APPEARANCES, as has often been said, are misleading. Many a girl in a fur coat, gold-buckled shoes and an expensive marcel, snips ribbon behind a counter; that inoffensive looking cloud over there may darken and spit forth lightning; your sweet-faced wife may be plotting to deceive you; parsons go wrong.
Jeffrey Saubes, sitting with outward placidity on a box before his barn door with a keen-bladed, horn-handled knife in his hand slowly whittling as though his sole aim in life was to model a yacht in perfect miniature, was, in reality, thinking how smoothly that same knife would carve into the heart of his enemy, Philip Loeber.
His hate was a black hate, compounded of jealousy, envy, a sense of inferiority, and fear. It had begun twelve years ago when, the two men owning adjoining farms and having been good friends until then, Philip Loeber commenced to climb and Jeffrey Saubes to go down. Jeffrey drank, but that was his own affair; lots of men took a glass now and then, and made money just the same. But he was driven to borrow money from the more prosperous Philip, not once, but again and again, and he grew to hate the man who had befriended him.
Then Martha Hansen came along with her yellow hair and her fresh cheeks and her soft laughing eyes to settle with her uncle on the old Leatherby place. The uncle had fallen from his threshing machine the following year and was killed. There had been a quiet, slow but determined battle for her hand between the two men. Loeber had won.
Although Martha was dead now, and Jeffrey could see the daisies waving in the spring on her grave in the orchard corner over there on his neighbor's land, he had neither forgiven nor forgotten. This was count two.
Also Loeber had given him advice about his habits—advice which Jeffrey, growing more and more aloof and bitter-hearted and weasel-faced and grim for the smoldering hate in his heart, considered had been offered with a superior air. Count three.
And Loeber had sworn yesterday to have Saubes arrested for stealing a dozen of his fine White Leghorns. It was the fear that followed this threat that had started the whittler's brain on its evil scheming. He would kill him; and he wondered why he had not thought of it before. It would be easy.
Since his wife's death Philip Loeber had lived alone, with only a man-servant who slept, as Jeffrey knew, in a room over the carriage house a few hundred yards from the back door. When the two farmers had been friends Saubes had often spent the evening talking and smoking with his neighbor. That was before he had become full of hate and he had taken to drink. He knew where his enemy slept and that there was only a very simple lock on the outside door downstairs. His knife would get through that easily.
The hired man, a young, melancholy, but on the whole good-natured Dane, would be in his loft by eight o'clock, or nine at the latest. Loeber would be sitting by the fire or preparing for bed, dropping his big boots on the floor and yawning widely after the hard day in the fields.
The man with the knife would come up behind, speak so that the other would turn—it was part of his design that his enemy should see the hand that struck him down—and the knife would be in his heart before he could cry out. . . .
The man in the sun, whittling at the miniature ship, smiled grimly, and with one powerful vicious plunge of the sharp blade cut his work in two like a piece of cheese and flung it aside. His thinking was done.
It was a propitiously dark night, black as Jeffrey Saubes' soul and as full of turmoil. A night full of the oh's and ah's of wind-tortured trees that bent curiously down to see the man who was going to kill his friend.
It was March, and the water in the creek that ran between the two farms was high and noisy, rushing through the darkness as if anxious to be away from the menacing meadows of the little wood and the big dark man who crossed heavily over the uncertain bridge. Some new-born lambs cried pitifully from the sheepfold and a coyote howled in answer. A streak of moon peered out fearfully and disappeared.
Approaching his victim's house, he looked up and saw that the farm-hand was moving about in his room. Undressing perhaps, already, although it was not yet nine. No, he was moving swiftly back and forth, stooping to lift something, passing the window almost at a run. Suddenly, as though he felt the scrutiny of the man outside, he snatched at the blind and the window was dark.
Whatever he was doing, he was up there and out of the way. Thought Jeffrey Saubes: My work is here; it will soon be over, and I shall be home with my tracks well covered before anything is discovered. I shall be rid of the fool in a little while. How simple a thing murder is, after all!
He meditated, as he crept toward the door he had planned to enter, that suspicion would certainly never fasten on him. He had carried his enmity in his heart like a secret disease and had confided in nobody. The crime would, no doubt, be laid to the robbers and drifters who infested the highway into town. He had no fear that he would be caught, only that he might find his enemy alert and waiting and that the deed might be defeated.
There was a light in the kitchen, as he could see through a slit in the door. Try as he might, it was a very difficult thing to raise the lock with his knife without making a sound, but after a full fifteen minutes he accomplished it. He opened the door, pushing it in softly and cautiously, inch by inch. A creak. He sprang inside.
In the kitchen a lamp was burning, but as far as he could see no one was there. In the bedroom, perhaps. He strode across the bare floor, looking with quick motions of his head to left and right like a jungle beast who expects death to leap from every shadow. Not a sound in the house. And then he saw the body of Philip Loeber, whom he had come to kill, already dead with a knife-jab in his thick red neck and his inert legs sprawling grotesquely.
