The Valley of Fear Arthur Conan Doyle (general ebook reader .txt) 📖

“Why, I seem to have read of the Scowrers in Chicago. A gang of murderers, are they not?”

“Hush, on your life!” cried the miner, standing still in alarm, and gazing in amazement at his companion. “Man, you won’t live long in these parts if you speak in the open street like that. Many a man has had the life beaten out of him for less.”

“Well, I know nothing about them. It’s only what I have read.”

“And I’m not saying that you have not read the truth.” The man looked nervously round him as he spoke, peering into the shadows as if he feared to see some lurking danger. “If killing is murder, then God knows there is murder and to spare. But don’t you dare to breathe the name of Jack McGinty in connection with it, stranger; for every whisper goes back to him, and he is not one that is likely to let it pass. Now, that’s the house you’re after, that one standing back from the street. You’ll find old Jacob Shafter that runs it as honest a man as lives in this township.”

“I thank you,” said McMurdo, and shaking hands with his new acquaintance he plodded, gripsack in hand, up the path which led to the dwelling house, at the door of which he gave a resounding knock.

It was opened at once by someone very different from what he had expected. It was a woman, young and singularly beautiful. She was of the German type, blonde and fair-haired, with the piquant contrast of a pair of beautiful dark eyes with which she surveyed the stranger with surprise and a pleasing embarrassment which brought a wave of colour over her pale face. Framed in the bright light of the open doorway, it seemed to McMurdo that he had never seen a more beautiful picture; the more attractive for its contrast with the sordid and gloomy surroundings. A lovely violet growing upon one of those black slag heaps of the mines would not have seemed more surprising. So entranced was he that he stood staring without a word, and it was she who broke the silence.

“I thought it was father,” said she with a pleasing little touch of a German accent. “Did you come to see him? He is downtown. I expect him back every minute.”

McMurdo continued to gaze at her in open admiration until her eyes dropped in confusion before this masterful visitor.

“No, miss,” he said at last, “I’m in no hurry to see him. But your house was recommended to me for board. I thought it might suit me⁠—and now I know it will.”

“You are quick to make up your mind,” said she with a smile.

“Anyone but a blind man could do as much,” the other answered.

She laughed at the compliment. “Come right in, sir,” she said. “I’m Miss Ettie Shafter, Mr. Shafter’s daughter. My mother’s dead, and I run the house. You can sit down by the stove in the front room until father comes along⁠—Ah, here he is! So you can fix things with him right away.”

A heavy, elderly man came plodding up the path. In a few words McMurdo explained his business. A man of the name of Murphy had given him the address in Chicago. He in turn had had it from someone else. Old Shafter was quite ready. The stranger made no bones about terms, agreed at once to every condition, and was apparently fairly flush of money. For seven dollars a week paid in advance he was to have board and lodging.

So it was that McMurdo, the self-confessed fugitive from justice, took up his abode under the roof of the Shafters, the first step which was to lead to so long and dark a train of events, ending in a far distant land.

McMurdo was a man who made his mark quickly. Wherever he was the folk around soon knew it. Within a week he had become infinitely the most important person at Shafter’s. There were ten or a dozen boarders there; but they were honest foremen or commonplace clerks from the stores, of a very different calibre from the young Irishman. Of an evening when they gathered together his joke was always the readiest, his conversation the brightest, and his song the best. He was a born boon companion, with a magnetism which drew good humour from all around him.

And yet he showed again and again, as he had shown in the railway carriage, a capacity for sudden, fierce anger, which compelled the respect and even the fear of those who met him. For the law, too, and all who were connected with it, he exhibited a bitter contempt which delighted some and alarmed others of his fellow boarders.

From the first he made it evident, by his open admiration, that the daughter of the house had won his heart from the instant that he had set eyes upon her beauty and her grace. He was no backward suitor. On the second day he told her that he loved her, and from then onward he repeated the same story with an absolute disregard of what she might say to discourage him.

“Someone else?” he would cry. “Well, the worse luck for someone else! Let him look out for himself! Am I to lose my life’s chance and all my heart’s desire for someone else? You can keep on saying no, Ettie: the day will come when you will say yes, and I’m young enough to wait.”

He was a dangerous suitor, with his glib Irish tongue, and his pretty, coaxing ways. There was about him also that glamour of experience and of mystery which attracts a woman’s interest, and finally her love. He could talk of the sweet valleys of County Monaghan from which he came, of the lovely, distant island, the low hills and green meadows of which seemed the more beautiful when imagination viewed them from this place of grime and snow.

Then he was