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Updated: June 10, 2025
A circumstance occurred not long before our arrival at Demarara, which, being somewhat remarkable in its character, furnished a fruitful theme for conversation and comment. This was the arrival of a vessel from Cadiz, with only one person on board. It seems that a Captain Shackford, of Portsmouth, N.H., was the master and owner of a sloop of some sixty or eighty tons.
Captain Shackford, a resolute but eccentric man, resolved not to be disappointed in his calculations, or delayed in his voyage by the desertion of his crew, and boldly put to sea on the day appointed for sailing, trusting in his own unaided efforts and energies to manage the vessel on a passage across the ocean of thirty-five hundred miles.
Besides, it was so clearly robbery. Though the gathering around the Shackford house had reduced itself to half a dozen idlers, and the less frequented streets had resumed their normal aspect of dullness, there was a strange, electric quality in the atmosphere. The community was in that state of suppressed agitation and suspicion which no word adequately describes.
It was therefore with a disgust entirely apart from the hatred of Slocum or regard for Richard that the old man exclaimed, "A Shackford a miserable marble-chipper!" "That is better than hanging around the village with my hands in my pockets. Isn't it?" "I don't know that anybody has demanded that you should hang around the village." "I ought to go away, you mean?
"William Durgin!" The young girl's fingers closed nervously on Richard's as she echoed the name, and she began trembling. "That that is stranger yet!" "I will tell you everything when we get home; this is no time or place; but one thing I must ask you now and here. When you sat with me last night were you aware that Mr. Taggett firmly believed it was I who had killed Lemuel Shackford?"
"I mean, sir," replied the latter, slightly nettled, "that it sometimes seems as if the Lord himself took charge of a case." "Certainly you are entitled to the credit of going to the bottom of this one." "I have skillfully and laboriously damaged my reputation, Mr. Shackford." Mr. Taggett said this with so heavy an air that Richard felt a stir of sympathy in his bosom.
Taggett was turning over the pages of a large dictionary, in order to gain time, and was wondering how he could rid himself of the old lady's importunities, he came upon a half-folded note-sheet, at the bottom of which his eye caught the name of Lemuel Shackford. It was in the handwriting of the dead man. Mr. Taggett was very familiar with that handwriting.
Then, when all was over, the imprisoned fiend in the boilers gave a piercing shriek; the leather bands slipped on the revolving drums, the spindles leaped into life again, and the old order of things was reinstated, outwardly, but not in effect. In general, when the grave closes over a man his career is ended. But Mr. Shackford was never so much alive as after they had buried him.
It was a heavy-hooped wine-cask, in which Lemuel Shackford had been wont to keep his winter's supply of salted meat. Suddenly Richard started forward with an inarticulate cry, and at the same instant there came a loud knocking at the door behind him.
He was surprised that it was noon. He rose from the bench and went home through the storm, scarcely heeding the sleet that snapped in his face like whip-lashes. Margaret was going to die! For four or five seeks the world was nearly a blank to Richard Shackford. The insidious fever that came and went, bringing alternate despair and hope to the watchers in the hushed room, was in his veins also.
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