enraptured. She had
never known you could take up the web of life
and twist and turn it to give forth such vivid
colors. “S’pos’n’’twas Annette. There's the
motive an’ all, too, complete. She's kinder half
engaged to Henry-least, I s'pose she is—an'
Henry wanted that lumber lot Cousin Jason
thorned Emma about till she signed a contract
to sell. There's your motive. Don't ye see?”
“Annette!” gasped the sheriff. The sweat
broke out on his forehead. “An' you accusin’
of her! Ann Hale, seems to me you ain't hardly
human.”
"Motive an' all,” said Ann, enjoying herself.
“Now if Annette thought she's goin' to be arrested,
what would she do? would she run away or stay
put?”
“But, God sakes!” said the sheriff, mopping
[ 81 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
You're as sound in your mind as I be.” A woman,
he was minded to add, that can do sums as you
can could no more be out of her mind than an
algebra. But he remembered his own shortcom-
ings at a spelling match where Ann had spelled
him down, and in the interests of his intellectual
standing, forebore to flatter her. And he could
not have proceeded, for Ann burst in with what
seemed to be a fresh discovery.
“Plea of insanity!" she cried. “I never once
thought o' that. Why, if you want to tangle
up a plot, seems if things were nothin' but tangles.
When it comes to untanglin' 'em, that shows
what you're made of.”
“Now,” said the sheriff, breaking in on her,
“you give me your word you won't go traipsin'
off an' hidin'—"
“Oh, no,” said Ann, with a transparent honesty
he had to accept. “I told you I wouldn't. I've
got too much to do. Besides, we're relations,
U
V
[ 83 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Jason an’ me. I've got to go to the funeral, ain't
I?” But here another of her dramatic problems
attacked her, full face, and she added: “I never
thought o' that. Had I better go to the funeral?
If anybody's guilty would they go or would they
stay to home?”
But now, in his mental extremity, Sheriff Holt
could only stare at her and shake his head, and
Ann had to answer her own question.
“I guess,” said she, “if you meant to brazen
it out you'd go, an' if you hadn't got any courage
to speak of you'd stay to home. An' I guess it
goes back to whether I'm me or whether I'm a
young girl, same as I said.” And leaving the
sheriff staring at her from a quagmire of bewilder-
ment she turned and went back to the house.
Another actor in the disorderly drama was
coming along the road, the stocky figure of a little
girl dressed in a brown plaid of an abnormal size,
and wearing a woolen cap too large for her daz-
[ 84 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
was on
W
zling red head. She was one of the shiftless Moreys
that lived on the other side of the hill, and the cap
was the token of her victory over one of the boys
when they dressed that morning for school. There
were more children than caps, and Mirandy, being
strong of arm and undaunted courage, usually
managed to force one of her brothers into the
world bareheaded. The sheriff turned upon her
like a dog disturbed at his bone. He was under
the irritating consciousness of having come out
at the little end of the horn in his encounter with
Ann, and here was a victim small enough to be
attacked with some certainty of triumph, and
so should his dignity be vindicated. It was not
that Mirandy Morey, of whom he had daily
knowledge as perhaps the boldest member in a
marauding tribe, was of any intrinsic importance.
She was merely the very small mirror where his
own fleeting consequence might for an instant be
caught and held.
[ 85 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
sen
“I'm late,” said she.
This was obvious, and suggested a logical con-
clusion.
“Well,” said the sheriff, "you ain't goin' to
school now. You ain't headed that way.” And
as she was patently refusing to help him out, he
added: “Where you been?”
Mirandy was suddenly on fire to tell. Her
sense of drama rushed to the fore. She spoke
eagerly, and her childish voice squeaked.
“I been over to old Jason Hale's,” she said,
“to see where he fell out an’ broke his neck, an’
there's nineteen people there—I counted 'em-
an' there's Fords drivin' up every other minute
an’ they think he didn't fall out same's they thought
first; they think he was pushed out.”
Her blue eyes had darkened and her chubby
hands twitched with the ecstasy of the moment.
Sheriff Holt found her a very unbecoming spectacle.
“There! there!” said he. “Little girls hadn't
[ 87 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Tas
ought to go round tellin' tales, a time like this.
It ain't pretty. Who is it,” he added, curiosity
getting the better of him, “who is it says he was
pushed?”
“Mis' Sheriff Holt,” said Mirandy calmly.
“She was there in the barn an' there was three
women with her lookin' down at the spot. She
whispered,” Mirandy added complacently, “but
I heard her.”
The sheriff made an unhappy noise in his throat.
Mirandy wondered what it meant. She could
not know that he had trusted in the discretion
of his wife, who was not merely his other half but
three-quarters of his legal acumen as well. And
yet, if things had come to this incredible pass,
if that admirable woman brought them to it, he
had to know the worst. He tried to speak with a
fine carelessness calculated to befog the childish
mind.
“There! there!” he said again. “Nobody's
[88]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
V
goin' to think any such kind of a foolish thing as
that. If they said it, they must ha' known you
were listenin' an' done it to throw you off the
track.”
This point of view also Mirandy was prepared
to meet.
“Oh,” she said earnestly, “she did say so, but
she took it back the next minute. She said if he
did get pushed over 'twas his own fault, for she
went over only yesterday to tell him somethin'
she'd heard-how he'd better give up leanin' on
that bar, because he's along in years, an' his lame
foot an’all—for 'twas dangerous, an' he was
mad as hops an’ as good as told her she better get
along home.”
For this he had no answer. If his wife had
felt impelled to give Jason Hale a mysterious
warning, she had not felt an equal necessity to
confide her intention to him. And now, not only
was Ann casting dark imputations upon her own
was
[ 89 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
niece, but no less a personage than the sheriff's
wife had started the ball of suspicion rolling in
the very barn itself where the law ought to be
raking in evidence with a silent impartiality afar
from gossiping supposition. If there was one
thing he knew above all others, it was that un-
solicited testimony was apt to get you in deeper
than you thought.
“Well, well,” he said, “you clip it along to
school.”
Mirandy's eyes narrowed slightly, but they
still met his in a perfect composure.
“I can't,” she said. “I've got to go into Ann
Hale’s.”
Again he was all agog.
“What you goin' into Ann Hale's for?” he
inquired, his own eyes narrowing in unconscious
challenge. “You ain't got an arrant, have you?
Your teacher ain't sent you with an arrant to her
Aunt Ann?” For now, with his first inkling of
ya.
[ 90 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Ann's perfidy, he could believe these Hales would
do anything.
Mirandy answered him with dignity, in the
words of childhood's everlasting plea:
“I want a drink o' water."
“Well,” said the sheriff, with a sudden grim-
ness, “you go in an' get it an' I'll go with ye.”
He was about to extend his hand to her, but
Mirandy had, with what he felt to be an impish
cunning, foreseen this and bounded away up the
path. As she went she called piercingly: “Ann!
Ann!” The sheriff followed her, but at a man's
pace. He it was who had once failed to arrest a
Morey who gathered the rareripes off a precious
tree and then scuttled away, because, as he ex-
plained, it wouldn't look very well for an officer
of the law to be seen chasin' a boy. And when he
entered the house and went through to the kitchen
he found Ann standing in the middle of the room,
looking strangely excited and Mirandy at the
[91]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
sink drinking water copiously from a tin dipper.
Mirandy goggled at him over the rim of the dipper,
but he did not deign to question her.
“Ann Hale,” said the sheriff sternly, “what's
this young one want?”
Mirandy removed the edge of the dipper suffi-
ciently to gasp from dripping lips:
“I want a drink o’ water.”
“Well,” said the sheriff, “you've got it, an'
now you go.”
But, as he noted, looking after her down the
path, she did not turn toward school. She bounded
off along the road in the direction whence she had
come. And this would take her back to Jason
Hale’s. By no possible conjecture could he
know that she had run up to Ann Hale, while he
was still making his way along the garden path,
had clutched Ann’s apron to steady herself and said
brokenly, with the fearful joy of one chosen to
play a great part:
[ 92 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
TOC
“Seliny Rule put her head out the bedroom
winder an' told me to run fast as I could an' tell
you she'd got to see you quick. She's in the bed-
room now. In the bed. An’ she's got her clo’es
on. I peeked in an' see her.”
And hearing Sheriff Holt's step on the door-
stone, she had flown to the sink and begun drink-
ing water at a rate Ann had never seen equaled.
“Ann Hale,” said the sheriff again, “I'm waitin'
for you to tell me what that young one wanted.”
But Ann contented herself with smiling at him
disarmingly.
“Law!” said she, as he showed no sign of
going but continued to stare, and she had no
clear idea of what a sheriff might be empowered
to do, “you know what young ones be.”
He might well, she thought, for he had five and
not a bright one among 'em.
“I ask you,” said the sheriff ponderously, "an’
I command you to tell me in the name o' the law,
[ 93 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
OU anV WO
if she brought you any word from your niece
Annette."
“Course she didn't,” said Ann easily. “An-
nette's keepin' school, an' it's the furthest off
from Mirandy Morey to go anigh the schoolhouse
on a day like this when Cousin Jason's been made
way with an' the town an' county's drivin' all
over the lot.”
The sheriff looked at her with a penetrating eye.
He thought he had made a point.
“You acknowledge it then, do you?” said he.
“You own your Cousin Jason’s been made way
with?”
“Why, 'course I own it,” said Ann, in some
pity for an intelligence which could not under-
stand how she, as a fiction writer, was placed.
“I've got to assume it, ain't I? If I didn't, there
wouldn't be no story.”
“Will you give me your word o’ mouth,” said
the sheriff as one way of accomplishing some-
[94]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
thing, he hardly knew what, “you won't slip out
an’ communicate with Annette?”
“'Course I'll give you my word,” said Ann,
readily. “I don't want nothin' of Annette at
present. But then, if I did,” she added, in scorn
of his futility, “I should give my word jest the
same. Do you s’pose a suspect is goin' to make
promises an' keep 'em an’ git laid by the heels in
jail? No, sirree, sir!”
But though she had again entangled him, the
sheriff reflected that his wife, possibly talking too
much, was awaiting him at Jason's.
“Well,” said he despairingly, “I put you on
your honor. An',” he weakly concluded with a
corollary he had never found effectua) with his
children, “if you put anything over on me I shall
find it out.”
After one frowning yet uncertain look at her, as
if he had to reclassify her, in his mind, from the
Ann Hale he used to know, unattractive but
Over
[95


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
never disconcerting, he went slowly out. Ann
watched him down the path, as she had before, a
meditative smile on her face, and, as she had
before, she called him back.
“Hermie,” she cried piercingly from the door-
way, “you come here whilst I ask you suthin?.” .
He came readily. It seemed to him he might
be on the point of discovery, at least the discovery
of the real Ann. She waited for him with an air
of confidential earnestness.
“Say,” said she, “should you think I could be
called a crook? Or seein' it's nothin' but murder
an’ ain't the least thing to do with diamonds or
confidence games, am I only a suspect or the
prisoner at the bar? What do you think?”
Sheriff Holt looked for a long moment into her
eyes. Was she, his gaze inquired, making game
of him? was she a guilty woman or a born fool?
Nothing could at the present moment solve that
doubt. She wouldn't do it and he couldn't.
[96]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Damn!” said he, and turned away down the
WI
path.
Ann went back into the kitchen and took down
her hat and coat. She was shaking with the fun
of it all. Cousin Jason, as a dead man, had as yet
no place on her horizon. She dwelt merely upon
the diversion Cousin Jason had conferred upon her.
“Emma!” she called.
Emma at once appeared. She had endured much
and there was little left of her. She drifted in like
a wisp, and seated herself by the window. After
these comings and goings, these runnings in and
out, she felt safer overlooking the road. Since the
sheriff had come, and in his black, her mind added,
anything might be expected.
“If anybody runs in,” said Ann, “an' asks
where I be, you tell 'em I'm goin' to the school-
house for a word with Annette.”
“But be you?” said Emma, with an acumen
startling to Ann.
[97]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Why, no,” said she, "course I ain't. Only I
want you should say so.”
“O my suz!” wailed Emma. “I ain't goin' to
say no such a thing. 'Tain't safe, such a time as
this, to go round swearin' black ’s white, same as
you do. They might land ye in jail.”
“Let 'em land,” said Ann cheerfully. “That's
the next step any ways. But Emma,” she added
curiously, “when I told you where I was goin',
what made you ask me if 'twas so? You never
did afore.”
“You never was in such a state o' mind as you
be now,” said Emma faintly. “Everything any-
body's asked you sence Cousin Jason was took
away, you've answered contrary. So I s'posed
that was what you're doin' now.”
“That,” said Ann, with importance, “is because
I'm a crook, if I ain't no worse. From now on,
if they question me, if they say black I shall say
white, an' if they say east I shall say west. So
[98]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
when I say I'm goin' to see Annette, you can take
it for what it's wuth, but you needn't tell no
more ’n you can help or you'll mix my plot up
somethin' terrible.”
Emma was looking at her with a fixity she had
to challenge, really because there were so many
kinds of questions in it. Wonder, a troubled fear,
these were both in Emma's look.
“What is it?” asked Ann kindly. “What you
takin' on like that for?”.
“Ann,” said Emma, "you don't seem to sense
what's happened. Why, Cousin Jason's passed
away.”
Ann understood at once. Cousin Jason had
passed away and she was treating his death as
merely the central incident of her chaotic plot.
Brought face to face with her own indifference, she
could not explain it herself. She only knew
it had to be so. Ann had never thought of
the creative impulse as it intoxicates the hur
W
( 99 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
was
man mind, but she was feeling it in its in-
tensity.
“I dunno the leastest thing about it,” said she.
“True’s I live, I dunno. Anyways,” she added,
with relief, “'twon't do no good to dwell on it.
You better slice up some apples an’ make a pie.
I shall be back by noon an' I expect to be as holler
's a horn."
But would she be back by noon? Emma, in
that newborn distrust of her, watched her down
the path and was not greatly surprised to find she
was not headed toward the schoolhouse, but the
other way whither Mirandy Morey had gone,
evidently to Cousin Jason's. Shaking her head
unhappily, she turned away from the speculation
the window engendered and got her pan of apples
to pare for the pie. The homely task appealed
to her as likely, in this whirlpool of events, to
save her reason.
When Ann turned the corner that afforded a
[ 100)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
a
view of Cousin Jason's, she knew exactly what
she should find: an assemblage of cars and buggies,
such as blacken the roadside at a country auction
or a funeral. People were standing about in
small groups, and she knew what they were say-
ing. They were passing about, from lip to lip,
the suspicion, eagerly snapped at and rolled under
the tongue, that Cousin Jason had not merely
fallen out of his barn door. He had been done
away with. For the first time, Ann began to
dwell, though briefly, on Cousin Jason's side of
the question. The black dotted groups were
bringing it home to her. “Poor toad!” she said,
disposing of him with that perfunctory sympathy,
and hastened back to her own cause as a suspect
at large bound on a mysterious errand. At least,
if the errand could not be considered mysterious,
Ann meant to make it so. It was not in the part
she had set herself, so she considered, to walk
along the road and up the path encountering the
[101]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
curious gaze of those who might or might not
have been told she was under suspicion. She
would, at this point, cross the orchard and arrive
at the eastern wing of the house where Seliny's
bedroom window could be easily reached, and
where no spectator was likely to linger. While
she thought, she put a resolute foot over the wall
and took her way toward the house among the
young trees Jason had recently set out. She
was right. No one was within hailing distance.
They were all either in the front yard, by the road-
side, or at the end of the barn which already began
to be known as the spot where poor old Jason
pitch-poled out. Selina’s window was open, and
Ann approached it by a somewhat circuitous route
because that seemed more mysterious, and sud-
denly appeared before it, her nose for an instant
flattened against the screen.
“Seliny,” said she, in a cautious tone, “you
there?”
We a
a
C
[ 102 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
UT
She could see the bed, convex in the middle
from a recumbent Selina, who, not moving her
shoulders at all, now lifted her head with a serpent-
like effect.
“That you?” asked Selina, her voice shrill and
uncontrolled. “You come in here quick 's ever
you can, but don't you let nobody set eyes on you.”
Ann paused not to explain that she, too, found
it unwise to encounter the ever increasing crowd
without. She pushed up the screen, lifted her
serviceable leg as she had in getting over the wall
and, after a brief struggle with the hostile forces
of mechanical art, was in the room. She turned
about, was in the act of leaning over to pick up
her hat which had been scraped to the ground in
transit, when it occurred to her that if it were
picked up outside the window it might lead to
evidence, of what it was impossible to say. But
she left it there, put in the screen again and turned
to Selina, who, looking incredibly small and as
ces
[ 103 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
wild-eyed as an imprisoned bird, lay regarding
her. Selina's hair, gray and rather short, was, as
Ann noted “all over her head,” which added to
her rumpled and bird-like aspect. She must, Ann
concluded, be beside herself, if the rumpled hair
bore witness. She must have "tossed and turned”
like a teetotum or a fever patient, to get it in such
a state. Her great dark eyes were “big as sau-
5 saº
cers.”
“You set down here,” said Selina, in an agitated
voice. “Draw the chair right up close.”
Ann did it, and marked that, as she sat, Selina,
although the day was warm, pulled the coverlet
to her chin. As she put out a hand to draw it in
more tightly, Ann saw that the thin fingers emerged
from a brown calico sleeve.
“For the land sakes, Seliny,” said she, “what
you in bed for, this swelterin' day, with your
clo’es on?”
Selina held her with the agonized gaze of her
[ 104 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
say
10
imploring eyes. She spoke gaspingly, as if in
extreme caution and pain.
“They were after me.”
“Who?” said Ann.
Such a point had she reached that it added a
savor to life to find anybody, however innocently,
pursued by the most benevolent of pursuers.
“All of 'em,” said Selina. “They begun to
drive up soon as the news had time to spread.
The telephone bell's been ringin' sence I dunno
when. They've had me up before the bar same's
you do in court. ‘Fell out, did he?' 'How d’you
s’pose he happened to?' 'Had a stroke? He's
too poor for a stroke.” Ann understood that
she meant, according to country speech, the thin-
ness of his body, not the slenderness of his purse.
“An' then I come upon suthin' I didn't want
no soul to find, specially Mis' Sheriff Holt.
She's got an eye like a hawk. An' I ketched
it up an' put for bed. 'Twas the only spot on
nes
[ 105 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
earth where I could hide anything an' have it
safe.”
“What is it?” said Ann, leaning nearer. Her
eyes were glittering. “Evidence?”
“I dunno whether 'tis or not,” said Selina.
“Anyways, it's no sort of a thing for Mis’ Sheriff
Holt to find. But they won't set eyes on it so
long as I keep it in here with me, unless they
hear it rattlin' ag'inst my buttons. I can't move
but what it rattles. You can hear it if you keep
still long enough.”
Ann kept still, but she could not hear it.
“What under the sun is it, anyways?” she
inquired.
Selina transfixed her with a questioning glance.
“It's that screw-driver,” she said. “The one
you left on his desk when you was rummagin'
amongst his papers day 'fore yesterday.”
This was, Ann concluded, the last thing she could
have expected. Was Selina retaining the screw-
screw-
[106]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
back into your father's tool box, for sure as you're
alive Mis' Sheriff Holt see it layin' there on that
desk where Jason left it when he come on it night
'fore last. She see it same as I did, an’ she was
only waitin' for me to go out o' the room, same
as I was waitin' for her to git it out from under
her hands."
“But,” said Ann, divided between an amazed
gratitude and a besetment of helpless laughter,
“if Mis? Holt's got her eye on you, she'll be in
here 'fore long, an' then if it rattles ag’inst your
buttons you'll be a goner. She's got ears like a
cat. You better stay where you be till things
kinder quieten down. Long about twelve o'clock
folks'll git thinkin' o' dinner an' they'll drop off,
specially the ones that ain't put their ’taters on.”
“I can't stay covered up in bed all day,” said
Selina miserably. “Why, Ann Hale, I should
think you'd be willin' to help me out. I'm tryin'
hard enough to help you.”
( 108 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
day in, day out, an' not see where he keeps things?
Many's the time I've stood there in the kitchen
door in my stockin' feet an’ watched him open
it. A secret drawer's nothin' when you got the
hang of it. It's a dozen times easier than if he
locked things up an' kep’ the key in his pocket.”
Ann was frowning in thought. The present
complication was beyond her. It was quite within
her rights to tangle her own fate, but she had
rigorous ideas of the laws pertaining to property.
“Don't seem to me,” she said slowly, “you
showed any judgment when you done that.”
Selina's eyes met hers defiantly.
“I had to do it,” she said fiercely. “I know
what's in that bundle o' papers. It's his will an'
two-three old deeds.” Then her eyes took on an
imploring look, so crafty also that Ann could
never have believed it possible to her. “Ann,”
said she, “the agreement's there, too.”
“The agreement?” repeated Ann.
[110)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Yes, betwixt him an' Emma, about the lumber
lot. That'll mean suthin' to you, Ann. You
better have it in your own hands, an' you say the
word an' I'll put it there.”
“I dunno,” said Ann wonderingly, "what use
'twould be to me.”
“Why,” said Selina, “mebbe it'll hold after
Jason's death. Mebbe 'twon't. But you better
not take no chances. You better put it out o'
the way. An’’tain't no harm to nobody. He's
gone where he don't want lumber lots, an' fur's
I can see, now it's as much your business an’
Emma's as 'twas his."
“But what under the sun,” said Ann, “you
takin' on so about what concerns me? You never
done it afore.”
Two tears came into the burning eyes and rolled
down the fever-scorched cheeks.
“No,” said Selina. “I never did. I never had
no call to. But now I see it comin' nearer 'n'
[ III 1


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
nea
nearer, folks thinkin' you done it an all, an' I
want you to make way with that awful screw-
driver an' I want to pay you for takin' it away,
an’ all I've got to do it with is that agreement
betwixt him an' Emma,-for, Ann Hale, I can't
have it so. I can't have his death fall on you.”
Ann was not so much touched as again amazed.
Selina had never shown more than a meager
neighborly interest in her.
“Why can't ye?” she inquired curiously. “Tell
me why.”
Selina rolled her head from side to side, keep-
ing her body stiff beneath the counterpane. Even
in her anguish she remembered the buttons and
the screw-driver.
“Because,” she said, in a whisper, “even if
you're never took up for it, they'll keep on sayin'
you done it. An', O my soul, Ann Hale, I done
it myself!"
S
[112


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
as 1
happens to me, you look out for my faithful
housekeeper, Seliny Rule.'”
There was no doubt that Selina got wind of
this through the wall of quilted cotton over her
ears, for the counterpane crawled down a very
little, as if she meant to emerge entirely. But
at that instant came the voice of Sheriff Holt
outside the door which his wife had left ajar.
“Ann Hale, you in there?”
Ann turned, the situation momentarily out
of her hands. And before she recovered it, a shrill
voice sounded from the same region, though at
many inches nearer the floor, the voice of Mirandy
Morey.
“Yes, sir, she is, sir. I see her get in. She got
in through the winder”–
“You pass that child in here to me,” said Ann,
“an' I'll spank her good an' hard.”
She was the more vexed because Mirandy Morey
had seemed to be on her side, and now she was
[116]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
an’ she can answer yes or no. In the name o' the
law!” fulminated the sheriff, and ended lamely,
“Now, then!”
His manner was a grand manner, a threatening
manner, implying that he made nothing, even at
ordinary times, of breaking down a door or two
to reach his prey.
“You're within your rights, Hermie,” said his
wife, one hand on the coverlet. “Course you're
comin' in.”
“Abbie Holt,” Ann flashed at her, in a quick
aside, “this is a case where one woman's got to
stan' by another. Don't you know ’tis? You've
seen the time when you were glad enough to have
womenfolks stan’ by you.” Whatever this was
intended to convey, it meant abundantly to Mrs.
Holt, for she blushed, bit her lip on the retort she
might have been tempted to make, and removed
her hand from the coverlet. “You step out there,”
said Ann persuasively, “an' quieten him down,
U
[ 118 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
PL
an’ I'll git Seliny up ag‘inst the pillers. Then
we'll see.”
Mrs. Holt obeyed her meekly, and Ann, follow-
ing her to the door, was about to shut it behind
her, when she found Hermie confronting her.
She looked at him in scorn. “You're as near
nothin', Hermie Holt,” she felt like saying, “as
anything I ever see.” He was holding some
object behind him, and now he brought it out
with so quick a movement that it flashed in the
sun and Ann involuntarily blinked. He meant to
ask her as if worlds depended on her answer, but
he really asked as if he did not know himself and
needed to find out. Drama was afar from Sheriff
Holt.
“Will you,” said he, "tell me what this is?”
Ann looked. She had not seen the saw for a
long time, but though she remembered when and
by whom it had been borrowed, that, she promptly
decided, was no business of Hermie Holt's.
[ 119 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Why,” said she, with a fine carelessness,
“pears to me like a saw.”
“Whose saw should you think it was?” said the
sheriff bitingly, as if now he had her. “Whose
name is it burnt into the handle?”
He seemed to Ann, not alarming, but indescriba-
bly foolish.
“For mercy sakes, Hermie,” said she, “f you
want to know whose name's burnt into the han-
dle, why don't you look an’ see instid o' goin’
round Robin Hood's barn an' expectin' me to tell
you?”
“I know!" came Mirandy Morey's piercing
voice. She stood, like a fierce acolyte, at his hand.
“I see it when I went down to the end o' the barn
where old Jason Hale fell out an’ broke his neck.
I picked it up out o' the piny bed.”
“She did,” said Sheriff Holt, in a tone of mourn-
ful pride, as if here was a budding sheriff he might
have been proud to call his own. . “Anybody'd
[ 120 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
ve &
was
be glad an' thankful to have a little girl like
that.”
"An' I know the name on the handle,” piped
Mirandy, inspired to a madness of ambition by
this injudicious praise. "It was Eli-Eli—”
There she stuck.
“I guess you can finish it out for yourself, Ann
Hale,” said the sheriff meaningly.
Ann warned herself to beware. She also glorified
in the exploits of Mirandy, the Child Detective,
but she could not tell without reflection whither
the evidence was leading her, and now she had
not only to implicate herself in the toils of her
story but she had to save Selina Rule. When in
doubt, she rapidly decided, the best card was
denial.
“No,” said she briskly. “I dunno any Eli
'bout here. Mebbe a tramp’s been round. Only
last week there was a pedlar. Pedlars are terrible
set on killin' folks-no, no, I've got it wrong side
[121 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
O
to. It's the pedlars that used to be killed for what
they had in their packs.”
“You can't throw me off the track that way,”
said Sheriff Holt, and his wife cut in again:
“No, Ann Hale, you can't throw the dust in
our eyes an' don't you think it.”
“The name,” pursued the sheriff bitingly, "is
Eliphalet Hale, your own father's. An’ 'tis your
father's saw, an' you not only brought over his
screw-driver, when you feloniously broke an’
entered, but you brought a saw, in case, I should
say, you found the bar didn't loosen up as you ex-
pected an' you wanted to saw it through.”
“Should you?” said Ann. “Well, mebbe that
would be the general impression. But whether
'twould be what a kind of a smart Alick thought
or what a real detective thought, with handcuffs
in his pocket an'a badge ready to flash out at ye,
that's more’n I know. But there's one thing I do
know, Hermie Holt.” She was ignoring his black.
[ 122)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
He had become plain Hermie. “You an’ MisHolt
take yourselves off into the kitchen an’give this poor
creatur' here a chance to git up an' dress herself.”
“She's all dressed,” came the shrill pipe of
Mirandy Morey. “I see her through the winder.”
Ann continued in an even tone, as if she had
not been interrupted:
“An' take that little limb o' Satan with you.
An' you wait there till Seliny an' I come an' talk
it over.”
“We're right here in the settin' room,” said
Mrs. Holt, with a shrillness nearly equaling that
of Mirandy Morey. “An' here we'll stay.”
“So you may, for all me,” said Ann. “But
you don't ketch me talkin' anything over in that
settin' room with a stiddy stream o' callers
goin' through it, same as there's been for hours,
them nimshis from way down the Branch specially.
You go into the kitchen, or it's the last you'll
hear from me, one while.”
[ 123 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
She stepped back into the bedroom. There was
a murmured dialogue without, and the sheriff
called to her:
“You come along then, quick as ever you can.
My time's wuth suthin', a day like this.”
And there were withdrawing steps in the di-
rection of the kitchen, Mirandy Morey piping
as she went. Ann closed the door softly and
turned the wooden button. She made one stride
across the little room, and, at the bedside, threw
back the coverings from Selina's resisting grasp.
“You step yourself out o’ bed,” said she. “Here,
gimme the papers an' that screw-driver. I'll
put 'em in my coat pocket. Nervous as you be,
I wouldn't trust you with a spool o' thread.”
It is doubtful whether Selina meant to leave
her refuge, but Ann both physically and mentally
dragged her forth. Presently she stood by the
bedside, shaking, and gazing at Ann piteously, a
thin creature with great dark eyes and a working
re
S
a
[ 124]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
so
mouth. Ann had once told Emma she hated
Selina's eyes. They were handsome eyes, said
she, but they were always beseeching you to do
something or other and you never could find out
what.
“Where's your hat an' coat?” said Ann. “There
ain't a livin' thing in here to put on your head, an'
swelterin' as 'tis this mornin' it'll cool off 'fore
night. Here, you take the coverlid an' you can
wrop it round you if so be we stay out. I'll take a
blanket. We don't know what'll befall us 'fore
we're under a roof ag’in.”
As she spoke, she was folding the coverlet
neatly, and now she handed it to Selina, who,
not accepting it, found it tucked under her arm
and the arm pressed down upon it. Then Ann
folded the blanket with the same care and rapidity,
and, going to the open window, again took out
the screen and tossed the blanket to the ground.
She turned back to Selina.
W
[ 125 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Here,” said she, "you step over the sill an'
I'll boost you from behind.”
“I can't,” said Selina piteously. “I can't any
way in this world.”
“Course you can,” said Ann ruthlessly. “Here,
you give me a holt.”
Whether she was lifted or pushed, Selina did
not know, but in a terrifying instant she found
herself standing on the ground, Ann beside her.
And miraculously the folded coverlet was still
under her arm.
“Now,” said Ann, "we'll cut an' run.”
"Ain't this your'n?” asked Selina, stooping to
pick up Ann's disreputable hat at her feet.
“You leave it where 'tis,” said Ann. “They'll
find it an' it'll be some kind of evidence, I dunno
what. Come on, now. No, don't turn your head
towards the road. It's all lined up with cars an’
I dunno what all, an' the less you gawp round at
'em the more stren’th you'll have to ’tend to your
[ 126)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
own business. An' that's runnin' away. We're
runnin' away, Seliny,” she announced, with a joy
she found irrepressible. “We're escapin'. Don't
you see?”
Selina saw nothing. She merely ran. For Ann
had her by the arm, and it was a serious business
to keep up with that long unfaltering stride.
Once, halfway across the field by the footpath,
she did venture breathlessly:
“Where be we goin'?”
“I know where we're goin”” said Ann. She
had breath enough and to spare. “You leave
it to me.”
Selina thought she could guess. They were
headed in the direction of Ann's own house. And
yet, just as she gratefully accepted that as her
refuge, Ann veered suddenly to the north, aban-
doned the path and crossed the stubble left from the
second mowing. And after three or four minutes'
hurried progress she suddenly released Selina and
[ 127 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
caso
W
wa
went forward alone. Selina, freed from that
mandatory grasp on her arm, stopped short. It
was a mercy to be left to get her breath again.
But in the one instant of shutting her eyes in
thankfulness, Ann had disappeared. The field
was a large one without trees or bushy cover, a
rolling upland mowing, and not a human figure
broke the sky line. Selina straightened, as if to
compose herself and reason her own disordered
intelligence into shape. Where was Ann? But
there was Ann. She had risen from the ground,
not a rod ahead, and was striding back. Coming
up with Selina, she laughed. Selina, looking at
her, exasperatedly thought she seemed every minute
stronger, tougher, more “full of it.”
“Where d’you think I'd gone to?” asked Ann,
taking the coverlet away from her and drawing
her along toward the spot from which she had
appeared. “I guess you forgot the old potater
sullar, didn't you? Mebbe you never knew 'twas
[ 128 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Well,” said Selina, still resisting, “you want
the slab to fall down on me?”
“?Twouldn't fall on them,” said Ann prac-
tically, “if they didn't holler so, like wild Injuns,
enough to loosen the foundations o' the airth.
Besides, s'pos'n' it does fall? I guess we could see
it comin' in time. Leastways I could. In with ye.
There!” she said approvingly, “ain't this elegant?”
Selina's unwilling feet had borne her inside,
and now they stood together in a rock-bound cave,
perhaps ten feet square. It was not entirely dark.
Through the bushes at the opening, several shifting
bands of light were struggling. Ann had thrown
her blanket on a rough bench opposite, and now
she laid the coverlet there.
“That's our old wash bench,” she explained.
“We let Mirandy an' her crew have it to make
mud pies on till we forbid 'em the place. You
se' down on one end of it. Why, you poor creatur'!
you're all of a shake.”
n
[ 130 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Selina, as if she could no longer stand, did sit
down, and gave way to what Ann believed to be a
conniption fit, otherwise a crisis not to be ac-
counted for, save as "nerves.” There seemed
to be nothing to do for her, except perhaps to
keep her warm, and Ann solicitously wrapped
her in the blanket, the coverlet over that.
“You set right there,” said she, “an' I'll kinder
slip round through the orchard an’ put my hand into
our pantry winder. Emma's got a pitcher o' coffee
poured off from mornin'. Mebbe I can reach it.”
She emerged to the surface, and Selina, alone
with her chill and very much frightened by it,
wondered why Ann couldn't have taken her
home and given her a comfortable cup of tea in a
chair in the sitting-room. But she had no more
energy for thinking than for action. Ann seemed
to her, as she did to most of her neighbors, entirely
unaccountable. Unless you had the strength to
fight her, you could only yield.
[131]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
wa
LS
wa
Everything went as Ann had hoped, for she
was back again while Selina was still ineffectually
dealing with the strangeness of their situation,
and she bore a long half-bushel basket, laden to
the brim. It was covered with a fine towel, and
when she had whisked this off and folded it, with
a mechanical nicety, Selina saw bread in the
basket, a half loaf, currant cake of the kind Emma
was famous for, a little pitcher carefully wedged
and a generous plate of ham. There was a cup, a
bread knife and a spoon. Ann carefully extracted
the pitcher from its place and poured a half cup
of black coffee. This she offered to Selina.
“You better drink it down,” said she. “Emma
made some elderberry wine, in case o' sickness,
but I couldn't lay my hands on ’t.”
Selina, drinking her coffee in small sips, shook
her head. She was no longer trembling, and con-
science had returned to its job.
“I shouldn't ha' drinked it if you had,” said
[ 132 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
she. “I should have to be nigh death before I
set my lips to the wine cup.”
“Should ye?” enquired Ann tolerantly. “Well,
mebbe ’tis kind o’sweltry for it, a day like this,
but I shouldn't say no to a mite of elderberry wine,
when all's said an' done.”
Selina had given her back the cup and she poured
perhaps a thimbleful of coffee into it and tossed
it down with gusto.
“S’pos’n’’twas wine,” said she, and remembered
one of her mystery tales. “Cheerio!”
Selina, watching her, felt, in a way she could
not have explained, that, mysterious as she found
the game, this was a part of it. How should she
have guessed that Ann, as whole-heartedly
as a boy of twelve, was playing to the top
of her bent the rôle of bravo and robber
chief? But there was one thing Selina felt she had
to know.
“What under the sun d’you steal things out
0
Was O
[ 133 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
o' your pantry winder for?” she asked. “Why
didn't you go into the kitchen door?”
“Why,” said Ann, "can't you guess? So's
Emma shouldn't see me. When they find we
don't go out into the kitchen to Jason's, to have
Hermie Holt put us through the third degree,
they'll make for our house an’ they'll find Emma,
an’ if she's seen me they'll git it out of her or put
her on her oath-poor Emma! So here we be,
snug as an emmet in a cheese, an' Emma don't
know no more’n the dead. Mebbe she'll begin to
think I ain't fur away when she sees the ham's
gone an' the bread, but 'less’n they ask her ques-
tions right up an' down, she won't tell. I was
’most tempted to go into the kitchen,” added
Ann regretfully, “that hot apple pie smelt so good.
I do admire an apple pie, out of early apples so.
But there!” She tore herself away from this
fleeting joy of the flesh and regarded Selina with a
cheerful smile. And when Ann smiled, her face
[ 134]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
was beneficent as the sun. “Now,” said she,
“le's plan what we'll do next.”
Selina was bending on her that exasperated look
Ann was unhappily certain, sooner or later, to
awaken on the faces of her kind.
“Do?” said she. “I should think there's but
one thing to do, if you've got sense enough to
see what's before ye, an' that's to take that screw-
driver out o’ your pocket an' make way with it
'fore Mis’ Sheriff Holt gits hold on’t.”
“Well,” said Ann, calmly judicial, “you might
think that, fust go. But the question is,
what's best for the story? My opinion is
'twould be best to hide it, not so's you couldn't
find it, but so’s ’twould be found. That ties
up another knot in your plot, don't you see it
does?”
Selina was looking at her, mouth a little open
in supreme bewilderment and in her eyes that half
terrified conviction the truly mad awaken in the
[ 135 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
world at large. Ann, who was used to causing
such facial phenomena, went patiently on:
“An’’twould be kinder foolish to have the sheriff
find it. Obvious, that's what they call it, obvious.
It's got to be somebody else. An' they've got to
find it, not when they're lookin' for it but when
they ain't. My soul o' body, Selina Rule!" she
cried, with a shrillness not to be exceeded by
Mirandy Morey when strongly moved, “I see it
as plain as the nose on your face. That little imp
o’Satan, Mirandy Morey, comes over there an’
slips into our vegetable gardin an’ cuts a chunk
out of a melon here an' there, as they look ripe
enough. We ain't stopped her, Emma an' me,
because they never ripen anyways, the season's
so short. We keep sowin’’em, year in year out,
hopin' they'll do suthin' an' they never do an’ never
will. But what I'm goin' to do is take this bread
knife an' go over to the gardin' an' slice open the
biggest melon there is an’ scrape it out an' lay the
[ 136]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Scr
screw-driver inside. An' it bein' the biggest melon
an' the yellerest, Mirandy Morey'll have it 'fore
sunset.”
“Cut it open an' put in a screw-driver?” said
Selina, with the scorn of the unbeliever. “How
you goin' to hold it together?”
"I'm goin' to tie a string round it,” said Ann.
“I got a piece o' string right here in my pocket.
Many's the time I've done that, an' said to
Mirandy, 'The melon with the string round it is
the one we want for seed.' An' that's the one
she's took, an' said afterwards she see a wood-
chuck in the gardin, settin' up eatin', as bold as
brass."
Selina emitted a little moan, and Ann innocently
wondered at her own effect on the feminine mind.
Ever since these exciting events began to pile up,
Emma had taken to groaning, and now Selina
was following, a close second. Selina was speak-
ing.
wa
2 was
[ 1371


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
U
“What under the sun,” said she faintly, “do
you want the screw-driver found for? Here
you've got it right in your hand, an' you can hide
it, if you won't put it back into the tool chest,
or you can throw it into the fire. What's Mirandy
Morey got to do with it?”
“She'll give it over to the sheriff or Mis’ Holt,"
said Ann, patient as always with the haltingness
of the unimaginative mind. “Don't you see that's
got to be or the whole thing'd end up right here
an' now? The plot, Seliny, that's what we're
workin' for, the plot, an' it's got to be so’s
you couldn't git your finger-nail into it edge-
ways. Them you can see right through from
the beginnin',—why, they ain't wuth the ink
that goes to 'em. Nor the powder to blow
'em up. Now you set right here an' I'll clip
it over to the melon patch an’ do same as I
said.”
She took the bread knife from the basket,
[138]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
use
dropped it into her coat pocket with the screw-
driver and bade Selina a cheerful good-by.
“If I ain't back in less'n a quarter of an hour,”
said she, “you may know it's because I've been
took up. An’in that case, don't you say nothin' to
incriminate nobody, yourself least of all. You
better act kinder dazed, as if you'd lost your wits
or suthin'. There ain't no difficulty in that for any
of us. But you an' me,” concluded Ann, with
emphasis, "have got to hang together, an' when
I come back, fust thing you do you make up your
mind to tell me how it happened, an' what you
mean by sayin' you done it yourself.”
When she came back in less than her allotted
time, she found Selina in no condition to confess.
Selina had had time to think it over. She con-
demned herself for having confided to any extent
in a scatter-brain like Ann; deaf to all adjurations
she sat huddled on the end of the wash bench, the
coverlet about her shoulders, and refused to speak.
[139]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
1
W
LS
Ann was gentle with her. She had become tardily
compassionate over Selina who, she realized, was
of no mettle to enjoy the whirl of high adventures.
If Ann had been associated in this with a kindred
spirit, she knew how her own blood would have
mounted, but creatures like Emma and this faint
heart were only clogs upon the sweep of bright
romance: to be treated loyally, but regarded with
the tolerance naturally accorded the weaker na-
ture and more faltering mind. She stood for a
moment gravely regarding her, and Selina, wrig-
gling slightly under that inquisitory look, sud-
denly began to cry, in a half-hearted way, with
no audible sound and no contortion of the face.
The tears rolled slowly and copiously down her
cheeks, and Ann found the sight disconcerting.
“Don't do that,” she said sharply, and Selina
responded:
“I wish I was back in my comfortable home I
never'd ought to left. I wish he was there, too;
VI
[ 140 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
but he's past an' gone. I dunno what made me
think I'd got to foller out every order you give
me an' git out o' that good bed an' traipse off
acrost the mowin', wropped up in a coverlid,
too. If any of 'em see me, they never'll let me
hear the last of it, not to my dyin' day.”
“You wa’n’t wropped up in it,” said Ann
literally. “'Twas under your arm. An' if you
want to go back there an’ face the whole town-
ship-I guess it's the county by this time you
can do it. Only don't you let Mis’ Sheriff Holt
git her claws into you. Nor Mirandy Morey,”
she added, with a sudden access of enjoyment.
“That young one wouldn't leave hide nor hair
o'you, once git them eyes o’ her’n fixed on you
an' that tongue a-goin'. There wouldn't be
enough left o’you to make a feather duster.”
“I can't go back,” moaned Selina, in a miserable
acquiescence. “You know that as well as I do.
I should be took up for gittin' out o'winders an’
C
[ 141 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
wearin' off bedquilts that don't belong to me.
You'd land in the county jail, but the poorhouse
would be my end. That's where the crazy
paupers be.”
Ann contemplated the woeful figure. A diver-
sion occurred to her.
“Well, any ways,” said she, “le’s have dinner.”
“Over to your house?” Selina enquired hope-
fully.
Any pretext was welcome to free her from the
potato cellar.
“No,” said Ann cheerfully. “Right here. What
d’you s’pose I brought all these victuals for an
’most likely scairt Emma out o’ her senses thinkin'
somebody'd got in, if 'twan’t for our dinner?
There! you set still an' I'll make you as nice a ham
sandwich as ever you see.”
Selina did sit still, watching her with a patent
distaste, as if sandwiches made in that environment
were too unholy for human appetite to contem-
[ 142 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
plate. But when Ann, working deftly, had piled
her a slab she accepted it, only saying weakly,
as she began upon it:
“It's no time for dinner, anyways. 'Tain't
twelve o'clock.”
This Ann ignored. Food was, at this juncture,
not so much a necessity as a mental diversion.
“I'll warrant 'ee you had your breakfast late,
too,” she remarked sympathetically as she bit
into her own sandwich, a slatternly affair compared
with Selina's and much smaller. “'Twouldn't sur-
prise me to know you couldn't so much as swaller.”
Selina gave a little assenting noise, and plucked
up pride at being found so sensitive. Ann seemed
to her, as she did to most women, a gormin’
person, and the frank enjoyment with which she
polished off her own sandwich was, to say the
least, unladylike. Ann had quickly finished. She
put the bread and ham back in the basket and
neatly tucked them round.
[ 143 1


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Sec
“We can't afford a second helpin',” she said
soberly. “Nobody knows how long we shall be
marooned here. Our supplies must be made to
last.”
“Marooned?” repeated Selina. This suggested
to her only the hue of a dress she had once loved,
her first “for nice,” bought with her own money
when she went out to work. “What's that?”
“It's bein' abandoned on an island an' the crew
sailin' away from ye.” But Ann forbore to elab-
orate further. Selina must not judge her to be
entirely out of her head, else she might slip out
from the potato cellar and run shrieking to the
road. “Though,” she concluded hastily, “I guess
that's nothin' we need to concern ourselves about.
Here we be on dry land, an’ the chief thing for us
is to make up our minds what we'll do next.
Now the screw-driver's where 'twill do the most
good. It's safe in the middle of a melon, waitin'
for Mirandy Morey to find it. I'm within my
[ 144 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
rights. 'Twas my screw-driver, Emma's an’ mine,
an' I can throw it into the well or dig it into the
ground if I want to, half on't anyways, an' Emma
never'd say why do ye so. But about them papers
I'm kinder skittish. They were his papers, an’
here they be in my coat pocket. We stole 'em.
That is, you stole 'em an' I received 'em. I'm the
fence.”
“The fence?” repeated Selina, sorely bewildered.
"Law, yes. Ain't you read any detective
stories, an' the lib’ry right here afore your face
an' eyes? The fence is the one that receives the
stolen goods. But that's neither here nor there.
I hadn't ought to use words you ain't familiar
with. Anybody'd think your wits had all gone
into pies an' cakes for Jason Hale.”
Again Selina began rocking back and forth;
the ready tears were flowing.
“He won't eat no more of 'em,” she lamented.
“None o’my pies nor my cakes will Jason Hale eat.”
[ 145 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
De
“No,” said Ann, as if that were a matter to be
passed over as cursorily as possible in favor of more
weighty considerations. “But the thing we've
got to do now is to git them papers back where
you took 'em from.”
Selina was aghast.
“Go into that house,” said she, “with Mis’
Sheriff Holt reignin’ supreme?”
“'Twas but a minute ago you were longin' to
go into it,” said Ann calmly. “But that's neither
here nor there. We can't go, either of us, with
them papers in our pockets. What I say is, leave
'em round where somebody'll pick 'em up an'
find 'em.”
“Mirandy Morey?” enquired Selina, with a
fine irony which Ann, to her surprise, took se-
riously
“That might do,” said Ann thoughtfully. “She's
like a puppy that's learnt a few tricks an' has to
do 'em all one way. Every single thing she finds
[ 146)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
from now on, if ’tain't suthin' to eat, she'll carry
off to Hermie Holt. I dunno but that's the best
we can do, if the papers ain't too valuable to
leave round. What d’you say they be? I can't
seem to remember. You looked 'em over.”
Why Ann did not look them over herself she
did not say, though she had drawn them forth
from her pocket and was handing them, rather
gingerly, to Selina. Perhaps it seemed to her
that, as the theft was another's, that other should
be responsible for further meddling. But Selina
had no scruples. She took the papers, and at once
selected the one Ann was likely to feel an interest
in. There it was, a folded sheet, docketed across
the top: “Contract between E. H. and J. H.,”
with a penciled note in Jason's crabbed hand:
“Lumber Lot.” She laid it down beside her on the
bench and laboriously went through the rest.
“These two,” said she, turning them over in
their rubber band so that Ann could see the mem-
[ 147 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
CS
oranda at the ends, “were them old deeds he'd
been studyin' afore he got Emma to agree to
sell. When I see him twistin' an' turnin' 'em over
the lamp every evenin' I used to wonder whether
he didn't think there was some flaw or another
in the way the land come down to her an' he
could git it for the askin'. The rest's nothin' but
receipted bills except–oh, yes, here's his will.”
The last she said with a perfect neutrality of
tone, as if wills were of no actual importance in the
conduct of life.
“His will!” cried Ann. “You don't mean to
say you've got Cousin Jason's will right there in
your hand?”
“Yes,” said Selina indifferently. “You want
to see it?"
Ann was amazed at her.
“No,” said she, “course I don't. Whatever
’tis, 'tain't for you an' me to go spyin' into it.”
“You could, as easy 's not,” said Selina, still
[ 148 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN.
bursa
with that mild melancholy of indifference. “It
ain't sealed up. He never was one to use a good
envelope when he could help it. Want I should
look?”
“No,” said Ann indignantly. “'Course I don't.
Why, Seliny Rule, you've got no more sense of
what's right an’ wrong than a-than a crook.”
And she remembered that it was not so long
since she herself had rejoiced in her own qualifica-
tions as a crook. Life was very puzzling.
"He made that will himself,” said Selina, with
the same weary indifference. “Se' down to the
kitchen table he did an’ wrote it, ’twas only yester-
day, right on end o’ Mis’ Sheriff Holt's comin'
in all of a whew an' tellin' him you was mad as
hops with him for gittin' that land out of Emma
for little or nothin', an' he better look out how
he leaned over that bar on the barn door. He
was as mad as ever I see him, mad as he was that
year the steers got in an' trampled his pinies down.”
[ 149 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Yes,” said Ann, indifferently in her turn,
since Cousin Jason's devotion to his peonies was
as inexplicable a matter to her as her own diver-
sions were to him.
“'Twas then,” said Selina, "he se' down an'
wrote his will. Leastways, I s'posed it was a
will, for he kep’ it in his coat pocket, kinder pre-
cious, an’ we rode over to the street an’ while I
set in the wagon he was in squire's office, havin’
it signed an sealed an all, so I kinder thought.
Yes, he was there the whole durin' time.”
“Well,” said Ann philosophically, “if he was
as mad as that, 'twas with us, for thinkin' he
done wrong, an' I s’pose he left the property away
from us, where 'twould naturally go. But I tell
you this: a stolen will ain't any kind of a thing
to have round in your pocket, an' I sha’n’t
let the grass grow under my feet 'fore I take it
back.”
LS
as
S
“You
“Back to that house?” cried Selina.
[150]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Ann failed to hear the betraying sound. And
when a less skillful movement seemed likely to
attract her, Selina coughed violently and drowned
it out. She sat there for a moment, holding the
scraps of paper tightly in her hand, wondering
what she could do with them. Ann, primed with
all the known devices of criminals at such a pass,
would have told her to swallow them; but Selina
had never heard of such engorgings and dropped
them into her apron pocket, as the only hiding-
place available. Then she closed her eyes, chiefly
to secure a moment's freedom from Ann, and
really did sleep, “off and on,” as she realized when
she woke somewhat after twelve, to find Ann
sitting there with a little book in her lap, wherein
she wrote at intervals. Ann, looking up at her,
smiled encouragingly.
“There!” said she. “You've had a good sleep
an’ I guess you're 'cruited up so's you can take in
what I've decided to do. I'm goin' to take them
[ 152 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
knack of forcing you to do her will even when
you most longed to escape. That was like old
Jason, too, she reflected; it ran in the blood.
There was no actual pleasure in staying with
Jason, but she had never in years questioned
whether she had better stay. Selina had been
born an affectionate little creature, suited to quiet
domestic ways and the small corners of an obscure
life, but life itself had fitted her with a protective
armor of suspicion and irony not native to her
temperament. Yet underneath this, there still
lived, scarcely weakened by years, a childlike
hunger to be loved. Only she could never have
used that word. It would have cast her down
to the depths of a gauche natural shyness. If she
had had occasion to refer to love at all, as a dual
passion, she would have said a man and a maid
“set by” each other. That would have been her
expression of supremest feeling. Of one thing she
was sure: though Ann had had no part in old
[154)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“You'll find out,” said Ann, cryptically in her
turn. “Now, there's no reason above ground
why you an'me shouldn't pass the time, cast
away as we be now, playin' a little game betwixt
ourselves.”
Selina shook her head dismally. To her, a game
meant the incomprehensibility of cards or the
forfeits of her youth. Said she:
“I don't feel to.”
“They never do, prisoners don't,” said Ann,
again beginning to enjoy herself. “They have
to go through with it, all the same. Now you
have been arrested on suspicion of havin' some
knowledge of the death of Jason Hale of this
town. Where were you at the time the murder
took place?”
Selina looked at her with staring, obstinate
eyes.
“Seliny Rule,” said Ann, “you answer me."
For some reason always to be unknown to her-
[158]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
self, Selina felt bound to answer. Ann did not
really represent the majesty of the law, but she
was a towering figure, a new amazing light in her
eyes. If Selina could have known it, this was
not the light of authority but romance.
“What time in the day did the death o' the
deceased occur?” pursued Ann, recalling whiffs
of legal phraseology and becoming the more
dignified thereby.
In spite of herself, Selina answered:
“About half-past seven in the mornin' it might
ha' been, when I run down an’ found him-as
he was.”—Here a dry little sob choked her at the
remembrance.—“I see his watch on the ground.”
“Had somebody pulled it out an' then run?”
inquired Ann, frowningly.
“No! no!” Selina said, despising her for putting
questions with such obvious answers. “It jest
snapped out o' his pocket when he fell an' laid
there hangin' by the chain.”
[159]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“I was talkin' things over with him.”.
“Things? What things?”
“Things,” Selina repeated doggedly.
“Did you,” said Ann, “have any kind of a
quarrel?”
d
“No."
“What was Cousin Jason-I mean the deceased
—what was the deceased doin' of?”
“Well, if you must know,” said Selina, her eyes
snapping in a momentary savagery, "he had a
saw in his hand”—
“Father's saw?” cried Ann, her eyes big with
wonder.“I mean, the saw of the late Eliphalet
Hale? Our saw?"
“Yes,” said Selina, now beginning to snatch
at some pale enjoyment of her own. “The same
saw that little imp of a Mirandy Morey found
out amongst the pinies, an' he was jest goin' to set
to work to saw through that bar acrost the door-
way. But he didn't do it,” she added mournfully.
[ 161 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Saw it through? take it down?” repeated
Ann. “What under the canopy for?”
“Well,” said Selina, “there I guess it goes back
to you, an’ if you hadn't acted as you did with
your crazy talk an' all, he might ha' been alive to
this day.”
“I never!” said Ann, justly incensed. “I never
threatened Cousin Jason not so long as I lived on
this earth. So there!"
“Well, you told Mis' Sheriff Holt how you
was goin' to kill him, fallin' off o' that bar
an all, an' she come an' beseeched him to be
careful how he leaned on it, because suthin'
might happen to him, an' he was so mad he says,
I'll show 'em.""
“Show 'em what?” gasped Ann.
“Show 'em he wa’n't an old infirm creatur
that could be pitched out o’ barn doors an’ not
help himself. If there was one thing that made
Jason Hale madder 'n another 'twas to be treated
Tas
[ 162 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
as if he was gittin' along in years. You know that
as well as I do."
Ann shook her head.
“I dunno,” said she. “I can't see what made
him want to take away the bar.”
“Seems if you wa’n’t so bright as you expect
other folks to be,” said Selina bitingly. “He
could ha’ told ye what 'twas. He would, if you'd
been there, same's I was. “I'll learn 'em,' says he.
'I'll show 'em I don't need no bar to lean on when
I stan' here to look down at my pinies. I'll stan'
here in the doorway an' show 'em whether I'm
goin' to lose my footin' or not.' An’ with
that—"
But quite evidently she found it impossible to
go on.
“There! there!” said Ann soothingly. “'Twas
a terrible thing for you to witness. I wish I
hadn't asked ye. Don't you think no more about
it.” But a mounting curiosity did get the better
[ 163 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
of her and she added, almost in spite of herself,
“I s'pose he took a step for’ard then an' kinder
stumbled—lawzy me! I do wish I knew how
'twas in the end."
“He didn't stumble,” said Selina doggedly.
She seemed bent on saving old Jason's pride as he
had himself been moved to save it.
“Seliny Rule,” said Ann irrepressibly, “you
forge ahead an' tell me how ’twas.”
“Well,” said Selina, "he had the saw in his hand
same as I told you, an' I said suthin' an' he turned
round an' then ”
A sharp voice pierced the air of the cellar like an
insect's shrilling note. There, in the doorway,
holding a bush aside with one chubbily valiant
hand, stood Mirandy Morey, her blue eyes alight
with ecstasy. Whether she had been looking for
them or not, she had found them, and romance as
potent as Ann's, though of a different stripe, bade
her rejoice.
[ 164 1


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Here you be,” she cried piercingly, “both o'
you. An' the sheriff an' Mis’ Holt are as mad as
hornets because they don't know where you
went. I'll fun an' tell 'em quick 's ever I can.”
[ 165 1


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“D’you know of anything else?” she inquired
avidly. “Somebody said he set out ever-bearin'
strawberries, but I didn't know's they'd even
bloomed.”
Ann's manner underwent a change. Under
the scowl that armed her features when she found
wandering boys in her pear tree, she became ter-
rible to look upon. Her voice rang out in a tone of
command.
“Mirandy Morey,” said she, “you're a naughty
girl, goin'round to folks's melon patches an'
getherin' up fruit. Especially the doctor's. Now
you set down on that end o’ the bench whilst I
leave you here an' go an' do an arrant. Seliny,
you take holt of her apron an' you keep a holt of
it an' don't you stir, neither o’you, till I come back.
And then,” she added darkly to Mirandy, “if
you're a good girl mebbe I'll let you go. Here!”
She drew the amazed Mirandy to the bench and
forced her down upon it by a coercion Mirandy
[ 168 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
could not resist, and taking one corner of her
pinafore she placed it within Selina’s grasp. “You
keep a holt of it,” she said meaningly, and Selina
understood that she was to detain Mirandy until
Ann should salvage the bundle of papers from the
doctor's garden. None of these backings and
fillings were very clear to Selina. She only knew
Ann was playing some kind of intricate game in
the interest of their common problem and, not
understanding it, she dared not block it in any way
lest worse befall her.
Ann pushed through the doorway and hurried
off.
“Where's she goin'?” asked Mirandy, sitting
in present contentment so long as she found the
situation perplexing, and holding her melon in her
lap.
"I guess she's goin' to do an arrant, same as she
said,” answered Selina uneasily.
“What kind of an arrant?” asked Mirandy,
arr
Oswe
une
[ 169 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
V
gathering impetus from the wonder of actually
being answered.
“I dunno,” replied Selina, thinking how sleepy
she had suddenly grown and how cold the cellar
was, how lacking in the comforts of Jason's home.
“Why don't you know?” enquired Mirandy.
To this, Selina made no reply, and Mirandy
was forced to draw her own conclusions.
“She don't think ’twas her melon I've got here?”
she asked strenuously. “Well, I can tell her
'tain't, anyways, an’ if ’twas ’twouldn't do her
no good goin' over the patch. She wouldn't find
out. I can take a melon off the stem so slick—"
Here Mirandy suddenly realized that her admirable
system of melon gathering might as well be kept
in abeyance. For a time she was silent, ruminating.
Selina leaned back against the wall of the cellar
and allowed herself a thought, not of a cat nap
exactly, for that she could not have, but a fleeting
memory of what a cat nap used to be. At that
[ 170 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
moment Mirandy's round face became irradiated
with a sudden flashing intelligence from eyes to
chin. “You needn't tell me where she's gone,”
she cried sharply, with the decision of a forceful
nature roused to a new grip of life. “I know.
She's gone to find doctor an' tell on me, an’
she's a mean hateful thing, an? 'fore I'd tell anything
'twas told me same as I told her that—" Mean-
time she was trying to pull her pinafore from
Selina's grasp, and Selina, wakened effectually
to the prospect of facing an irate Ann whose
commands she had not obeyed, hung to it the more
desperately.
“There! there!” said she, in the tone of mingled
patronage and conciliation known among those
not in the habit of dealing with children. “You
be a good girl an’ when she comes back she'll let
you clip it right along home.”
But to Mirandy there were other ways of escap-
ing from an exasperating grasp. In that instant
n
[ 171 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
she had unbuttoned her pinafore at the neck be-
hind, slipped out of it and darted through the
doorway, her melon rolling. Just beyond the
doorway she paused and sang a song of triumph
only to be described by the syllable “Yah-yah,”
Da capo, after which she tore across the field and
over the stone wall into the road: for she saw
Ann Hale appearing on the ridge. And Ann was
striding at a rate dangerous to little girls with
short legs.
“Well,” said Ann, appearing like an avenging
fate before Selina who sat ruefully contemplating
the pinafore of Mirandy, “she got away from ye,
didn't she? Seems if you might ha' had the sperit
to keep your hand on a young one like that, no
bigger 'n a pint o cider, no matter if she was
possessed of the Evil One.”
“She run right out o’ this,” said Selina, regarding
the pinafore as if it were a responsible agent,
"as slippery as an eel.”
was
S
a
[ 1721


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Well,” said Ann bitingly, “I s'pose you know
what it means, don't you? She'll run like a deer
to tell Hermie Holt, an' he'll be over here with his
handcuffs in his pocket an’ I dunno but the whole
township to his heels. Now, do you know what
we've got to do next?”
“No,” said Selina, with an evident distaste for
whatever it might be. “But I know I've ketched
my death o'cold here underground.”
“We've got,” said Ann, with the utmost severity
but really rejoicing in any acute turn of affairs,
"to git out o’here, quick as we can manage it.
Hermie won't be round till he's had his early
supper. I know that. I see him an' Mis' Holt
puttin' for home. They prize their cup o' tea as
they do their life. But after supper, here they'll
be, right on the dot, an' you an' I must be some'r's
else. Now we've got to clear up this place so
’twon't show it's been lived in, an' then we'll
put." With great rapidity she went over the
ve
[ 173 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
wild tract of land that sloped rapidly down to a
lower lot, called the bog.
“O Ann!” moaned Selina, as she stumbled
along and Ann walked easily, with her free swing,
“why ain't we goin' to your house? I should
think you'd admire to go home, after all we've
been through, an' seems if you might give me a
shelter one night any ways. Seems if 'twas the
least you could do.”
“You'll have shelter all right,” said Ann, waiting
for her to catch up, and then, seeing how wearily
she walked, taking the coverlet from her and
adding it to her own burden. “You remember
Cousin Jason's old sugar house, don't ye? The
one up on the slope.”
Selina stopped short
“This ain't no way to git to it,” said she.
“There's a nice loggin' road to it from Jason's
house, but you can't make it this way without
crossin' the bog."
NV
[ 176)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
evenin' turnin' cold, but whatever 'tis, ’twon't be
gittin' into a bog an' bein' sucked down to the
center o’the airth an' hollerin' whilst the mud
stops my mouth.”
She placed her feet together in a rigid symmetry
proclaiming her doggedness of decision and closed
her eyes. Ann, looking at her, might well have
been discouraged, but difficulties never threw her
off the track. They but exhilarated her.
“Here,” she said pleasantly, "you lemme wrop
this coverlid round you. 'Tis growin' kinder
chilly. I'll take the blanket an’ we'll set an’ talk
it over.”
Selina opened her eyes slightly and gazed at her,
in some surprise and an excess of caution lest Ann
had a design against her not yet apparent. But
Ann, kindliness itself, wrapped the quilt about her
and tucked it down deftly where it covered her
chin. Then she disposed the blanket on the
ground, to serve as a cushion, and dropped upon
[ 1781


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
a thing to eat to-day, but I'm chilled to the bone.
But anybody might as well die one way as an-
other, an' if I've got any choice left, it's to be took
up an’ hung if I've got to be an’ not choke to death
with my mouth full o'swamp mud.”
“Sho!” said Ann reflectively. “Well, if that's
the way it seems to you, I dunno’s you can do any
different from what you be doin'. But somehow it
don't seem to me that way, an' mebbe I can't do
any different either, an' this is what I'm goin' to
do.”
She came to her feet with a quickness at which
Selina blinked and instinctively shut her eyes
again. Selina was not fanciful, but several con-
current images went through her brain in a vivid
rush quite foreign to the ordinary habit of her mind.
Lightning, she thought, that was Ann, a steel
spring, a snake. But she had no time to clarify
her thought, for Ann, with a noiseless accuracy of
movement, had fallen upon her, scraped her up
[ 180)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
S
SV
was
ca
from the rock and was striding with her into the
swamp. Selina hardly knew how she was being
carried, whether with the utmost convenience to
herself or to Ann or to them both. She only knew
they were progressing in a series of lopes from
tussock to tussock and that she was by instinct
clinging to something—probably Ann's neck-
and that Ann breathed heavily but never faltered.
It was a long way across the swamp, it seemed to
her, and indeed it was a long way to Ann, having
to pick her familiar route with the coverlet trailing
at last and once getting under her feet. But she
finished her course without accident and stumbled
up the rising ground on the other side, not so tender
of Selina now that the danger of toppling over
with her was past. She set down the little figure
abruptly and Selina, unprepared for it, let her
knees collapse under her, and fell in a heap. Ann,
as if her interest in her burden had departed, now
that the emergency was over, did not even look
[ 181 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
at her. She took out her handkerchief and mopped
her forehead.
“My!” she permitted herself the breath to say,
“that was the toughest piece o' work I ever done
in all my born days. Now,” she added, as she got
her breath again under control, “you set there or
you lay there same as you be, an' I'll go back after
the blanket an’ the basket.”
“Oh my suz!” groaned Selina from the ground,
“don't you resk it, Ann. That's a terrible dan-
gerous place. An' if you fall off'n one o' them
hummocks, you might scream all night an' I
couldn't help ye.”
“I sha’n’t fall off,” said Ann grimly. “An' if
I do I sha’n’t scream. I dunno whether it's a
quagmire or whether it ain't, but if it is, an’ I git
drawed down you go home an' tell Emma. An'
you tell everybody,” she added, the light of romance
flashing into her gaunt face—“tell 'em I done it.
Tell 'em I pushed Cousin Jason over the sill—"
Crea
[ 182 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“But you didn't,” Selina screamed back at her.
Ann seemed to her so uncontrollable a force that
she felt she must scream her down, deafen her into
silence, sweep her out of the way. “Ain't I told
you I done it myself?"
“Never you mind that,” said Ann. “You
couldn't stan' up ag’inst it. You're a poor creatur',
all nerves an' not a mite o' judgment. No, you
tell 'em I done it, an' I was—” she hesitated for a
dramatic conclusion and ended gleefully, “Tell
'em I was overtook with remorse, an' I walked
right into the swamp. Tell 'em,” said Ann, now
in full career and seeing before her the printed
pages of the story she longed to write, “tell 'em
I was glad to go. Where the wicked cease from
troublin,” she concluded with a delighted sniff,
"an' the weary are at rest. But!” here she came
back to realities with a bound. “You take these
papers. I forgot to tell you I found 'em in doctor's
gardin jest where I flung 'em in. You keep 'em
[ 183


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
jest as they be, an' when I'm no more you carry
'em over to Hermie Holt an’— There!' says you.
'I rescued 'em. She was goin' to fling' 'em away.
She's a bold creatur',' says you, 'that Ann Hale.
A crook. But she's got her just deserts an’ she's
down to the bottom of old Jason's swamp, that's
where she is an’ serve her right.' All the papers
are there, Seliny, same as they were when you
stole 'em. Or, no! don't you own you stole 'em,
if I've passed away. You say 'twas me.”
“They ain't all there,” said Selina, in a small
voice. “The agreement betwixt him an' Emma
ain't there."
“What!” cried Ann. “You ain't left it in the
Cave?"
“No,” said Selina, flinching before Ann's frown-
ing face.
“You ain't made way with it?” Ann repeated,
incredulously.
Selina nodded.
[ 1841


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
en
UN
“You have?” said Ann. “What under the heav-
ens d’you do that for?”
“I told you,” said Selina miserably. “I had to
tell you I done it because I had to keep you from
goin' round talkin' the way you did an' drawin'
suspicion on you. An' then when I told you, I
kinder thought you'd be more likely not to tell
if”—Here she faltered.
“If you bribed me,” said Ann, with a dread note
in her voice. “You said so, afore, but I never
more'n half believed it. An' you've tore up a legal
paper. Why!” All the hours she had spent in the
courthouse listening to the exposition of the law
rolled upon her like a wave and hurled her to the
righteous eminence whence she could judge her
sister woman. “Destroy a legal paper!" she
repeated, in a tone as solemn as judgment, “why,
that's as bad-as bad—” She paused here for
adequate simile, and Selina flashed at her:
“You seem to conclude it's wuss than plannin'
[185]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
W
Tas
this moment Selina definitely accepted the certainty
that, while Ann sank deeper and deeper into the
swamp, she herself was to languish here, forsaken,
until such time as hunger forced her forth to seek
neighborly aid. But Ann had no idea of sinking in
the swamp. She did not know whether it was
bottomless or not and, indeed, hardly gave the
legend a thought. It was at least an exciting fic-
tion, making her sallies across it the more dramatic,
and Selina's apprehension was the more grateful as
a background for her own prowess. Ann did
long, with a mighty longing, for the approval of
her kind. She often thought what it would be to
stand up before an applauding throng and make a
speech; and when it came to discovering the North
Pole and sailing gallantly home to receive the
tributes of a nation thrilled to the core, that, she
knew, was to be “made.” Now crossing a swamp
was something, if only in the mind of a timorous
Selina Rule. Thinking these things, she went
[ 188 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
ca
28
was
splashing from point to point, recovered her
basket and blanket on the farther side and came
back again without mishap. But there was no
little figure collapsed on the ground before her.
Selina had gone. For a moment, Ann was merely
disgusted with her, a Selina who needed to be
carried across the swamp and yet had the strength
to run away. But the door of the sugar house, the
weathered brown oblong two or three rods up the
slope, was open. Selina had sensibly betaken
herself to shelter, and there Ann found her: but
not a Selina prepared to sing pæans in praise of
those who essay the perils of swamps. Instead, a
small heap of a Selina upon the coverlet she had
laid on the floor, a creature opening her eyes for a
woe-begone glance and closing them again as if she
found the effort too much for her. Ann bustled
about, taking off her coat and hanging it on a nail
and acting, Selina wearily thought, as if she meant
to set up housekeeping
[ 189 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Ann,” said she faintly, “I b’lieve my soul I'm
comin' down with a fit o' sickness.”
“No, you ain't,” said Ann ruthlessly. “You've
been through too much, that's all. You're all
wore out. You wait till I can git us a cup o' tea.
I dunno how, exactly, but git it I will. I wish
they hadn't tore out all the b’ilin' down business
Cousin Jason had in here when he used to make
sugar. But I'll manage suthin' later on. Don't
you want a mite o’ham to keep you up till then?”
Selina shook her head and rolled over on the
coverlet, her face to the wall. Ann sat down in
one of the derelict chairs and considered.
“What bothers me,” she said, at length, “is
that we ain't got enough complications.”
Selina rolled back and sat up to transfix her
with a worried gaze.
“What kind?” she inquired. “I ain't so sick
as that yet. You s'pose I be?”
“Oh, I don't mean that sort,” said Ann, with a
[ 190 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
as v
tools from unsuspecting households? It was worth
trying. Perhaps it could be done. But now there
were problems to be met here, actualities of the
plot where Selina indubitably occupied a place.
“Seliny,” she called loudly, as if Selina were
deaf as well as unresponsive, “you wake up an'
put your mind on what we're doin' of.”
Selina sulkily came again to a sitting posture.
Again she fixed Ann with a glittering eye. Her hair,
as Ann noted absently, was “all over her head.”
“You can speak for yourself,” said Selina. “It
may be what you're doin', but it's nothin' to me.
All I want is to be let alone an’ git warm-or git
cold, one or ’tother, an' stay so. Fust I'm burnin'
up like fire embers an' then I'm as cold as ice. You
may not b’lieve it, but you'll see the day you
repent bringin' me into this God-forsaken place to
ketch my death."
Ann had not been ill since her childish measles
and mumps. She had an impression that most
[ 194 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
er
V
“Wa’n’t he fond of anything else?” Selina in-
quired, her eyes like those of a ruthless judge.
“You think it over. Wa’n’t there anything else
he spent his life worshipin', when he hadn't any-
thing left to him to worship but what grew out
o'the ground?”
“His pinies?” said Ann, now abundantly curious.
“Yes, he did set by them.”
“Set by 'em?” said Selina ragingly as if her mind
could hardly compass the breadth of his devotion.
“I should think he did. He'd stan' there in that
barn door by the hour, lookin' down on 'em when
they were in bloom. He'd go out there in full
moon the month they blowed an' come in an' tell
me how much he managed to see of 'em, an’’most
always he was disappointed because the colors
didn't come out in the moonlight an' the white
ones looked like handkerchers spread on the grass.
I mean, they did to me. Lord above us only
knows what they looked to him.”
Ove US
WS
[ 197 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
"You!” Ann ejaculated. “What under the sun
for?”
“Because I couldn't bear to see anybody want
anything as Jason Hale wanted them roots," said
Selina savagely, “an not git 'em for him. Why,
Ann Hale, I ain't never had anything myself in
all my born days. I went to the poor farm when
I was three year old. I begun to work out when
I was ten. When I was twenty-five I went to
work for Jason Hale’s wife.”
“Yes,” said Ann, “when she had her shock.”
“She had to have a shock,” said Selina bitterly,
“to git a hired girl into that house, an' he never
would ha' had her then if he hadn't got a poor
fool like me you could pay little or nothin' to."
"Well,” said Ann, in wonder, “an' you've stayed
there ever sence. I always wondered what made
you, when there was plenty o places you could
ha’ had. You could ha’ gone to the Branch an'
laid up money.”
[ 2011


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Who could ha’ run away an' left a man like
that,” said Selina, lashing herself on, “wantin'
things an' too stingy to buy 'em an’ not stoppin'
wantin' 'em but cravin’’em more an’ more? Why,
I've seen that man settin' by one taller candle
studyin' a piny catalogue—I wrote to 'em unbe-
knownst when I see it in the paper, and told 'em
to send it. Mebbe you could ha' stood it. I
couldn't, that's all. An' when I see him markin'
'em off on the paper, the kinds he'd like to have,
I says to him, 'You goin' to send for some?' He
looked up at me as if I'd struck him a blow. If
looks could ha’ killed, his would ha' killed me.
'No,' says he. “I've got pinies enough now.' An’
I knew then he couldn't bring himself to send.
All he could do was to study 'em over ’n’ over
there on paper. Same as they say a miser counts
his gold. An' when I'd stood it as long as I could,
I got out my money from under my feather bed,
what I'd laid by that winter, an' wropped it up
N
was
[ 202 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
with a baby-an' went off an’ set 'em out. An' I
slipped into the barn an’ looked out on him-out
o' that very barn door I looked where he pitch-
poled down amongst 'em-an' I kep’ kinder back
an' he was so took up with 'em he never knew I
was there."
The moon had laid a pathway on the dark
floor of the sugar house, and Selina, regardless of
her own body, or, it seemed, of her very being,
stood in its track. Ann, noting how it lighted the
seamed disorder of her face, felt that she ought
to turn away from it. And yet she regarded it
with awe.
“Why, Seliny,” said she, in a low tone, “you
must ha' set by him as—as young folks do when
they—marry.”
And upon this Selina began to cry, not with
that ugliness of half suppressed emotion Ann had
seen in country women, but a frank abandon to a
wildness of pain. And up to this time Ann had
rn av
( 204 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
way, wantin' what's nice an' pretty an' born
t'other way, not able to let himself have it.”
She could hardly have put it more clearly for
Ann's comprehension. She did not, however,
know she had done it and she could not have done
it again.
“Well!” said Ann. “My suz!"
“An' then he dies,” said Selina, abating only a
little of her passion, “an' I says to you ‘I done
it.' An' I did. An' you go an’ stir up the whole
neighborhood with your fool talk an' here we be
now.”
Ann had been deeply moved. She was moved
still, but for an instant her undying love of myste-
rious adventure came up in her and blotted out
the meager lines of homespun tragedy.
“Seliny,” said she, “you don't mean that. You
can't mean it. You wa’n’t”—she hesitated and
hit upon a word that looked to her, as she seized
it, supremely ridiculous—"you couldn't ha' had
CO
[ 206)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Yes,” said Ann breathlessly, “yes! What d’you
say?"
“I don't hardly know,” mused Selina. “But
it all come back to me, all the years an’ what he'd
made of 'em. How he never'd had no comfort of
his wife, poor sick thing as she was, layin' there an'
wastin' away. An' how he never'd had a piny
to speak of if I hadn't give 'em to him.”
“You told him then?” said Ann breathlessly.
“Course I told him, more fool I! 'Twa’n’t
that I meant to, but everything that had passed
an’ gone come up an' broke over me like the waves
o'the sea."
“Well,” said Ann, “what d'he say? Wa’n’t he
pleased?”
“No,” said Selina aridly. Her tears stinted with
the dryness of her answer. “Not any to speak
of. He looked as if it scairt him 'most to death.”
“Well,” Ann insisted, “he must ha' said suthin'.
What d'he say?”
VC
waves
[ 208 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
hope you stood up to him an' told him to his face
'twa’n’t so."
“Do ye?” said Selina. “Well, I didn't. I let
him know never such a thing come into my head,
but, same time, I told him I prized him as I do my
life.”
Ann laid a hand on her thin shoulder and shook
her a little.
“Seliny Rule,” said she, “I b’lieve you're out
o’your mind.”
“Oh, no, I ain't,” said Selina. “An' I wa’n’t
out o' my mind then, though from what happened
I guess I'd better been an' it never'd ha' come to
pass. I told you how it come over me what a
poor lonesome creatur' he'd been, an' I says to
myself: 'If anybody'd only set by him, everything
that went wrong with him would ha' gone right.
An' it's a pity,' I says, ‘he should go down to his
grave thinkin' there never was a soul that cared
whether he lived or died.' An' I says to him-
as
d
.
[ 210 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
thrill of action and now she began to imagine she
saw the lights of another advancing host, coming
along the dark way of dreams.
“I s'pose,” she said to herself, in a voice of awe,
“that's—love.” And at the same instant it came
to her that there might be stories of love on the
library shelves, not “kinder sickish,” as she had
thought, but-love. “Seliny,” she said, her hand
still on the meager shoulder, “ain't it a wonderful
night?”
“Yes,” said Selina indifferently. “I guess so.
It's full moon. But there's but one thing I want,
an' that's to git warm."
Ann came back to earth. She felt a quick spring-
ing tenderness for this little creature who had
accomplished something Ann had not herself
managed in her sixty-two years. She had loved
and-mystery beyond belief, proving how deep the
central mystery must be—she had loved Jason
Hale. Selina, out of the idiocy of her love, perhaps
[ 213 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
because of it, seemed to her helpless and therefore
to be protected
“Now you look here,” said Ann. “I'm goin'
to warm you up, soon 's ever I can. I'm goin' to
clip it home an' git some more bed-clo’es an'a
nip o' that elderberry wine, wherever 'tis. Any-
ways, some red pepper. An' if I can slip into the
kitchen ’thout Emma seein' me mebbe I can fill a
hot-water bag, if the kittle’s on. But, Seliny,”
she turned at the door, to ask, “if you see him
pitch-pole out, why under the heavens didn't you
up an’ say so right off?”
“Do you b’lieve for a minute,” said Selina,
“that would ha' been the last of it? They'd have
got thornin' me, same as you did yourself, an' I
should ha' been on my oath an', 'fore I knew it,
they'd had it out o' me what I said to him, an' it
never'd ha' been forgotten, how Seliny Rule told a
man she set by him an' he fell out of a door an’
broke his neck.”
ven
[ 214 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Oyou poor creatur’!” said Ann. “Omy soul!”
She did not stay for more, though again she
saw how thorny was the path of the mystery called
love, even to so homespun a figure as Selina Rule.
She ran out of the house and up the wood path to
the road, and by Cousin Jason's house where the
two front rooms were lighted, one, she knew,
where Cousin Jason must be lying and the other
where the watchers would whisper and doze until
they had made their cup of tea at twelve o'clock.
At the field bordering her own home lot she crossed
the stone wall and the orchard, to approach the
house from the back, for she had n't yet made up
her mind whether to go in and confide her plans to
Emma or break and enter through the pantry
window. There was a light in the sitting room.
She paused a few moments to listen, and then
slipped into the shade of the lilac by the shed
door. And here, at the instant of her entering
the shadow, a hand closed upon her wrist and a
vas
[ 215 )


If Ann had been told that a man's hand would
grip her wrist out of the dark, with an implication
of her being "wanted,” it would have seemed to
her a thrilling incident in an adventure that showed
no sign, as yet, of coming to an end. But, taken
by surprise, with her mind on Selina alone in the
sugar house suffering from nerves and possibly a
chill, she was merely irritated and flung back at
him:
“You take your hands off’n me,” to add, after
an instant's scrutiny of his face, “Why, Henry
Griffin, what under the sun do you mean, hangin'
round here in the dead o' night, scarin' anybody
out o' their wits?”
“You come along o' me,” said Henry “an' I'll
tell you.”
And under the propulsion of the hand now upon
her arm, she was being led back into the orchard
rol
[ 217 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
were Henry and Annette unaccountably apart.
Ann had never read Shakepeare's sonnets, but her
heart was running passionately to the tune of
them.
“Henry,” said she and her voice trembled on
his name so that he wondered if she were cold,
“d’you ever see such a night as this?”
He bent a little to look at her more closely. This
was, he felt, a new dodge to beguile him to some-
thing, he did not know what, but folderol, since
it was Ann's.
“I ain't here,” he said dourly, “to talk about
the night.”
“Seems if,” said Ann, regardless of his tone,
“I never see such a moon in my life. An' there's
Seliny Rule up there, heartbroken, as you might
say, an' all alone.”
“Up where?” inquired Henry pertinently, but
as Ann did not answer, he continued: “What's
the matter of her heart?”
VO
[ 222 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
vas
She was wondering if she might tell him. It
seemed to her she had got to have somebody on
Selina’s side. And Henry, though he was, to some
extent, talking to-night, was in ordinary silence
itself. She could at least persuade him to let her
trust him. She felt the challenge of that.
“Henry,” said she, “I'm goin' to tell you one
o'the queerest things you ever heard of in all your
days, an' you'll see it's suthin' you mustn't tell,
not if you live to be a hundred. Seliny Rule set
by Cousin Jason Hale as she did her life.”
Henry made the obvious reply:
“She's an old woman."
“She wa’n't always an old woman,” said Ann,
who was prepared for this. “When she went
there to work, she wa’n’t any older 'n Annette is
now, an' it grew up in her an' kep’ growin' all the
time, till now he's passed away an' it ain't too
much to say it's broke her heart.”
"I guess he'd laugh, if he was alive,” said Henry
[223]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
and it might well be that Selina, who “waited
on him hand and foot,” who “tended him with
hot cloths,” according to the country superlatives,
came nearer to his heart than any human thing.
“Well,” said Henry, with the air of dismissing a
topic of an indifferent interest, “seems kinder
sickenin' to me, that's all I can say.”
But Ann was launched and a fair wind blew her
on.
“An' that ain't all,” said she. “Seliny see him
fall overboard, an' that's what upset her som
that an' her broken heart.”
Now Henry's attention was really arrested.
“She did?” he said incredulously. “Why didn't
she say so before then an’ put a stop to all this
go-round, Mis’ Sheriff Holt sayin' she guessed if she
told all she knew somebody'd swing for 't, an' that
little imp of a Mirandy Morey drawin' herself
up on the winder-sill by her hands an’ scarin’ Aunt
Emma 'most to death.”
[225]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Law, Henry,” said she indulgently, indulgent,
at least, of her own bizarre activities, “I never
meant no harm. Mis' Sheriff Holt's the one that
done the business. But le’s not get away from ”—
she had a phrase to use here which seemed to her
admirable, as pertaining to courts and evidence-
“the subject in hand. You ask why Seliny didn't
up an' tell. Land alive! she couldn't. She hadn't
the stren’th. Her knees were weak under her.
She had to go to bed, an’.there I found her, the
coverlid up to her chin.”
“Yes,” said Henry, “an' you ketched her up an'
raced her off some'r's, Lord knows where."
“Course I did,” said Ann cheerfully. “There
they were, outside the bedroom door, ready to
break in an’hound her to death. An' there was she
mournin' like a dove over her lost mate"
But at this Henry, who was unused to figurative
language, balked. He bent to peer at her with an
anxiety now for her alone.
[227 1


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Aunt Ann,” said he, “you don't feel feverish,
do you? You've said some terrible queer things.”
“Aunt Ann,” as well as “Aunt Emma!” Cer-
tainly he had got swiftly used to feeling himself
in the family.
"No," said she. “I'm real well, Henry, but
when I think o’that poor woman that's lost her
all, mournin' herself to death over there in the
sugar house”—
“Oh,” said Henry, “that's where she is then,
old Jason's sugar house?”
“An' a high fever, too, by this time,” pursued
Ann. “When I left her, she'd been shakin' like a
leaf an' that's the way pneumonia begins—hot
an' cold an' 'fore you know it, out o’ their head.”
“What d’you leave her for?” asked Henry,
sensibly.
“I left her,” said Ann" because I ain't got the
wherewithal up there to save her life, if so be she
should be sick. I thought mebbe I could git in
[ 228 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
WO
an' do up a few things 'thout Emma's knowin' it.
I can't have Emma brought into this.”
“You better ha' thought o' that before,” said
Henry scathingly. “You better ha' thought Mi-
randy Morey'd come on your hat you left in some
God-forsaken place an’ Aunt Emma see her swellin'
round in it, bold as brass, an' thinkin' for all the
world you'd been made way with.”
“My soul!” said Ann. “Did Emma have to go
through that?” She felt warm at the heart over
the vision of small, patient Emma so concerned.
The two sisters had never seen any reason for
outspoken affection, but Ann felt suddenly a draw-
ing toward Emma and their home. “'Twa’n’t in a
God-forsaken place, Henry,” she said, more meekly
than she was used to speaking. “'Twas under
Seliny's bedroom winder. I left it for a clew.”
This Henry did not answer. It was too wild
and wandering. He was silent, evidently think-
ing, and Ann also kept very still. She had a whole-
1.
[229]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
some fear of Henry, at that moment, as the one
person armed with the present power of spoiling
all her darling plans.
“I'll tell you,” said he, “what I'll do, an' it's
the only thing I will do. I've got my horse an’
buggy here."
“You have?” said Ann. “What for?”
“What for?” repeated Henry, as if anybody
ought to have known immediately. “I'm goin'
to carry off Annette, if I can stir her a step
away from Aunt Emma, Aunt Emma rockin' back
an’ for’ard and Annette holdin' camphire to her
nose. You've brought Annette into this, whether
you will or no, an’ if I can git her started I'm goin'
to carry her off over to the Branch to Aunt Jennie's
till it blows over.”
Ann was enraptured. He must set by Annette,
he must be making himself responsible for her, a
midnight flight and all. It was nowhere near
midnight, but the word itself fitted her ideas of the
[ 230)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
occasion and, to her eager mind, midnight it
was.
“O Henry!” said she hopefully, “you do set by
Annette, don't you?”
“Set by?” Henry repeated angrily. “What's
that got to do with it? Annette ain't goin' to be
dragged into this commotion, you can bet your
life on that. Now—” He seemed to have for-
mulated something—“I'll give up that. If I can
git you out o' the neighborhood, I'll resk Annette.
You come along an jump into the buggy anº
we'll go round by the sugar house an' take in
Seliny an' I'll carry you both over to Aunt
Jennie's an then we can see what we'll do. You
can be gittin' into the buggy whilst I tell
Annette.”
“No, Henry,” said Ann, “don't you do any
such thing. You come right along without a
word, an' she an' Emmaʼll be as innocent as the
babe unborn. An’if they know where we be they'll
TO
n.
OV
[231)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Tas
who, she suspected, was not so ill as she thought
herself. Selina had simply been all nerved up,
and Ann recurred again to the wonder of the strange
besetment called love which could weave its
wreaths of passionate lament about the memory
of old Jason Hale. Suddenly she felt the need of
impressing the wonder of it on Henry, who as-
suredly considered Annette his Annette, but had
thus far shown no apparent realization of the
amazing treasury of youth and a moonlit
world.
“Henry,” said she, “don't it seem the queerest
thing that ever come into your head—Seliny Rule
settin' by Cousin Jason the way she did an' her
heart ’most broke over losin' him?”
“Not,” Ann added, in her own mind, “that she
ever had him to lose, but there's no reason for
Henry's knowin' that.”
“I dunno,” said Henry, giving his attention to
his horse. “Kinder sickenin' I call it.”
[ 233 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
This was again a facer, but Ann found she was
speaking quite loudly into the still air.
“Well, then, you give your mind to such things
when it's the time for 'em-go it while you're
young, I say—an' you won't have folks callin' you
sickenin’ when you're old.”
At that point Henry, seeming to repent of his
ungraciousness, qualified grudgingly:
“I don't want to cry down nobody, old or young.
But anybody can like anybody all right, so fur as
I can see, an' not be gassin' about it all the time.”
“But the moonlight!” said Ann. They were
coming out of the wood-shaded stretch into a silver
sea of it and she was beyond words exhilarated
and moved by a wonder she had never felt before.
Certainly it was Selina Rule, to whom nature and
circumstance had been equally hostile, who had
opened to her this door into a spacious room. The
bright mantle of romance that now enveloped
Selina seemed to float in a scented air, and its hem,
SCO
[234]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
was
at least, touched her also. Selina had never had a
chance. She had loved without fruition and Ann
felt, for the first time in her life, that she herself
had never had a hail from the land of soft under-
standings and strange companionship. For the
first time, she felt poor. Yet was this poverty?
Or was it an unknown bliss, with the sky itself
laving her in the waves of a mystery the more
exquisite for being undefined? And all she could
do for Henry, who felt none of these things, was
to bid him look at the moon.
“Yes,” said he, indulgently now, because he was,
as Ann remembered, running her out of town,
“the moon's all right. Nice night as ever I see.
Seems to me they're well lit up at old Jason's for
a house o' mournin'."
They were passing the house, and they could
see lights upstairs and down. Ann thought she
knew why. Cousin Jason had used one small
kitchen lamp, all the days of his life, and Selina
ca
SO
[ 235 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
were
se
had had to carry it from room to room, as she
needed it, and now the neighbors, with a prank-
someness common to mortal minds, had lighted
every lamp and candle. They'd show him, Ann
knew their thoughts were running, how a house
ought to be lit up. Henry had taken the wood
road and drew in his horse to “step and step,”
for the way was rough. The trees met overhead,
and once the horse snorted and jumped aside
when a branch tapped his ears. And at the sugar
house, a dark blot in the moonlight, Henry stopped
and this time very kindly helped Ann to alight.
Perhaps the moonlight had, after all, she thought,
with a shrewd little smile to herself, softened him
to her who might really become Aunt Ann. While
he was tying the horse to a sapling, she opened the
door and found, in the darkness, as it seemed for a
moment, a voice and nothing else. It came from
the floor, and was Selina's voice, in disjointed
phrasing that Ann judged to be delirium. The
was
[ 236)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
broken flow of it consisted of ejaculatory phrases,
such as “O my suz!” and “That ever I should
live to see this day!” combined with disjointed
invocations to peonies, their form and colors,
remembered fragments from the catalogue, inter-
spersed with the names of varieties pronounced
with such eccentricity that Ann recoiled at the
sound. They might have been, from their uncouth-
ness, prehistoric birds labeled with the admirable
accuracy of science, or fabled monsters of the deep.
For an instant Ann did, also, wonder if Seliny were
indulging in some quaint form of profanity, but
she put the suspicion aside as unworthy of them
both. Now Henry entered and he halted, equally
amazed, unable to determine whether Selina had
become endowed with the gift of tongues or
whether, from some intellectual vigor previously
unrecognized in her, she invented as she spoke.
Neither he nor Ann had ever heard such words
before. They were frankly appalled.
[237]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
poor dyin' woman, he can take himself off to bed,
or I'll see.”
Henry gathered up the little unregarding figure
and carried it out to the wagon, Ann following;
and while Ann sat on the wagon seat and held
Selina against her shoulder, he stood in the back
and drove.
“You poor dear creatur?!” Ann broke the
silence to whisper.
They were driving through the woods again, an
enchanted wood with moonlight flickering in, and
now, to Ann, a part of the wonder of it was the
amazing knowledge that Selina Rule could seem
to her a creature to be protected and fought for.
“What say?” asked Henry, catching the mur-
mur of the words.
“Nothin',” replied Ann.
When they reached her door, explanations were
quickly over. Henry seemed to manage them by
dint of saying nothing. He simply appeared at
am
mur-
ee
[239]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
bered that to Emma, also, Cousin Jason's death
meant perhaps a practical misfortune for which
she must be prepared. “Emma,” said she, "you
know how folks are, forever talkin' about Jason's
leavin' us suthin' in his will?”
“Yes,” said Emma, “but I never give no heed
to it. You s’pose he has?” she added wistfully.
“No, no,” Ann hastened to inform her. “The
evidence p’ints the other way. He got terrible
mad, so Seliny says, an' I guess he cut us off at
the last. I've got his will here in my coat pocket.
Emma, I'm goin' to peek at Cousin Jason’s will!”
This was terrifying to Emma. She could not
guess what new turmoil Ann might be stirring
up about them, and indeed Ann herself hardly
knew. But the will was clearly a fact she needed,
in order to work out her immediate course. She
took the papers from her pocket and while Emma
blinked at her, opened the scanty sheet. Then
Ann herself blinked.
vas
[ 241 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
“Yes,” said Annette. “The water's ’most hot.”
She, too, like Emma, thought Ann showed
traces of anxiety and weariness. Her face had
paled, and her brows, slightly frowning, gave
her a wistful look that well might touch the
heart.
“You go,” said Ann, “an' while it's comin' to a
bile, you tell Henry to take you out to the end
o the house where the grapevine is. Them
grapes do smell enough to do your heart good.”
Annette gave her a passing glance of inquiry.
“Mercy!” said she, “I know how grapes smell.
I don't need Henry to show me.”
“Annette!” cried her aunt. There was a sharp-
ness of appeal in her voice. It caught Annette's
ear, and she stopped and looked at her. “An-
nette,” said Ann. “It's bright moonlight, an'
here you be in this bedroom, an' I s'pose Henry
sets there in the kitchen waitin' for you to come
out, an' when you do there won't neither o' you
[ 244 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
use
take a step outside the house. An' it's moonlight,
Annette. An' grapes!” Then she added, with
what seemed to her a brilliant finesse, “Some o’
them grapes grow high. You ask Henry to pull
you down a bunch or two."
Annette, still mildly wondering, had gone and
Ann turned again to the figure on the bed.
“Now, Seliny,” said she, “you open your eyes.
You ain't no more passin' away than I be, an',
what's more, you ain't been, an' I'll miss my guess
but what you played it on Henry an' me up there
in the sugar house to git brought down here an’
put to bed."
Selina lay there, evidently supremely comfortable
and regarding her quietly. Then she spoke:
"It's a proper nice bed,” said she. “Pillers, too.
Geese feathers, I s’pose. Anybody's head sinks
right into 'em.”
Ann, according to her irrational habit of en-
joying herself whenever things were in the least
[ 245 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
wa
different, began to feel extraordinarily light-hearted,
as if some game were on and it was her turn to
play.
“That's all very well,” said she, “but what do
you think you're goin' to say when Mis’ Sheriff
Holt an' Hermie bu’st in here an' begin to put you
through the third degree?” And then Ann herself
knew what must be done. It wouldn't be what
her plot demanded. It would bring in no unknown
to be accused of pushing Cousin Jason out of the
barn door, but it would be, in a sense, a clearing
up of the mystery as it touched Selina. It would
serve. “Seliny,” said she eagerly, “don't you
want I should defend your case?”
“No,” said Selina, with unexpected acumen.
“If you'll only keep your mouth shut, there won't
be nothin' to defend.”
“Oh, yes, there will,” said Ann darkly. “There's
lots o' things got to be accounted for, an' I'm the
only one that can account for 'em. Now, Seliny,
serv
[246]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
away from the sugar house,” said Henry. “I
know that much.”
“Well,” said Ann, “what if she was to pass
away? Not that I expect her to, but she might.
It's a thing we've got to look for’ard to. All
flesh is grass. An' she's the only creatur' now livin'
that knows how Cousin Jason's death come about,
an’ she ought to tell it before witnesses, now while
she's in her right mind.”
“She ain't in her right mind,” said Henry dis-
concertingly. “If ever a woman was out of her
head, it's Seliny Rule, for I've seen her an’ I know.
Don't you remember them words she was rollin'
off her tongue? Well!"
To this Ann did not reply because the present
moment, she judged wisely, was not a time for
weighing evidence.
“You take your horse an' buggy,” said she,
“an' go over to Hermie Holt's, you an' Annette
both. An' you bring Hermie back with you. Yes,
aus
was
[ 248 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
Annette, you go, too.” For Annette had with-
drawn from Henry and taken a step toward the
house. “So's the buggy'll be full up an’ Mis’
Sheriff Holt won't offer to stick herself in. Don't
you tell him what he's comin' for, Henry. Only
you tell him to come.”
She took a fleeting glance at the enchanted night,
and it seemed to her she could not abandon it
utterly to watch over a poor toad of a Selina in a
stuffy bedroom. She hurried down to the gate,
where Henry was unhitching and Annette
waited.
“Henry,” said she, "you drive round a mite
'fore you rout out Hermie. I guess we better let
Seliny rest a spell 'fore she’s called on to testify.”
She waited while the two turned to drive away,
and then, wildly free and enamoured of the night,
stepped out into the road and began to run. At
first, she ran for the fun of it. Ann had not been
even signaled by approaching age. Her joints
L
[ 249 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
were supple enough for all she asked of them and
her breath came gallantly. Perhaps she did lack
endurance for a long pull, but when she had climbed
the doctor's garden fence and stood listening in
the shadow at his shed door, she was scarcely
winded at all. This was a trustful neighborhood.
Sometimes doors were fastened at night, sometimes
they were not. Ann knew she could steal into the
shed and possess herself of some tool or other lying
carelessly at hand. She knew she could, thereafter,
slip along the road and at the next house, which
was the minister's, play the same trick, without
too much loss of time. “Petty larceny!” she mur-
mured to herself, as she ran noiselessly through
the shadows, but not for a phrase could she give
it up. The night had bewitched her. A queen
thirsting for a diamond necklace could not have
abandoned herself more completely to greed than
Ann to her desire for an unconsidered trifle of
evidence. But she must hurry. She had a deed
n
an
[ 250 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
to do at Cousin Jason's and another in her own
garden. So she ran.
When she entered her kitchen again, wild-eyed
with excitement, Emma was awaiting her, looking
strangely at her, raptly indeed, as if she were still
relieved beyond measure to see her back again.
It was a different Emma from the one of ten
minutes before. She was still disheveled and the
faded curls strayed as wildly, but she herself un-
wittingly explained that difference.
“It's been an awful go-round,” said she, “but
law! I don't feel as if anything would ever upset
me ag’in if you'll only stay to home. Ain't you
terrible hungry?”
“I dunno,” said Ann, passing a hand across her
forehead and trying to recall herself to the ways of
life. “Anyways, I can't eat till I've got Seliny
off my hands. Emma, do you know what I be?
I'm the counsel for the defense.”
“There! there!” said Emma soothingly. “You
rc
[251]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
and he wore overalls, and not over his blacks, at
that. Ann knew where his blacks were. Mrs.
Sheriff Holt had hung them in the parlor chamber
closet, and she had unwittingly hung up his pro-
fessional dignity with them. Hermie looked like a
somewhat shy, perhaps irascible and rather appre-
hensive boy. Ann knew she need not plead very
hard and she could lead him whither she would.
But she wanted to plead hard. She began quietly,
in her own proper person as Ann Hale, not the
counsel for the defense.
“I'm terrible glad you've come,” said she.
“You see, Seliny's give up beat. I looked into the
bedroom a minute ago an' seems if she'd dozed
off, but Henry here'll tell you how we found her
over to the sugar house.”
“Out of her head,” said Henry gruffly. “Crazy's
a loon!”
“Hermie,” said Ann, with a melting gentleness
so foreign to her that Mrs. Sheriff Holt, if she
[254]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
could have heard it, would have known there
were designs behind it, “you remember how we
found her over to Cousin Jason's, laying there in
bed, coverlid up to her chin, an' a hotter day for
September you never see. Do you know why
Seliny Rule laid there covered up in bed?” (Here
she had almost added an interrogative “gentleman
of the jury,” but wisely refrained.)
“No,” said Hermie, in frank curiosity. “What
was it?"
Ann had established herself near the center of
the room, resting one hand on the table. The
other she slipped into the front of her coat, an
admired posture of a lawyer whose pleading she
had always followed with awe. Hermie, she
noted, looked at her with an unconscious increase
of attention, perhaps of respect. The others also
were looking. She began with a composure and
mental ease she found delightful. She was now the
counsel for the defense.
[ 255


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
C
pint o’cider she was left alone an' left poor. An'
when she was old enough to run away from the
Poor Farm she worked out, an’ she's worked from
that day to this. You know how she come to
Jason Hale’s. 'Twas when his wife was layin'
there, crippled as she was, never gittin' out o' bed
to do a hand's turn. An' that little creatur?—she
never had much stren’th, Seliny didn't—she done
it. An' after Jason lost his wife—an' merciful it
was for both of 'em-he an’ Seliny rubbed along
there together, an’ she done her best for him, an’
byme-by seems if Jason see the ought to do his
best for her. Now what was there he could do for
her, gentlemen o' the jury?”.
She had ventured it. There it was, the words
“gentlemen of the jury” spoken out boldly and
with such conviction of their rightness in that very
place that, watching Hermie with a challenging
eye, she saw he did not turn a hair. She had at-
tained the great triumph of the artist in whatever
[ 257 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
C
SUO
line. She had made him see with her eyes, forced
upon him the almost incredible magic of believing
what she told him to believe. She was fired by her
success, and ran, breathless, up the slope of bold
achievement.
“I've got here,” said Ann, striking the pocket
of her coat dramatically, “the will of Jason Hale.
This very day, seein' Tom, Dick an' Harry clumpin'
in an overrunnin' Cousin Jason's house, Seliny
Rule picked up these papers out o’ the desk an’
handed 'em over to me. I run 'em over, as any-
body would that had charge of 'em, an' I see one
of 'em was Cousin Jason's will.”
Here Hermie plucked up spirit. He shook his
head disapprovingly.
"You hadn't ought to done that,” said he. “A
will's a will."
“Why hadn't I ought to done it?” Ann in-
quired boldly. “Who's got a right to look out
for a man's will an' produce it when the time comes
[ 258)


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
a.
allow it full swing, because, at this point, she feared
nothing so much as questions. There must be no
official probings. That conversation in the barn
must be touched upon lightly, passed over and
forgotten. “It's hard enough,” said Ann, "for a
young man to talk about marryin' to a girl his own
age.” Here Annette involuntarily took a step
nearer Henry and Ann caught the quick look
between them. She was momentarily triumphant.
Again she wanted to cry out to them: “Moonlight
an’ the smell o’grapes!” But she transfixed Hermie
with her hypnotic gaze and went on: “Marryin'!
that was what was betwixt them two that after-
noon. Cousin Jason, as I've reminded you,
wa’n’t a young man, an' he got terrible worked
up over it, an' he set down kinder careless on that
bar—that fatal bar,” she stayed herself to amplify-
“an' he lost his balance an’ pitch-poled over an’
there amongst the pinies the poor man was found.”
“What about that saw?” called Hermie loudly,
[ 261 ]


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
an' a young woman everybody wishes 'em well;
but if an old man sets out to marry a woman
the age o' Seliny Rule he's a laughin' stock
an' mebbe so’s she. Gentlemen o' the jury,”
pleaded Ann, almost sobbingly, "you wouldn't
let Seliny Rule rub along through the re-
mainin’ years of her life knowin' she's a laughin'
stock to the town an county. Would you?
You tell me.”
It was Henry who answered first, gruffly, and
with a look at Annette which Ann translated as
saying that, in protecting Selina, he protected
another, near and dear.
“No,” said he. “No, by gum!"
But Hermie, remembering the astuteness of
his own womankind and the fealty he owed in
that direction, inquired obstinately:
“What about that screw-driver 'twas found on
that desk?”
“That?” said Ann contemptuously. “That
re
[ 263 1


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
she laughed a little, wondering what they would
say when they heard that, by Cousin Jason's will,
Annette was to have the house and farm when
Selina was done with them.
Emma was waiting for her in the kitchen, and
she looked like the young Emma Ann remembered,
which was, she mentally told herself a hundred
years or more ago. Emma's color had deepened.
Her cheeks seemed to have filled out into a curve
of youth.
“Ann,” said she, recklessly, because she knew
how late it was, “le's have us a cup o' tea.”
A voice came from the bedroom, and they both
started. For the moment they had forgotten Selina.
“Oh!” cried Selina, “that's the best word I ever
heard in my born days. Le's have a cup o' tea.”
While the water was heating Emma drew Ann
aside into the pantry.
“D’you s'pose,” she inquired, with an air of
great mystery, “d’you s’pose she mourns?”
[ 270 )


THE MYSTERIES OF ANN
A
20
.
had happened and the world hadn't been upside
down. And yet Cousin Jason was dead. His
money, though on that Emma would not allow her-
self to brood, had run into Selina Rule's empty
pocket. Who had done all this? Who was to
blame? Was it Ann? She couldn't think so, Ann
looked so light-heartedly alive and free from care.
What was Ann herself thinking about it? Or
wasn't she thinking at all? Emma had no under-
standing of the romantic temperament, no knowl-
edge of the exhilaration of fantastic deeds, and,
recognizing her own inadequacy, with a sigh of
relief because the neighborhood turmoil seemed to
be over, she gave it all up and tacitly returned to
the plane where doilies and delectable cups of
tea need henceforth be her only concern. But
Ann had paused by the fireplace, dustpan in hand.
She was speaking thoughtfully.
“Well,” said she, “if Jason never had nothin'
here, same as Seliny seems to think, mebbe he
[ 272 )