“Oh. I couldn’t think where I’d seen him. But I remember now--he’s a sort of porter and general helper at that large bakery on lower Market Street.”
“I really didn’t know where he worked,” admitted Mrs. Buhler. “I had thought of asking him several times, but he’s an awfully hard man to carry on a conversation with.”
He had been at the rooming-house four months when he received his first letter. Its envelope proclaimed it a hay-fever cure advertisement.
As he was not in the habit of leaving his key at the desk, the letter remained in his box for three days. Finally Mr. Buhler handed it to him as he was passing the desk on the way to his room.
He paused to read the inscription.
“You never receive any mail,” remarked Mr. Buhler. “Haven’t you any family?”
“No.”
“Where is your home?”
“Catawissa, Pennsylvania.”
“That’s a funny name. How do you spell it?”
Scannon spelled it, and went on down the hall.
“C-a-t-a-w-i-double-s-a,” repeated Mr. Buhler to his wife. “Ain’t that a funny name?”
* * * * *
In his room, Scannon removed the advertisement from its envelope and read it soberly from beginning to end.
Finished, he folded it and placed it on his pile of newspapers. Then he brushed his hair and went out again.
He ate supper at one of the little lunch counters near the Civic Center. The rest of the evening he spent in the newspaper room at the public library. He picked up eastern and western papers with impartial interest, reading the whole of each page, religiously and without a change of expression, until the closing bell sounded.
He never ascended to the reference, circulation or magazine rooms. Sometimes he would take the local papers home with him and read stretched out on his bed, not seeming to notice that his hands were blue with the penetrating chill that nightly drifts in from the ocean.
On Sundays he would put on a red-striped silk shirt and a blue serge suit and take a car to Golden Gate Park. There he would sit for hours in the sun, impassively watching the hundreds of picnic parties, the squirrels, or a piece of paper retreating before the breeze. Or perhaps he would walk west to the ocean, stopping for a few minutes at each of the animal pens, and take a car home from the Cliff House.
For two years the days came and passed on in monotonous reduplication, the casual hay-fever cure circulars supplying the only touches of novelty.
Then one afternoon as he was brushing his hair, he gasped and put his hand to his throat. A sharp nausea pitched him to the floor.
Inch by inch, he dragged himself to the little table and upset it, crashing the bowl and pitcher into a dozen pieces.
His energy was spent in the effort, and he lay inert.
* * * * *
Mrs. Buhler consented to accompany her friend to the spiritualist’s only after repeated urging, and she repented her decision as soon as she arrived there.
The fusty parlor was a north room to which the sun never penetrated, and in consequence was cold and damp. The medium, a fat, untidy woman whose movements were murmurous with the rustle of silk and the tinkle of tawdry ornaments, sat facing her with one hand pressed to forehead, and delivered mysteriously-acquired information about relatives and friends.
“Who is Dave?” she asked finally.
Mrs. Buhler hastily recalled all of her husband’s and her own living relatives.
“I don’t know any Dave,” she said.
“Yes, yes, you know him,” insisted the medium. “He’s in the spirit land now. There’s death right at your very door!”
She put her hand to her throat and coughed in gruesome simulation of internal strangulation.
“But I don’t know any Dave,” reiterated Mrs. Buhler.
She regained the street with a feeling of vast relief.
“I’ll never go to one of those places again!” she asserted, as she said good-by to her friend. “It’s too creepy!”
A great fog bank was rolling in majestically from the west, blotting out the sun and dripping a fine drizzle on the pavements. Drawing her coat collar closer about her neck, Mrs. Buhler plunged into the enveloping dampness and started to climb the long hill that led to her rooming-house.
Her husband’s distended eyes and pale face warned her of bad news.
“Dave Scannon’s dead!” he whispered hoarsely.
_Dave Scannon!_ So that was “Dave!”
“He’s been dead two or three days,” continued Mr. Buhler. “I was beating a rug in the back yard a while ago when I noticed a swarm of big blue flies buzzing about his window. It flashed over me right away that I hadn’t seen him for several days. I couldn’t unlock his door, because his key was on the inside, so I called the coroner and a policeman, and we broke it in. He was lying between the bed and the dresser, and the bowl and pitcher lay broken on the floor, where he had knocked it over when he fell. They’re taking him out now.”
Mrs. Buhler hurried to the back stairway and descended to the lower hall. Two men were carrying a long wicker basket up the little flight of steps between the back entrance and the yard. She remained straining over the banister until the basket had disappeared.
The coroner had found nothing in his room but clothing, about five dollars in change, and a faded picture in a tarnished silver frame of an anemic looking woman who might have been a mother, wife or sister.
Mrs. Buhler answered his questions nervously. Yes, the dead man had been with them about two years. They knew little of him, for he was very peculiar and never talked, and wouldn’t even allow the maid to come in and clean up his room. He had said though that he had no family and that his home was in Catawissa, Pennsylvania. She remembered the town because it had such an odd name.
The coroner wrote to authorities in Catawissa, who replied that they could find no traces of anyone by the name of Scannon. No more mail ever came for the man except the occasional hay-fever cure circulars.
The manager of the bakery telephoned to ask if the death notice in the paper referred to the same Dave Scannon who had been working for him. He knew nothing of the man except that he had been very punctual in his duties until that final day when he did not appear.
* * * * *
Several weeks later, little Mrs. Varnes, who occupied a room at the rear of the second floor, stopped at the desk to leave her key. She hovered there for a few minutes of indecision, then impulsively leaned forward.
“Mrs. Buhler, I just want to ask you something,” she said, lowering her voice. “One afternoon several weeks ago I saw some men carrying a long basket out of the back door, and I’ve been wondering what it was.”
“Probably laundry,” hazarded Mrs. Buhler.
“No, it was one of those long baskets such as the undertakers use to carry the dead in. I’ve often thought about it, but I couldn’t figure out who could have died in this house, so I decided I would ask you. I told my husband about it, and he said I was dreaming.”
“You must have been,” said Mrs. Buhler.
[Illustration]
_The_ ACCUSING VOICE _A Strange Tale_
_By_ MEREDITH DAVIS
“We, the jury, find the defendant, Richard Bland, guilty of murder in the first degree, in manner and form as charged.”
Allen Defoe, foreman of the twelve men, listened with impassive face as the judge read away the life of the prisoner in the dock--the man whose death warrant Defoe had signed only a few minutes before. As the judge finished, Defoe glanced warily toward the prisoner. Somehow, he preferred to avoid catching his eye.
Bland, a slight, rather uninteresting type of man, stood with bowed head; Defoe now turned his gaze full upon him.
“Has the prisoner anything to say why judgment should not be pronounced?”
The judge’s voice, coming after the short pause, sent a strange chill into the heart of Allen Defoe, juror. He hoped the prisoner’s counsel would make the customary motions for a new trial or for time in which to file an appeal. He did neither: evidently Bland believed the verdict inescapable--or else he was out of funds.
Now the judge arose in his place, donning with nervous gesture the black cap that accompanies the most tragic moment in the performance of a court’s duties. The judge seemed ill at ease in the cap. It was the first time he had worn it. The grotesque thought flitted through Defoe’s mind that perhaps the judge had borrowed the cap from one of his fellow jurists for the occasion.
The almost level rays of the western sun diffused a sombre, aureate glow athwart the judge’s bench, so that the dark figure of the standing man was in mystic indistinctness beyond the shaft of light from the window. A fly now and then craved the spotlight for a moment and lazily floated from the growing dusk of the room to the avenue of ebbing day, streaming in from the west. And always there was a constant turmoil of dust particles, visible only when they moved into the bright relief of the sun-shaft.
The handful of spectators stirred restlessly while the judge was making his preparations. The droning noises of approaching summer evening in a rural county-seat were smothered by the buzz of ill-hushed voices. Perhaps that was why the judge, in the midst of adjusting his headgear, rapped sharply thrice with his gavel--or, it may have been only his excess of nervousness.