Into the Valley of Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

approach Mrs. Steadman herself.”
    “Indeed, madam?”
    “Yes.”
    Miss Unwin drew a weary breath. “Yes, sir. So I have come to you as being, I understand, the person in the town mostable to give me an account, not of the case itself, the details of which I have learnt from the newspapers, but of the man who has been found guilty of the crime.”
    “That is, Mr. Steadman? John Steadman of this parish?”
    “Exactly. Now, would you be able to tell me something about him? As the parish beadle, you would know more of him than perhaps anyone here.”
    The gross flattery seemed to work. Onto Mr. Sprunge’s solemn cone of a face there came a look of profound thought.
    “Yes, madam,” he said at last. “Yes, I consider that I am that man.”
    “And?”
    “And, madam?”
    “And what can you tell me of John Steadman?”
    “Ah. Ah, yes.”
    More deep consideration. Then a long-drawn breath. “What I shall tell you, madam, will, I truly believe, astonish you.”
    Miss Unwin drew herself up. “I am ready to be astonished,” she said.
    “Then, madam, I will say this. This and no more. John Steadman, convicted murderer though he be, is a truly good man. A truly good boy he was when I marched him to sing in the choir at church, and a truly good man he has proved ever since he came back to this town of ours from serving Her Majesty the Queen in a military capacity. There, madam.”
    Miss Unwin duly put on a display of fine astonishment. Mr. Sprunge appeared gratified. She thanked him then for his assistance and, seeing the spire of the parish church not far distant, set off in the direction of the rectory and the Reverend Dr. Clarke.
    Her interviews with him and with old Mrs. Orridge, the midwife, who proved to be a terrible gossip, were longer by a good deal than her encounter with the beadle. But neither did anything to take away from the impression she had formed from pompous Mr. Sprunge.
    “Yes,” Dr. Clarke, pink-faced and white-haired, had declared at the end. “Steadman, though he keeps an inn, is as fine a fellow as you will come across in all Oxfordshire. I cannot understand how he can have done such a fearful thing, and only the evidence in court persuades me that he did.”
    While Mrs. Orridge, in her way, was as positive. “Oh, little Jack Steadman would knock down a boy in fight like a true ’un, so he would. But in fair fight always, mind you. In fair fight and no hard words after. That was Jack Steadman.”
    Miss Unwin hurried back to the Rising Sun after this. Much of this hot July Sunday had gone, and next Friday at eight o’clock in the morning Jack Steadman, the fair fighter, would be led out to the hangman’s noose.
    Yet she could find in her mind little notion how she might set about the task she had undertaken. It was all very well for Vilkins to believe she was some sort of magician who had only to look at the facts of a case to be able to put a completely different interpretation on them from everybody else, and the true interpretation at that. It was all very well for indomitable Mrs. Steadman to tell her that her Jack could not have killed a man from behind, and that he himself had declared that he had not done so. And it was all very well for Miss Unwin herself to feel convinced that Jack Steadman had not committed the crime of which an assize court had found him guilty, and for her three witnesses of character to back that belief. Yet the facts remained. And on the facts, she was soon to confirm, there seemed to be no arguing with that jury’s verdict or the response of the Home Secretary to the appeal sent to him.
    When she got back to the inn, she ensconced herself in Mrs. Steadman’s neat-as-a-pin sitting-room and there read column after column, first of the local newspaper’s account of the inquest, and then other accounts of the trial itself, which Mrs. Steadman had carefully pasted into the pages of an old account-book.
    Evidence had been brought to show that there was no love