Silent guests

A mysterious thing, the human mind. Can it keep a secret indefinitely? Here I find myself committing to paper things which I had determined never to divulge--sacred things long hidden; intimate privacies having their roots in the soul.

However, these written pages shall never be seen by the merely inquisitive eye, but shall be safely hidden away and kept as a faithful attestation of the genesis of this house--unless fate decrees otherwise. I believe in fate--are we not all merely its playthings--toys moved hither and yon in Nature’s nursery?

Was it fate that called me from my accustomed life and routine in a distant American city to that little churchyard in a secluded corner of the Canadian backwoods, where so trivial a thing as curiosity aroused by the peculiarity of an epitaph chiseled in a marble headstone marking the grave of an unknown led me into a realm of fact more unreal than even the wildest of dreams and unfolded to me in reality the pages of a weird, transcendental drama? Was it predestined that I should leave home and friends and find in this sparsely settled spot an interest which inextricably drew the very threads of my being into the tangled skein of other and tragic lives?

The mission calling me from the office of a firm of lawyers in Philadelphia into which I had but recently been admitted as junior partner was a forlorn search for traces of an Englishman, one James Hogarth, who had, while in Canada, mysteriously disappeared. The case was important and urgent, we were informed by our clients in London, as seven years had elapsed since Hogarth, heir to a large estate, had been heard from, and the property was about to escheat to the British crown.

I was following a seemingly slender clue--the statement of a butler once in the employ of the Hogarth family that “some six or seven years previously he had seen a letter postmarked ‘Valleyford, Canada’ in which Hogarth made mention of a place called Craighead Hall.”

On this meager thread rested our firm’s hope of a large fee and mine of proving my qualification as a worthwhile partner.

My third day of travel on this, my first long journey, brought me to a village called Laketown, reached only by local train. This day is indelibly fixed in my memory. It was a bright September morning, and marked the last stopping point before reaching my destination.

No premonition of anything untoward troubled me as I rested comfortably on the cushions of an old-fashioned high-swung stage-coach as it rolled quietly along a smooth dirt road away from the village. My spirits were high through avid anticipations of success and the enjoyment of an unusual and well-deserved holiday.

Alone in the coach, a long twenty-mile ride before me, I had ample opportunity for reflection. What should I find: romance, mystery, perhaps danger, for impulsively even before transferring my luggage from the depot platform to the stage-coach labeled “Laketown-Valleyford,” I had questioned the driver of the team of bays:

“Do you know of a place called Craighead Hall?”

The man had given me a peculiar inspection.

“Yes, but nobody of your kind ever goes there.”

Further inquiry brought curiosity but little satisfaction. “Never been there.” “No, nobody ever went there.” “Place was some ten miles east of the village.” “Was said to be a resort for criminals, brought there by the owner, Hugh Craighead, who lived with them, a sort of overlord.” “No, I have never seen him, but I think you run a big chance of being murdered,” he speculated after I had informed him of my errand.