[Epigraph]

“O my grandfather’s clock was too high for the shelf, So it stood ninety years on the floor. It was taller by half than the old man himself, Though it weighed not a pennyweight more. It was bought on the morn of the day he was born, And was always his treasure and pride, But it—stopped—short—never to go again—— When—the old—man—died.”

Alibi.

“Alibi (al’-i-bi) n. 1. In law, a plea of having been elsewhere at the time an offense is alleged to have been committed. Hence.—a. The fact or state of having been elsewhere at the time specified; as, “he attempted to prove an alibi.”—Cent. Dict.

“If it (alibi) appeared to be founded in truth, it is the best negative evidence that can be offered. It is really positive evidence which in the nature of things necessarily implieth a negative.” Foster, J. Crown Law, 3rd Ed. p. 368 (1762).

“If any one fact necessary to the conclusion is wholly inconsistent with the hypothesis of the guilt of the accused, it breaks the chain of circumstantial evidence, upon which the inference depends; and, however plausible or apparently conclusive the other circumstances may be, the charge must fail. Of this character is the defense usually called an alibi; that is, that the accused was elsewhere at the time of the offense is alleged to have been committed. If this is true, it being impossible that the accused could be in two places at the same time, it is a fact inconsistent with that sought to be proved, and excludes its possibility,” Shaw, C.J., in Commonwealth vs. Webster, 5 Cush. 299, 318 (1850).

The Hermit of Turkey Hollow

I

“All the same,” affirmed “Skinny the Tramp,” “some one o’ these days them bugs’ll wiggle themselves off’n their pins—an’ do for ye!”

The “Hermit of Turkey Hollow” laughed derisively as he paused in pinning a large gray moth against the wall of the shanty.

“That’s all bunk!” he asserted with a show of bravado which, however, concealed a certain uneasiness. “When a thing’s dead—it’s dead! And that’s the end of it!” he added, pushing in the pin firmly until the moth, giving a final flutter, remained motionless.

Skinny shook his head.

“No, it ain’t!” said he with conviction. “Nuthin’ ever really dies—or, if it does, that ain’t the end of it by any manner o’ means! Your body kin die—like a cocoon—but somethin’ goes on after—like the butterfly.”

The Hermit threw a nervous glance in the direction of the moth, and then, evidently reassured, nonchalantly removed a piece of cut plug from his trousers pocket, bit off an end and held it out to the tramp, who bisected the remainder.

“But the butterfly dies—” concluded the Hermit decisively, “and then that’s the end of it—for good an’ all!”

Skinny wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked round the smelly little shanty, the sides of which were decorated with a heterogeneous collection of defunct beetles, moths and butterflies.

“The butterfly don’t die—no more’n the cocoon!” declared he. “Nuthin’ dies. The moth flies away out o’ the cocoon, and then—when the moth dies—somethin’ flies away out o’ the moth.”

“But you can’t see nuthin’,” remarked the Hermit with significance.

“I don’t know whether ye can or not!” replied the tramp noncommittally. “Some says ye can an’ some says ye can’t. Some claim they’ve photographed the human soul!”

“What do them as claim ye can see it say it’s like?” inquired the Hermit in a tone of incredulity, in which nevertheless were mingled awe and curiosity.

“Mostly like a butterfly—somethin’ with wings—so’s it kin fly, I s’pose.”

“Huh!” retorted the Hermit. “Just pure bull! That moth, now—how can you say it ain’t dead?”

Skinny’s jaws relinquished their extreme vigor of motion, as he leaned forward earnestly towards the Hermit.

“Listen, Bo!” he adjured him. “You think you know all about bugs, an’ worms, an’ snakes, an’ yerbs, an’ trees, an’ weather. An’ I reckon you do, too! But you don’t ponder none compared to me. I don’t do nuthin’ but think, ’cause I ain’t got nuthin’ else to do. I lie an’ meditate most all the time. And I hear things—and sense ’em. Sometimes I sit harkenin’ all night long. I know a lot more’n most folks about things you can’t see.”

“I don’t say you don’t, Skinny!” admitted the Hermit politely. “I don’t deny it!”

“There’s two worlds,” affirmed the tramp. “One you kin see an’ smell an’ touch and one that you ordinarily can’t—right alongside t’other. But sometimes—dependin’ on circumstances—you can catch a glimpse of what’s goin’ on there—see ’em an’ hear ’em. You’ve seen ghosts!”

“Sure, I’ve seen ghosts. Everybody’s seen ’em!” readily assented his companion.

“Well,” continued the tramp, “everythin’ has a ghost—walkin’ right along beside it all the time—only it’s in that other world—the one you don’t see.”

“But things don’t have ghosts!” declared the Hermit. “A thing must have been alive sometime to have a ghost.”

“Everything’s alive!” asserted the tramp. “Rocks an’ trees an’ flowers an’ water an’ fire an’ bugs an’ beasts as well as folks,—an’ they all have ghosts an’ none of ’em ever die. An’ they all have a right to live in the world they’re in until they naturally pass on into the other. Now, when they go—maybe they go one way, maybe another; but they all do go; and some folks claim to have seen ’em. An’ mostly they go with wings—flyin’—shaped like a moth or somethin’ like that.”

The Hermit spat disdainfully through the open doorway.

“Huh!” he remarked with sarcasm. “An’ I s’pose,—you’d say,—when I die I’ll go flyin’ away like a big gray moth?”

“Like as not!” returned Skinny cheerfully. “Like as not! You got to go somehow, ain’t ye?”

“All bull!” repeated the Hermit. “You’re just a nut!”

“Just the same!” returned Skinny the Tramp, “leavin’ out entirely me bein’ a nut, I wouldn’t kill anythin’ that’s alive an’ can feel—for money! I hate even to put an axe to a tree an’ see the sap ooze out. How do we know it ain’t sufferin’? An’ when it comes to live things—I’d be skeert!”

He let his eyes wander over the shanty walls thickly populated with tiny corpses and shuddered slightly.

“Yus! I’d be skeert to live in this house! Sometime they’ll have their vengeance!—An’—just as I said,—one o’ these days, they’ll come wigglin’ off’n them pins an’—do fer ye!”

“An’ then,” mocked the Hermit of Turkey Hollow, “I’ll flutter off out the winder like I was a moth! Bull, Skinny! All bull!”

* * * * * *

As may be inferred from the foregoing conversation the Hermit of Turkey Hollow lived in the world of Fact, while Skinny the Tramp dwelt in that of Faith,—which is to say, of Truth. Yet, as odd sticks, there was little to choose between them. As being a house dweller—and not a mere vagrant open to all the insidious imputations of vagabondage—the Hermit may of the two have been entitled to greater social recognition, but being a recluse, although something of a curiosity and hence in the nature of a local asset,—he was practically negligible as a factor in the life of the neighborhood. Skinny the Tramp, on the other hand, was a sociable sort of being who lived in the open, not because he loved his fellows less but because he loved nature more.

Turkey Hollow lies three miles to the north and east of the thriving town of Pottsville in the Mohawk Valley of the Empire State, surrounded by low hills still thickly covered with second growth timber; in spots, especially where Chasm Brook flows down into the westerly end of Turtle Pond, wet and marshy; and elsewhere filled with a tangled growth of Getchel birch, swamp maple, and alder, save for the acre or so of cleared upland above the lake where stands the Hermit’s now deserted shanty.

On the whole, the original turkeys having for several decades been entirely extinct, the hollow offered no attractions to anybody, save possibly to naturalists impervious to mosquito bites. It was in truth a dank sort of place, full of underbrush, and inaccessible except by the wood road leading to the Hermit’s abode, which some years he cleared out and some he didn’t, and where you had to go afoot anyway.

Nevertheless, once you got there, you found that the hermit was a genuine up-to-date hermit, with most of the modern improvements. For he was neither a hundred years old with a bald pate and long white whiskers like William Cullen Bryant or Father Time; nor did he mutter incantations over a seething caldron like the witches in Macbeth, or meander aimlessly about prattling to himself as conventional hermits are supposed to do. And his shanty was no cave, but on the contrary a comfortable enough one-story shack, with windows of glass which, while they were nailed down tight and hence could not be opened, allowed plenty of light to stream in. By the door usually stood a butterfly net, a fish rod, and a hoe and spade,—for he had a small garden where he raised such vegetables as he needed,—and on one side of the shanty was a table, on the other his cot, over which by day was thrown a discolored “comfortable,” while directly “on ax” with the door and between the two rear windows was a tall, old-fashioned clock—the only article of any value in the place.

This was, indeed, rather a strange object to be in the middle of the woods and as it was of shining mahogany, its face decorated with the sun, moon and stars, ships, savages and zodiacal signs, it was an object of comment and surmise to the few who visited the place. No one ventured to ask where it had come from or how the hermit had acquired it, but he had been once heard to say that it made less noise than a woman, talked no nonsense, and was all the company anyone had need of. Even those who had never seen the hermit himself knew that he had a clock. That is the way of things. People will refer for years to a man as “the old chap who always wears that pair of gray trousers” and then accidentally discover that he is a world famous civil engineer or retired statesman who has swayed the fate of nations. So the hermit was known by his clock; although regularly once a week he walked to Pottsville to get his mail and buy groceries. For being an up-to-date hermit he was not without an occupation,—he drank; and he did it very well.

He was a large, lumbering man of about sixty years, full-bearded, bent, frankly ungiven to washing and generally a shade woozy in the upper story; and nobody could remember Turkey Hollow when he had not been there.

He was reputed to be possessed of mysterious, ill-gotten wealth hidden in and about the clearing, and, in spite of his squalor, the rumor acquired a certain cachet owing to the fact that his correspondence, regularly inspected by Constable Higgins out of abundant caution, consisted almost entirely of get-rich-quick-circulars and similar catch-penny advertisements. His name, which otherwise might never have been known, was Wilbur Drake,—although he was never referred to as anything but the “Hermit of Turkey Hollow.” That was his sum total—to the world at large.

Yet sometime and somewhere, he had perhaps been somebody; and nailed over his cot in a tarnished oaken frame was a dingy photograph of a dumpy little girl in pigtails. Why this sick soul had sought seclusion nobody knew and nobody cared, yet afterwards, although he was morose, taciturn and brutal in his manners, the Pottsville folk were sorry for him and regretted that they had not been kinder to him.

Skinny the Tramp was a totally different type of bird,—a “character” as they all said, beloved of the village children and regarded with good-natured tolerance by their elders. He was tall, lean, hawkish, with the traditional stubble about his chin and neck, which a Byronic negligée exposed to wind and weather. He belonged to Pottsville in his own way quite as much as did the hermit, for in spite of his peripatetic sojournings, he was a native of the town and, as James Hawkins, had passed those earlier days—before manual labor had been abhorrent to him—in its vicinity, having been even at one time admitted to the lowlier degrees of the Brotherhood of Abyssinian Mysteries. This famous order, however, he had ultimately abandoned in favor of the Hibernating Hoboes of Hesperides, of which he was now a member in good standing.

The reader will, of course, appreciate that for various reasons,—including that we may sometime run for public office—the foregoing names and titles are fictitious; but the organizations themselves are not, and each in its own way exerts an influence not lightly to be disregarded, whether one be a yokel on the one hand, or a yegg on the other. Twice yearly, once on his annual autumn trip to the Golden West and again on his return therefrom in the spring, Hawkins, emaciated, hairy, black from coal dust, dropped lightly off the truck of some fast freight and revisited the scenes of his youth.

Sitting upon a cracker barrel in Colson’s Grocery—so that nutriment might be the more easily accessible—Skinny the Tramp, like some wandering scop, bard, or friar of medieval days—would fill the wagging ears of the countryside with the narrative of his later wanderings in search of the treasure that somehow always just managed to elude his grasp. For Skinny believed absolutely that at the foot of every rainbow there was a Crock of Gold, and he would have gladly died for his belief—as any gentleman and sportsman would have done, and as he came very near to doing in this case.

However, while Skinny chased rainbows he declined to do so afoot—preferring the artificial and speedier means of transportation afforded by the transcontinental railroad systems, from the trains of which he was habitually—and at divers times and places, ignominiously,—hurled, to his great physical and temperamental detriment. Yet, albeit that he was a high officer of the Hibernating Hoboes of Hesperides and had once been an Abyssinian Brother of that elevation known as the “Order of the Sacred Camel of King Menelik,” from which noble association he had been swiftly dropped for non-payment of dues, he was, like a multitude of his fellow wanderers, merely a harmless child of good-nature, nearly a half-wit, essentially a devotee of Zoroaster, who spent his life following the sun. On these biennial visits Skinny hung about the town, spending a goodly portion of his time—both by night and by day—sleeping in a lean-to on the hillside above Turkey Hollow, and part of it wandering through the woods,—but always looking for the rainbow that should empty a hoard

of gold into his tattered lap.

Twice yearly also passed through Pottsville the “Sons and Daughters of the Southland”—the Zingara Gipsies,—in auto trucks and flivvers—camping for a time on the end of the old, deserted racetrack,—a sinister crew, surreptitious panderers to credulity and lust, the men surly and brutal, the women insolent and dirty, but attracting the imaginative and susceptible bumpkins as a trickle of molasses will draw a swarm of flies. When in the night they folded their tents and stole silently away the citizens of Pottsville invariably discovered that many of their most cherished personal possessions were unaccountably missing. But no one cared to pursue and prosecute them. They were too dangerous. Besides, they could have told things.

In the case of Skinny the Tramp there was, however, a practical as well as a sentimental reason for these half-yearly stop-overs, the legal necessity of his putting in a personal appearance to claim and receipt for the one hundred dollars of income which accrued to his account every six months from the trust fund created by his mother in her last will and testament, of which the Honorable—or “Squire”—Hezekiah Mason was executor. And as Squire Mason is one of the central figures in this legal tragi-comedy it may perhaps be worth while to stop for a moment at this point and give him what might be called the “literary once-over.”

Let us state frankly, without circumlocution or evasion, that while Hezekiah was known as “honorable” and “squire,” this grim visaged, tight-lipped country attorney was neither. He was “honorable” only in a Pickwickian sense; and a “squire” only by courtesy; but why or how any courtesy should have been extended to him remained a mystery, since he was the most unpopular man in the county,—evidenced by the fact that he alone of Pottsville’s masculine élite—which included the barber, druggist, sheriff and dentist—was not one of the Sacred Camels of King Menelik, and needless to say it rankled in his dried peapod of a soul.

Nevertheless, the Hon. Hezekiah was a power for he had mortgages on a majority of the farms of Somerset County already and his tentacles were reaching out along the county highways and by-ways after the others. Moreover, he was the only lawyer practising in either Pottsville or Somerset Corners so that, in one way or another, he managed to be mixed up in almost everything that went on. However, he couldn’t break into the mystic circle of The Abyssinian Brotherhood, which has a distinct bearing on our narrative. As Sheriff Moses Higgins,—who was the Grand Supreme Exalted Patriarch and Ruler of the Sacred Camels of King Menelik—had said at the lodge meeting held three months before in the P. of H. (No. 769) Hall when Hezekiah had made his final attempt to become one of the genus dromedary and had been flatly and contumaciously turned down, refused, rejected, rebuffed and repudiated—I repeat, as Sheriff Higgins had said on that well known occasion, it made no difference how big a feller’s bank account was if he was a stinker, and everybody who had an atom of

brains fer fifty miles ’round knew all-fired well what kind of a cuss Mason was. Get a feller like that into the Camels and you never could get rid of him—“once a Camel always a Camel”—the whole herd would be contaminated. He’d sooner take in “Nigger” Jo, the colored ostler over to the Phoenix House stable. He spoke fifteen minutes and there wasn’t a white ball in the box when it was passed.

So Squire Mason nursed his antique grudge and took his revenge in coin of the realm. Then came the turn of the wheel and Hezekiah found himself in a position where by the adroit application of five thousand dollars where it would do most good he could get a strangle hold on one of the leading politicians of the county. The fact that the only funds available were those he held as trustee for James Hawkins was the merest incident and did not disturb him even momentarily. They were at hand and he used them. Skinny was only a tramp. He might get run over any day, just as, fortunately for Hezekiah, was Lawyer Tompkins, of Felchville, the public prosecutor of Somerset, for whose vacant job the Honorable Squire Mason instantly applied. As he had a cinch on the local political boss, and as the attorney general needed the influence of the boss in his own business, and as the attorney general had a cinch on the governor—he won in a walk and duly became, by official appointment and designation, for Tompkins’ unexpired term,