Tracks in the Snow

On the morning of the 29th of January, 1896, Eustace Peters was found murdered in his bed at his house, Grenvile Combe, in the parish of Long Wilton, of which I was then rector.

Much mystery attached to the circumstances of his death. It was into my hands that chance threw the clue to this mystery, and it is for me, if for anyone, to relate the facts.

To the main fact of all, the death of my own friend on the eve, as I sometimes fancy, of a fuller blossoming of his powers, my writing cannot give the tragic import due to it, for it touched my own life too nearly. I had come⁠—I speak of myself, for they tell me a narrator must not thrust himself quite into the background⁠—I had come to Long Wilton, three years before, from a college tutorship at Oxford, to occupy the rectory till, as happened not long after, the son of the patron became qualified to hold it. Country-bred, fond of country people and of country pastimes, I had not imagined, when I came, either the difficulties of a country parson’s task or the false air of sordidness which those difficulties would at first wear to me; still less was I prepared for the loneliness which at first befell me in a place where, though many of my neighbours were wise men and good men, none ever showed intellectual interests or talked with any readiness of high things. The comradeship of Peters, who settled there a few months after me, did more than to put an end to my loneliness; by shrewd, casual remarks, which were always blunt and unexpected but never seemed intrusive or even

I was up early on the 29th. Snow lay thick on the ground but had ceased falling, and it was freezing hard, when, while waiting for breakfast, I walked out as far as my gate on the village street to see what the weather was like. Suddenly Peters’ housemaid came running down to the village on her way, as it proved, to the police-station. Before passing she paused, and breathlessly told me the news. I walked quickly to Peters’ house. Several neighbours were already gathering about the gate of the drive but did not enter. I rang the bell, was admitted by the housekeeper and walked straight up to Peters’ bedroom. Callaghan and Vane-Cartwright were there already, the former half-dressed, unshaved and haggard-looking, the latter a neat figure in bedroom slippers and a dressing-gown. We had only exchanged a few words when the police-sergeant entered, followed a minute or two later by a tall and pleasant-faced young constable, who brought with him the village doctor, an ambitious, up-to-date youth who had lately come to those parts.

I have some little difficulty in saying what I then observed; for indeed, though I looked intently enough on the dead face and figure, and noticed much about them that is not to my present purpose, I took in for myself very little that bore on that problem of detection which has since interested me so much.

It appeared, too, that the owner of the knife had taken precautions against being traced, by carefully obliterating the maker’s name and other marks on it with a file.

In the midst of our observations in the room a vexatious interruption happened. I have forgotten to say that the servants had been sent out of the room by the police-sergeant, and that, almost immediately after, the constable who brought the doctor had been sent down to examine the outside of the house. For some reason he was slow in setting about this; it is possible that he stopped to talk to the servants, but in any case, he went out through the kitchen, and explored first the back of the house, where he thought he knew of an easy way of making an entrance. Meanwhile the neighbours, who had collected about the gate, had been drawn by their curiosity into the garden, and by the time the constable had got round to the front of the house several were wandering about the drive and the lawn which lay between it and the road. They had no more harmful intention than that of gazing and gaping at the windows, but it led to the very serious consequence that a number of tracks had now been made in the snow which might very possibly frustrate a search for the traces of the criminal. This the Sergeant now noticed from the window.

I leapt to my feet calling “Fire!”

In waking fact, the thatched cottage was in a blaze.

I called with all my might to Mrs. Trethewy. I told her to run out while I brought out her daughter, and she answered.

I burst into the girl’s little room on the ground floor. It was full of smoke; she was suffocating before she could wake. I tore her from her bed, and bore her through the door and on to the footbridge. I turned my head back towards the house to call again to Mrs. Trethewy, when a hoarse cry of “Fire!” came from the other direction, and a man⁠—he seemed an old grey-bearded rustic⁠—ran on to the bridge towards the door, dashed with full force against us, and overturned me and my half-conscious burden.

I do not know just how we rolled or fell, but we were in the water. I had managed still to hold Ellen Trethewy with my right arm, and with my left hand to catch the edge of the footbridge. I could not by any effort have pulled us both out or raised her on to the bridge, but it was easy to hold our heads above water, for we were against the pier of the bridge, in between the two currents that shot under the arches. Mrs. Trethewy would be there in a moment and could help us out; or⁠—why did not that old rustic help us?

They say that men in moments of extreme peril take in all manner of things with extraordinary rapidity, but I do not know whether