LITMIR.BIZ

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hundred yards in, he stopped and abruptly sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree where the snow lay thickest upon it. He rose immediately and sat down again at once upon the same trunk, but this time at a spot a little removed from the first. Again he rose, and now very rapidly tramped up and down, up and down, for a space of ten yards before the tree, sometimes varying his direction by erratic steps to the right and left.

      And now, not running, but walking swiftly, he made his way out of the woods again, and, taking a course diagonal to that by which he had come, headed across the fields for a point on the town road a mile lower down than the Merton house—a mile nearer the town.

      Again his mind was concentrated on his problem. ​The weak link in the chain was the motive—he had realised that, sensed that from the first—therefore the stronger must be the constructive, supporting evidence, irrefutable, positive, each small detail fitting as inevitably and significantly into the whole as little cogs fit essentially into ponderous and complex machinery. For, from the moment Varge had accepted the guilt as his own, he had accepted it with all and everything that finality meant. To run from it, to beg the issue, was not only foreign to his every instinct, but it was certain eventual discovery of the truth. As a possibility it had undergone the almost unconscious, quick, accurate, mental surgery of Varge's mind—and had been eliminated from the outset. To count on suspicion being deflected from Harold Merton to himself by running away was almost worse than folly—at best it could but divide suspicion. Then would come investigation. Harold Merton was unpopular, disliked, and always had been from a boy; his New York record would be unearthed, one thing would follow another; the man himself, a mental, moral weakling, not big enough even in a vicious way to lie without stumbling, would be trapped and the end would be inevitable—and meanwhile over Mrs. Merton would hang the shadow of the truth, accentuating by days of agonised suspense the hideous certainty that sooner or later would be established. There had been only one way, only one sure way from the first.

      There was left then, strange paradox! only the law itself to battle with. A plea of guilty to the crime of murder in that staid old New England state was neither accepted as a plea nor as proof of guilt. A confession he could make, but after that would come the probing, ​the investigation that must establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to corroborate the confession. And this, Varge, as he reached the road, was finally satisfied that he had done.

      It was very black—only the white of the snow seemed to supply any light. It was very silent, very still—only his steps, and those deadened in the soft, yielding flakes, gave sound. And in the blackness and the stillness there seemed a great mystery, a vastness, typifying a still most vast and mysterious beyond—another world, the world which lay on the other side of life. Varge raised his eyes to the dark, heavy cloud-mass overhead as he walked. There was no qualm of fear within him, just the serious, sober recognition and acceptance of the fact that each step brought him nearer to this mystery whose solving was in death. A month, two months, three, perhaps a little longer, and he would see these things from the other side.

      Varge crossed the bridge over the little river and entered the town. He had met no one on the road—Robson then had not yet started back. He reached the square and quickened his pace as he headed across it. From the window of the sheriff's office on the ground floor of the courthouse—Berley Falls was the county seat—a light streamed forth, and from a sleigh before the door a man got out and hurried inside the building.

      Varge was barely more than a couple of minutes behind him. The sheriff's door was wide open as Varge stepped into the corridor. Marston, the sheriff, was at the telephone. Handerlie, the deputy sheriff, the last arrival, his hands deep in his overcoat pockets, was ​staring, jaw dropped a little, at Robson. Robson, round, fatuous-faced, was talking in a high, excited key.

      "No; of course, I didn't see him do it—but I see his face as he bent over the old Doctor with his head all covered with blood. If you'd seed that, you wouldn't need to ask who done it. Crickey, I tell you, it scart me! If he didn't do—"

      Marston half-turned with the receiver at his ear.

      "I'll admit," he said, "it looks kind of queer that young Merton, knowing his father had been murdered half-an-hour ago, hasn't notified any one, and that I can't get any answer from the house now; but if I were you, Robson, I'd go kind of slow with my tongue. Accusing a man of murder is pretty serious business."

      "I ain't accusing no one of anything," returned Robson, a little defiantly. "I'm only telling what I seen. And all I've got to say is that if Harold Merton didn't do it, why then—well, I'd like to know who did? "

      "I will tell you," said Varge, stepping quietly into the room. "It was I."

      ​

      CHAPTER IV LOOSE THREADS

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      BERLEY FALLS awoke that morning in stunned and awe-stricken gloom. Men gathered in little knots on the street corners, in the square, in their various places of business, and talked in hushed, subdued tones. It was as though to each had come, as indeed it really had, a personal and intimate bereavement, for none but had known and loved old Doctor Merton almost from their births. And yet as they talked, and deep as were their feelings, there was a marked absence of either execration or invective against the self-confessed author of the brutal, cowardly crime.

      Varge, the Doctor's man, had confessed and given himself up! Incongruously enough, where then there should be no mystery this very thing brought mystery into the affair—and they shook their heads in amazed incredulity. As they had known Doctor Merton, so, too, if not for so many years, they had known Varge. They had watched him grow from childhood amongst them, and had come to respect and esteem him for the kindly, modest nature, the fine consideration of others that was his; for his calm-tempered disposition; for his personality itself, retiring, unobtrusive, that yet seemed always to exude an intangible sense of latent breadth and power—but most of all they had come to hold him in high regard for the manifest gratitude and loyalty he bore toward the two who had brought him up and given him a home. That Varge should have struck down and ​killed his benefactor seemed beyond credence—impossible.

      "But he confessed to it himself," protested, in a puzzled, self-argumentative tone, one of the group gathered in the blacksmith's shop.

      Joe Malloch, the smith, drew a glowing piece of iron from the forge and laid it viciously upon the anvil.

      "S'posin' he did," he said gruffly; "I don't believe it for all that—nor none of you don't neither. There's something behind it, you mark my words. He's got some reason for sayin' it was him. Why, dang it, what's the use of talkin'! Don't you know Varge? Ain't he stuck to the old Doc all these years just out of gratitude, when he could have been anything about he liked if he'd only been willin' to leave the old couple an' strike out for himself? He's got a head on him, Varge has. Look what he's done with what he's had to do with. He's studied, he has; and I'll bet if he had college papers, or whatever it is, to let him practise, he'd show he was as good as the old Doctor himself. D'ye think a man that's done as he has an' acted the way he has would do a thing like this?"

      "It don't look likely, that's a fact," agreed the first speaker.

      "No; it don't—an' it ain't!" grunted Malloch. "But, anyway, there's one consolation—a man's just sayin' he did a thing ain't enough to fit a noose around his neck in these days."

      "No," admitted another of the group; "but it goes a long way toward it, just the same."

      The smith's arm came down with a sudden swing and a shower of sparks flew from the hammer blow.

      ​"We'll see what we'll see when they get to the trial," he asserted. "And what we'll see 'll be that Varge's story won't hold water, an' what's behind it 'll come out. Why, gol-blame it to blazes, look at the town! There ain't one of us but 'd give our right hand to have the old Doc back, but who's sayin' a word against Varge? An' ordinarily we'd be for lynchin'

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