Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 36, No. 4, October 20, 1928

They learned, for instance, that the farmer for whom James Crosby worked was a tenant of Edmund Lascelles. He was having such a hard time making his farm pay that at the time of the murder he was behind in rent; and being behind in rent with Edmund Lascelles, as everybody knew, was trying on the nerves. Also this farmer, Charles Parker, had a mean temper.

Now the two men from London began to keep late hours for a quiet town like Beckfield. Not that this attracted any one’s notice; the two visitors were careful not to attract attention whenever they came back to the inn toward dawn. Least of all did the farmer, Charles Parker, suspect that it was on his farm the visitors spent their nocturnal hours.

For they had become interested indeed in Charles Parker. They had struck up an acquaintance with him and James Crosby; but their talk was of farming, the weather and like topics.

Occasionally Crosby would make them listen to his oft repeated dramatic experience on the night of the murder. Parker seldom alluded to it.

Unwelcome Visitors

He was a morose man, and once or twice said something about giving up the struggle and trying again in the wheatfields of Canada. For the rest, he avoided even casual chat and moped about his farm.

The two Londoners, from the corners of their eyes, watched the places Parker seemed to avoid as well as those that attracted him.

Finally he became irritated at the too frequent visits of the two Londoners and let them see that they had worn out their welcome. It was then that the two men from London began to do their visiting by night.

They came quietly, a lantern under the coat of one, a shovel secreted by the other. Quietly they would dig into the ground in stable stalls, barns and cellars.

Before they touched shovel to earth, however, they would study the chosen spot by the light of the lantern. But for weeks they got little for their labor.

Then one night they looked thoughtfully at a pile of litter in a broken-down barn of Parker’s. They wonder why litter should be there, litter of just that kind, so far from its probable place of origin. They decided to dig.

They dug for an hour without results. Suddenly the man who was using the shovel, while the other held the lantern, said:

“Wait a minute!”

It was really an expression of excitement. For the light of his companion’s lantern showed a gruesome object in the spadeful he had just dug up.

A little later his shovel encountered something else — a short butchering knife, its blade thickly rusted. The knife, together with the human hand, rewarded the two detectives’ labors.

In the morning Charles Parker was arrested. The charge against him was the murder of Edmund Lascelles.

While he was being taken off to the police station the London detectives searched his house as thoroughly as they had his farm.

In one of Parker’s pillows trained fingers encountered a small, hard object. It was a ring with a large sapphire set in it, known to have belonged to Edmund Lascelles.

When this discovery was put before Parker the stolid silence with which he had met all questions up to then came to an end. Despair, such as George Manners must have felt, broke up the farmer’s resistance, and he confessed.

Sick cattle, poor crops and the everlasting nagging and bullying of Lascelles had done little to improve Parker’s temper.

On the night of the murder his landlord came to see him and Parker got the benefit of the temper in which Lascelles had come away from his last interview with Manners.

Parker finally forgot that Lascelles was his landlord. He told Lascelles, for the first time, what he really thought of him. Whereupon Lascelles gave the farmer a good taste of his riding crop. Then the landlord strode out of the farmhouse.

For some minutes the farmer remained where he was, smoldering. The welts raised on his face by the riding crop burned his flesh as if with fire.

Then, rushing out into the kitchen, the farmer snatched up a knife and set out on the dark road after Lascelles. Before he overtook him, Lascelles heard him approach and turned. Again the farmer got the riding crop across his face. This time, however, he had an adequate retort.

Madly he stabbed Lascelles again and again, exultant whenever his blade sank into flesh. The struggle ended abruptly — Lascelles was dead.

With resistance gone, Parker’s rage went. Utter fear and misery now possessed him. What was he to do when the crime should be discovered? Flight was his only hope. America — Australia — the farther the better! But how was he to get there, he who could not even pay the rental on his farm?

The sapphire ring on Lascelles’s right hand was part of the unforgetable picture his match showed. Here was his one hope for escape, the ring! Stooping, he took up the hand and tried to pull the ring off.