He has tried to crush the life and spirit and independence from everyone about him.
But once too often he wreaked his anger upon an innocent person—at least upon a person that for all he knew was innocent—and at one stroke his past injustices were avenged.
It was not chance that killed Colonel Gaylord. It was the inevitable law of cause and effect.
'Way back in his boyhood when he gave way to his first fit of passion, he sentenced himself to some such end as this.
Every unjust act in his after-life piled up the score against him.
"Oh, I've seen it a hundred times!
It's character that tells.
I've seen it happen to a political boss—a man whose business it was to make friends with every voter high and low.
I've seen him forget, just once, and turn on a man, humiliate him, wound his pride, crush him under foot and think no more of the matter than if he had stepped on a worm.
And I've seen that man, the most insignificant of the politician's followers, work and plot and scheme to overthrow him; and in the end succeed.
The big man never knew what struck him.
He thought it was luck, chance, a turn of the wheel.
He never dreamed that it was his own character hitting back.
I've seen it so often, I'm a fatalist.
I don't believe in chance.
It was Colonel Gaylord who killed himself, and he commenced it fifty years ago."
"It's God's own truth, Terry!" I said solemnly.
The sheriff had listened to Terry's words with an anxiously reminiscent air.
I wondered if he were reviewing his own political past, to see if by chance he also had unwittingly crushed a worm.
He raised his eyes to Terry's face with a gleam of admiration.
"You've been pretty clever, Mr. Patten, in finding out the truth about this crime," he acknowledged generously. "But you couldn't have expected me to find out," he added, "for I didn't know any of the circumstances.
I had never even heard that such a man existed as that chicken thief—and as to there being two ghosts instead of one, there wasn't a suggestion of it brought out at the inquest."
Terry looked at him with his usual slowly broadening smile.
He opened his mouth to say something, but he changed his mind and—with a visible effort—shut it again.
"Terry," I asked, "how did you find out about the chicken thief?
I confess I don't understand it yet."
He shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
"Nothing simpler.
The trouble with you people was that you were searching for something lurid, and the little common-place things which, in a case like this, are the most suggestive, you overlooked.
As soon as I read the story of the crime in the papers I saw that in all probability Rad was innocent.
His behavior was far too suspicious for him really to be guilty; unless he were a fool he would have covered up his tracks.
There was of course the possibility that Mose had committed the murder, but in the light of his past devotion to the Colonel it did not seem likely.
"I had already been reading a lot of sensational stuff about the ghost of Four-Pools, and when the murder followed so close on the heels of the robbery, I commenced to look about for a connecting link.
It was evident that Radnor had nothing to do with it, but whether or not he suspected someone was not so clear.
His reticence in regard to the ha'nt made me think that he did.
I came South with pretty strong suspicions against the elder son, but with a mind still open to conviction.
The telegram showing that he was in Seattle at the time of the murder, proved his innocence of that, but he might still be connected with the ha'nt.
I tried the suggestion on Radnor, and his manner of taking it proved pretty conclusively that I had stumbled on the truth.
The ha'nt business, I dare say, was started as a joke, and was kept up as being a convenient method of warding off eavesdroppers.
Why Jefferson came back and why Radnor gave him money are not matters that concern us; if they prefer to keep it a secret that's their own affair.
"Jeff helped himself pretty freely to cigars, roast chickens, jam, pajamas, books, brandy, and anything else he needed to make himself comfortable in the cabin, but he took nothing of any great value.
In the meantime, though, other things commenced disappearing—things that Radnor knew his brother had no use for—and he supposed the workers about the place were stealing and laying it to the ghost, as a convenient scapegoat.
"But as a matter of fact they were not.
A second ghost had appeared on the scene.
This tramp negro had taken up his quarters in the spring-hole and was prowling about at night seeking what he might devour.
He ran across Jeff dressed in a sheet, and decided to do some masquerading on his own account.
Sheets were no longer left on the line all night, so he had to put up with lap robes.
As a result, the spring-hole shortly became haunted by a jet black spirit nine feet tall with blue flames and sulphur, and all the other accessories.
"This made little impression at the house until Mose himself was frightened; then Radnor saw that the hoax had reached the point where it was no longer funny, and he determined to get rid of Jeff immediately.
While he drove him to the station he left Mose behind to straighten up the loft; and Mose, coming into the house to put some things away, met ghost number two just after he had robbed the safe.