In good time I shall get to the distressing actuality, to Red McIver and Handley Walker, to murder and sudden death.
But you realize, I am sure, how much old deeds incite to new ones, and you must forgive me if I tell you first of the old ones.

It was in 1814 that Abraham Wharf and his sister sat by a meager fire in their house on Dogtown Common, a desolate place even then.
He was sharpening his razor.
"Sister", said he "do you think people who commit suicide go to heaven"?
And she answered, "I don't know, but I hope you'll never do such a thing".
Without a tremor, "God forbid"!
He said, and went out and cut his throat in the cave near Granny Day's swamp.

What has this to do with the present?
Much, I assure you.
You must know what gets into people, even such as Red and Handley, before you can tell what comes out of them.
They had learned, both of them, about Abraham Wharf.
That's why I beg you not to forget him.
His ghost is not laid.
Red and Handley, God help them, knew the old Dogtown lore;
and I knew they knew it, for I'd told them a lot of it.
And isn't it true that you get a deeper perception about a man and his motives when you know what it is he knows?

Yes, gentlemen, I am getting to the point, to my point.
You know the facts;
they are set forth in your own newspapers.
You want from me the story, but a story is about 'why' and then, perhaps, about how.
The 'when' you know;
yesterday morning.
So what I am trying to tell you is the 'why' -- that is my point -- and that concerns the spirit of the matter.
There is an inwardness and a luster to old furniture (look at that mahogany highboy behind you) which has a provocative emanation, if I may say so.
Places, too, have their haunting qualities.
Even people.
And my point in this sad story is the spirit of the matter.
When you hold the spirit of a thing, then somehow you know the truth -- you know a fake antique from the real thing.
And the truth is what you've come for, is it not?

Now, Dogtown is one of those places that creeps into the marrow as worms get into old wood, under the veneer.
In fact, all the folk who lived on the back of Cape Ann, they are not just like others.
There's a different hall-mark on them.
There were no witch burnings here because everyone had a witch in the family.
Just think of old Granther Stannard who pulled the teeth of Dark Younger (her real name was Dorcas), and because he bungled the job and left two protruding tusks she put such a hex on him that he thought his legs were made of glass.
After that he was never known to run or even walk fast.
Today Dogtown is the only deserted village in all New England that I know of.
There it sits, a small highland, with towns like Gloucester near by;
but now it's the most lost and tortured place in the world.
Those who lived in that desolation of rocky deformity took on some of the moraine's stony character.
Scientists say it is the last spewings of a great glacier, but one rather feels that only a malevolent giant could have piled up those crouching monsters of granite which still seem to preserve a sort of suspended, ominous life in them.

We'll walk up there later.
It's perhaps a mile from here where we sit.
And not one single dwelling left there, though once, in the early eighteenth century, there were close to a hundred houses.
(I myself have identified about sixty sites, from the old maps and registers.
A fascinating pursuit, I assure you.
) Even I can remember nothing but ruined cellars and tumbled pillars, and nobody has lived there in the memory of any living man.
It is now a sweep of boulders and ledges, with oak, walnut and sumac creeping across the common, and everywhere the ruins and the long, long shadows.

That's your setting, and a sinister one.
Please get that in your reports.
It accounts for so many things.
Both Red McIver and Handley Walker lived nearby, almost as near as I do.
Red lived at Lanesville, and from his house he could be up on the Common in a half hour's brisk walk;
Handley lived further on, at Pigeon Cove.
I'd often find one or other of them up around Dogtown sketching.
They were both painters, (They were?
They are?
What should one say?
) Well, anyhow, Dogtown Common is so much off the beaten track nowadays that only Sunday picnickers still stray up there, from time to time.
Sea-road, railroad, lack of water, killed Dogtown.
Dead, dead as a brass door nail, and I sometimes feel like the Sexton, for I'm about the last to be even interested.

I knew Red and Handley well.
As I said, they were both painters.
They'd come, separately, to Gloucester some twenty years ago -- there's always been an artists' colony somewhere on Cape Ann -- and each married here.
They married cousins, Anta and Freya Norberg.
There are a lot of Scandinavians in this neck of the woods, and many still make painted furniture and take steam-baths.
Pretty girls among them, with blonde hair and pert faces.
Handley married Freya and Red, of the red beard, married Anta.
And it was because of an old Norberg inheritance that I got to understand them all so well.
The quarrel ended in a ridiculous draw, but I must tell you about it.
Oh, yes, I'm quite sure it's important, because of the Beech Pasture.
What's that?
Why, that's what gave me the feeling, gave me as-it-were the spirit, the demoniac, evil spirit of this whole affair.

You see, besides being custodian of antiquities, I am also registrar.
No, I don't hold with those who live entirely among dead things.
I know as well as the next man that a ship is called from the rigging she carries, where the live wind blows, and not from the hull.
But you've got to know both.
What's below the water-line interests me also.
As I was saying, I've known all about the old records, including the old Norberg deed.
Some ten years ago that page was torn out, I don't know by whom.
About five years ago, Handley came to ask me if he could see the tattered register.
He was courteous and casual about it, as though it were of no consequence.
He's always like that, in spite of being a big man.
(When you see him, you'll notice his habit of fingering, I might almost say, stroking a large mole with black hairs on it, by his right temple.
) A sensual man, but very courteous, some would say slick.
Like his glossy black hair.
Too many outside manners, to my taste.
He is the sort who, with an appraising eye, would cross the street to help a strange woman on to a bus and then pinch her.
A real gentleman, I feel, would do neither.
He's always worn a broad-brimmed hat, and I've noticed, in my small study at the Society, that he rather smells of cosmetics.
The next week, cousin Red wandered in as casually, but curt and untidy.
Red was small and fine-boned, like ivory-inlay.
He too asked to see the same page.
When I told him someone had torn it out, he shouted.
"By God, it's that damn Handley, the sneak"!
And later in the same week they both came together to examine the register.
Fortunately we were alone in the building -- so few people nowadays are interested even in their own past or in the lovely craft of other days -- for they began to abuse each other in the foulest language.
Red thrusting out his tawny beard, Handley glowering under his suddenly rumpled black hair.
They actually bristled.
Le rouge et le noir.
Violent men both.
Red always was morose, yet that day the dapper Handley was the louder of the two.
But for my presence, they would have been at each others' throats.

During the quarrel I learned what the trouble was, from the accusations each hurled at the other.
The Beech Pasture had suddenly become valuable.
There's a fine granite quarry there, and granite's coming back for public buildings.
Both men knew it was in the Norberg family holdings, but to which of the cousins did it belong, Anta or Freya?
Fortunately, I knew almost exactly what the will had said.
It began with a preamble, of course.
This explained that the judge of probate of Essex County, 1785 or 1786, appointed three free-holders of Gloucester to divide and establish the Norberg estate.
After the usual Honorable Sirs, it went on to say that there had been set off to the widow one full third part of the real estate of the deceased Salu Norberg, one lower room, on the Western side, privileges to the well and bake-oven and to one third of the cellar (I can show you the cellar when we go up), also one Cow Right, and lastly they set off to the widow her own land that she brought with her as dower, namely the Beech Pasture.
And I remember that the whole of the privileges, not counting the Beech Pasture, was valued at twenty pounds.
I wish you could have seen the crests fall on these two sparring coxcombs when I told them that obviously the pasture belonged to their wives jointly.

That battle scene, ridiculous as it was, remained in my mind.
A disturbing picture of bad blood, to be further heightened with illicit if buccolic colors, for on a subsequent day I saw Handley escorting Anta, Red's wife, up on Dogtown Common.
I felt it would be inopportune to disclose my presence.
Not that I intentionally go unperceived, but the boulders up there are very high and I am a small woman.

One other cause of jealousy between them I must tell you.
Paint!
Gloomy and unkempt as Red McIver was, he was much the better painter.
I suppose Handley knew it.
If Red had a show at Gloucester, Handley would hurry to hang his pictures in Rockport.
You may say this has little pertinence, but, gentlemen, remember that all this prepared my mind, alerted my intelligence.
By such touches the pattern takes shape.
You would call these the motives of crime.
I would call them the patterns of life, perhaps even the designs of destiny.
Yet with all this knowledge I had nothing of substance to unravel our case, as you would call it, till yesterday.

One month ago, on the 20th of October, was the opening of the gunning season in Massachusetts.
Not much to shoot, but there are a few pheasant.
Rabbits, too, if you care for them, which most of the folk around here haven't the sense to appreciate.
Any more than they have the sense to eat mussels.
That was the day Red was said to have gone away.
Oh yes, he'd talked about doing so.
In fact, he often disappeared, from time to time, -- off to paint the sea, aboard a dragger out from Gloucester.
Anta, his wife, never seemed to mind.
I suppose these absences gave her more clearance for her embraces with Cousin Handley.
Anyhow, I wasn't surprised, early that morning, to see Handley himself crossing from Dogtown Common Road to the Back Road.
No, he didn't have his gun, which he should have.
It would have been a good excuse for his being there at all.
I myself had been up there by seven o'clock, after mushrooms, since there'd been a week of rain which had stopped early that morning and the day was as clear as Sandwich glass.