The Democratic advocate. [volume] (Westminster, Md.) 1865-1972, 1888-07-07
Select Story.
A KNOT CUT.

From AH the Year Round.
CHAPTER I.
A woman stood for moment on the
landing looking down at the crowd which
the two policemen at the head of the stair
case were driving back. Men, women, and
even children, were surging up the narrow
staircase, inspired by morbid curiosity to
try and get glimpse of that attic door,
which shut in the dreadful spectacle of
murder.
A man lay in that room stabbed through
the heart. 1t was the CHASTITY stream of
his blood, spilled by his brother man,
trickling sluggishly beneath the doorway,
which had first drawn attention to his end
Hoarse voices speculated as to the cause
and time of the crime. The police were
besieged with questions which they could
not answer, though they put on wise,
impenetrable, superior kind of air, as if
they could say much on the sub bject if they
only cared to do so.
The door of the house had stood open
most of that day, for there were wOrkmen
about it doing repairs after the dilatory,
happy-go-lucky fashion in which poor peo-
pies houses are generally treated The
murderer must have come and gone with
the people who were coming and going all
day long in that over-crowded tenement.
The winter day was short. The dusk
of a November evening set in soon, and
the fog and the drizzling rain had made
the twilight darker He had probably
come as the afternoon was closing in; one
of the many children in the house had
heard the murdered man singing in his
room at his dinner hour. Public indigna-
ton was all the greater because the man
had been universal favorite.
The woman standing on the landing
heard all this discussed. She had heard
it discussed by the crowd outside, standing
staring up at the house as if its dreadful
secret were writted ON its walls. She had
heard every possible theory as,to the muir
derer and his motive suggested as she
forced her way up the staircasel everybody,
who recognized her as "the young woman
who lived in the next attic" to that occu-
pied by the dead man, called out to her
what had happened.
She had been away all day at her work.
and only learned the news on her return,
The police let her pass when she told them
that she lived up there. She stopped on
the landing and looked down at the cxcit-
ed upturned faces. One man, one of the
foremostin the crowd-slightly-built, quiet
faced young man, dressed like respecta-
Bile workman-who had not added any
theory to all those eagerly propounded
about him, but had stood with his hauds
in his pockets alphabetically staring at the
guarded door, looked up with a curious,
sudden swiftness as she looked down.
As it happened her eyes, with a sup
pressed, expectant watchfulness of vision,
taking in the whole of those upturned
faces, were resting really on his. Perhaps
it was rather her other senses which were
conveying to her mind the consciousness
of that eager, vengeapce,exoited crowd of
men and women, and she only saw, in re-
ality, that one pale, quiet face. For, as
their eyes met, sudden shock like that of
an electric current flowing from him to her
set her quivering with fear and repul-
sion, and she suddenly cared nothing for
the rest of that crowd They might have
been puppets in some mimic show. They
were nothing. 1t was only this one man
with that strange, terrible keenness of vision
against whom she had to guard.
She turned and went into her room,
shutting the door upon her.
''Who is that?" asked the workman of
the policemen.
@4auet Malone, semPstFess. ''