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By Night at Dinsmore
by Samuel Shellabarger
writing as John Esteven
Chapter 1
The Road to Dinsmore
"The section we're heading for," said the driver between a plunge and skid of the car, "is up yonder. They call it Blind Trails, or Black Woods."
"Do they?" murmured his companion somewhat disconsolately.
He glanced out over a large autumn landscape towards the surging wall of forest-covered mountains, black, indeed, and curiously overwhelming under the leaden afternoon sky. Scrofulous, rock-patched fields, dotted here and there with skeleton trees, slanted up to meet the line of the wilderness. A drift of wind from the north, moaning across them, swept with it now and then a scurry of dead leaves. Compared with this, the tiny settlement of Five Forks round the railway station, forlorn as it had looked, seemed cordial and inviting. It was that which the landscape in an odd fashion appeared to signify: an inscrutable power concealed behind hostile walls. And with every turn of the miserable road the mountains grew higher, the lips of the forest nearer, the wind colder.
At a last crossroad before the upward grind they had come unexpectedly upon a decrepit building marked "General Store", in front of which several dull-faced men in ragged mackinaws and mud-splashed boots had glowered at them, with the exception of one, who burst suddenly into laughter, grimacing and pointing till they had passed. This laughter, with its mockery and menace, might well have been construed as suitable welcome to the fastnesses they were approaching.
Meanwhile Ed, the driver, appraised his passenger with considerable curiosity. He wondered what business a stranger from the city, well dressed and obviously a gentleman, could have at Blind Trails. Viewing him sideways, there was something in the bold, regular features, wide mouth, square chin, and dark eye of the profile that discouraged personal questions. There was a hint of hardness and muscle concealed beneath the lines of his perfectly tailored coat that impressed the driver still more. "Might be an Army officer," he pondered. The stranger, lazily inhaling a cigarette, remained wrapped in his own thoughts. The car lurched and curveted again over the atrocious road.
Having made a recovery short of the ditch, Ed persisted, "It's a fair country for hunting, mister, where you're going. But I wouldn't look for much good society if I was you."
"No?"
"You bet your life, no!" declared the driver. "I don't mind telling you that if Fred Morrison, who's a friend of mine, hadn't asked me to drive you to the Dinsmores I wouldn't be doing it for twenty dollars, let alone ten."
"Why not?" exhaled the other. "Account of the roads?"
"No, it's not just on account of the roads. . . ." Ed's voice trailed off. "It's the woods up there," he added queerly — "something about 'em — that, and the people living in 'em."
"The people, eh?"
"Yes," nodded the driver, "wild people, the kind that are better left alone. Run to seed, along of the lonesomeness and relatives marrying relatives. Idiots, some of them; most of 'em cracked. Used to be a well-to-do section in the old days; but after the Civil War the worthwhile men didn't go back. Only no-'counts stayed; farms ran down; woods grew up. Human nature," propounded Ed, "is like a creek. Dam it up, and it goes stale on you, begins to crawl."
"H'm," said the other, "think so, do you?"
"I know so," returned Ed. "And let me tell you one thing: those Dinsmores are the worst of the lot." He broke off, adding cautiously, "Friend of the family?"
"No, friend of Morrison's, who's staying there. He's engaged to Miss Deborah Dinsmore. Knew him at college."
"Well," continued the driver, "maybe I oughtn't to have said what I did. I didn't mean they was the same as the others. They're the big family in Blind Trails. Been there two hundred years, maybe. Dinsmore used to be the finest house hereabouts — still would be if they'd kept it up. And the Dinsmores are gentry when you come down to it — you've got to hand it to 'em. What I meant was that craziness in some folks is devilry in others. That's what old Cyrus Dinsmore was — plain devil."
Ed's companion showed a flicker of interest. "How so?"
"Old women up in Blind Trails," answered the driver, "used to say he'd sold himself to Satan. That's crazy; he was a devil without that. When I was a kid I remember him riding into Five Forks: handsome, long-faced, pale old fellow. Queer thing was that nobody could stand looking him in the eyes — like as if they scorched people. There's killer blood in the Dinsmores. People said it was him that done for Jerry Ford's brother Hiram, found stabbed up in the Black Woods; but you couldn't prove nothing. Then there was a pore French half-breed from across the Canadian line — lumberjack named Cartier. Cyrus Dinsmore shot him to death and owned up to it; said it was self-defense. Nobody could show it wasn't. People around here call that sort of thing Blind Trails business, and keep out of it. They're a closed corporation up there."
Here the potholes and hummocks of the road claimed Ed's attention. The two men bucked and jolted over a devastated area of about fifty yards.
"Hope the tires hold out," panted the driver. "Wouldn't care to break down after dark."
"About old Dinsmore," queried the city man.
"You were saying — "
"Yes, sir — that he was a devil; and I stick to it. He married a French girl from Quebec. I never saw her, but they tell me she was lovely — a Ma'm'selle de Marcilly. They say he treated her worse than any dog was ever treated. Tortured her, folks said. Liked to make her cower and kotow to him before people, like as if he tamed her in private. They had three kids. He hated the two boys. Used to tie 'em up and beat 'em. Especially he hated Stephen Dinsmore. When he was just a little fellow Cyrus did something to his back. He's been a cripple since. As for Jim, he don't amount to nothing. They're both of them rotten in different ways."
"And the girl?" asked the other.
"They say she's all right," declared Ed. "There ain't nobody but has a good word for her. She's good-looking, and no end capable. Main prop of the family since Cyrus died two years back. Educated in a convent in Quebec. Old Cyrus doted on her. Only thing he cared for on earth except money. And that's what I can't make out."
"What?"
"He lived and died poor. Leastways, it'd look like it — family just scrapes along. He had a kind of mortgage business, and God help the fellow he got hold of! He's sold out a dozen people I know, not to speak of them I don't know. Ruined Fred Morrison's old man among others."
"And yet Fred's engaged to Miss Deborah," put in the stranger.
"Yes, it'd stump you if you didn't know Fred," replied the driver. "Honest and good-tempered as the day's long, ain't he? Everybody round here likes him. Poor as he was, he put himself through college; and they tell me he's done pretty well since. Nothing mean about him. They'll make a fine couple."
"Hello!" interrupted the other.
They both stared briefly at a lack-luster, blank face thrust out at them from a clump of low pines fringing the road — an imbecile face. The loose mouth hung open; the teeth showed animal-like. Then they rounded a turn of the road.
"That's one of 'em," muttered Ed. "We're getting to Blind Trails all right. Just a sample of what I was telling you. One of that half-wit Thrall girl's kids, maybe — by Jim Dinsmore."
He gave vent to a suppressed chuckle and fell into anecdote, which the stranger acknowledged with silence and disinfected with another cigarette. At last gradually even the driver's chatter died out.
It was a setting not conducive to small talk. The road, bad before, had now become little better than an uphill trail, deep in mud and traversed by half-rotten logs which had once served to reinforce it. Up and through this the car labored heavily. But far more oppressive than the difficulties of the road were the walls of the forest itself clamping in on either side of them. The damp breath of the wilderness, close upon winter, shut down. It seemed a living, sardonic presence, impassive, merciless, and expectant. The tangled masses of the pines formed, as it were, a screen behind which some essential malevolence peered out at them.
Then suddenly they came upon a figure which might have been the incarnate spirit of the place or a sentinel posted to guard its privacy. It was the figure of a very tall, lean man, bareheaded and with rough-cut, straight black hair. His heavy, aquiline features showed an Indian cast, though the skin was white. He carried a rifle in the crook of one arm, and a hand rested on the head of a huge, grayish dog that eyed the car as unblinkingly as its master. Indeed, both man and dog bore a curious resemblance to each other, a wolf-like quality into which they both merged.
The driver ventured a hail-fellow greeting at this apparition, though there was more nervousness than heartiness in his voice. But not a muscle of the woodsman's face relaxed; not a twitch of the eye showed that he had heard. His lips kept the same straight line. Only the dog responded by bristling.
"Who's that?" asked the city man in a tone of amusement, when they were past. "Seems an interesting character. We might have given him a lift."
Ed ran his sleeve across his forehead.
"Never seen him before. Just one of those people. I'd as soon give a rattlesnake a lift. Look behind, will you, and see what he's doing. It'd be on the cards for him to try rifle practice on us. I'm not driving back this road alone — get Jim Dinsmore to ride with me."
"He's gone," remarked the other, glancing back. "Not a trace of him."
"Probably alongside us in the woods," quavered Ed, and stepped on the accelerator.
But the car could do no more. Its wheels merely spun a little faster up the slippery grade.
Meanwhile the driver's face was a study in panic, nightmare panic of escape from an unavoidable pursuer.
His companion smiled. "Take it easy. You'll have us skidding off the road."
The warning came too late. With a sickening slither the car swung round, and its rear wheels, missing the road, sank down to rest in a pool of mud on the right. There sounded a churning and spattering of agonized tires, and then a groan from the driver.
"Now we're in for it, like I might have known. What d'you want to go talking to me for?" With backward glances into the wood towards a possible reappearance of the vanished rifleman, he stood dejectedly by the side of the car, cursing the road, the mountains, and finally himself for a fool to have undertaken such a job. "It's no use," he ended. "Only a team of horses can get us out of this. You'll have to do the last five miles on foot, and, believe me, I'm coming along. We'll carry your bags between us. Get help at the Dinsmores'."
But help came to Ed from a most unexpected quarter. His passenger, now uncoiling from the front seat, got out, and stood a moment stretching himself. His face showed only a profound boredom and disgust. "Can you tell me," he inquired with a certain casualness, "why anyone in his right senses would choose to live away from the conveniences of a city? Can you tell me why it's forever my luck to be bogged up somewhere in a desert like this?"
Then, disregarding the other's mystified expression, he picked his way through the mud, straddled the hollow into which the rear wheels had sunk, and, with a heave that brought the muscles out along his jaws, lifted the car back upon the road again. It was not a big car; but to lift the rear end even of a Chevrolet sedan requires very unusual strength indeed. Whereupon, as if nothing had happened, he inspected the dirt on his shoes and gloves, shook his head, and returned to his seat.
"Now, friend," he added, "drive carefully and have no fear. Neither the road, the forest, nor all the gunmen of Blind Trails shall prevent us reaching Dinsmore. After that, say your prayers and you may get back again."
Nothing impresses a certain type of man so much, perhaps, as the display of physical strength. Ed's eyes still bulged at the miracle. He swallowed once or twice, looking at the righted car as if he hardly recognized it. Still dazed, he climbed in and started the engine. Somehow it upset the recognized values that he, a stalwart native of the country, had stood about helpless while a city fellow restored his car to him as if it were nothing but a child's express train. As for the good-humored contempt in the stranger's words, which was all he could understand of them, any man as strong as that had the right to say what he pleased. Several minutes passed before he could find his voice.
"What d'you say your name was?" he ventured at last, in a tone of deference. "Didn't quite catch it when Fred Morrison told me over the 'phone, nor when you got off the train. Foreign sounding."
"Le Breton," replied the other absently, as if roused from thought, "Dr. Miles Le Breton."
"Thank you," said the driver, and added respectfully, "Gee whiz, but you got some muscle, doctor! Never seen anybody lift a car before." And, jocularly admiring, "Don't need no jack when you're around!"
But the stranger merely grunted, and sank back into silence. The car toiled on uphill, until at last, rounding a bend, it made better time along an intermediate ridge. Above them now, to the left, the mountains towered, like an on-sweeping tidal wave petrified in some prehistoric storm at the very zenith of its surge, but still black and threatening. The afternoon grew colder and, if possible, more somber.
Unexpectedly Le Breton spoke, but his words, or, rather, still more his voice, acted like a cold breath along the driver's spine. It was startling, too, because he seemed to be thinking aloud.
"Mania . . . homicidal mania, eh? Perhaps sadism . . . inherited. You said there was killer blood in the Dinsmores. Well, who, except Cyrus? Was there anyone else?"
"Just stories," muttered Ed. "Grandfather used to say there had always been one murder to every generation of Dinsmores."
"And the two boys?"
"Ever see a spider," returned the other, "a black one, hunched up in some corner, just ready to bust with poison? That's Stephen Dinsmore. Leastways, that's how he strikes me."
But the driver's zest for talk about this equivocal family seemed to have left him now that he had entered what might be called their territory. Topping a rise in the road, he pointed across a desolate meadow, once farmland carved from the forest, and not yet reabsorbed, though invaded here and there by an outcropping of dwarf spruce. Beyond, in a grove of pine, linked to the background of the wilderness, appeared the roof and gray patches of a large house. To the left of it stretched the waters of a singularly black pool, half rimmed with trees. Perhaps the dreariness of the day, or perhaps something in the composition of the landscape, accounted for the effect, but it seemed to Le Breton that the house and pool added a final touch of desolation. The chimneys stood out gaunt and naked. No sign of human activity could be seen. A cold puff of wind bent the spruce tops over in a kind of grotesque obeisance.
"There's Dinsmore," said the driver briefly, "and there's Thrall Pond. No bottom's ever been found to it yet. That's why the water's so black. Don't it look like the wrath of God?"
The phrase echoed curiously through Le Breton's mind as they plunged on. It found added reverberation in another phrase — "one murder to every generation." An odd shadow surrounded the place — invisible, indefinable, but definite. The words kept drifting through his thoughts as they turned into a long, unkempt avenue flanked with pines, and saw at the end of it, before them, the pale columns of a doorway.
He had not been wholly candid with the driver. His indifference had been used to spur the other's talkativeness; it had concealed an intent interest beneath its impassiveness. For his mission at Dinsmore was very much concerned with the history of Blind Trails and of that house. It was because of it, perhaps, that he had been summoned there (he could not know as yet) to baffle it, to prevent another murder if he could — an interesting mission. He had been honest enough in describing himself as a doctor. There had been no need to add that he was also a specialist connected with the Department of Justice. That would have let the cat out of the bag too soon.
As they entered the drive a line from one of his favorite poems occurred to him. To the surprise of Ed he declaimed aloud:
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."
