• MURDER AS A FINE ART IN SCOTLAND.
AFEW years ago the writer found his way along the curving shore of Galloway to the cottage of a grim old. Scotchwoman, Grace McCredie. She was the survivor of what had become famous in Scotland, and had become known beyond the bounds of Scotland, as the Glenluce murder. To find Glenluce you had to cross the Solway, and turn to the left towards the Irish sea. But when you found it, and had spent an hour in visiting the ruins of the lovely Abbey, it was easy to find Grace, and the house where that mid- summer tragedy had taken place. For half the horror of the crime—never yet explained or traced to its true perpetrators —was that it broke in upon the long summer night of one of the quietest villages in rural Scotland. The house where it took place was—and is—in the centre of the village, close to the post-office. Its inmates all slept in the two rooms on the ground-floor, and of these two the back room opened into the front one, and could only be reached through it. On the night of May 31st, 1880, Grace, then an elderly woman between sixty and seventy, went to bed in the outer room or kitchen. But before she did so, James Milligan, the old man for whom she acted as housekeeper, had gone to rest in the inner apartment. The only other person in the house was a young girl who assisted Grace in her house- hold duties, and who usually crept in and slept in the bed behind her. This night, all remained quiet till about 1 o'clock; when the wakeful ear of age was roused by what seemed to be a footfall, and Grace, rising on her elbow, asked, `° Who is there ?" The answer was a heaiy rain of blows from an axe or hatchet, and the old woman, struggling out of bed, grappled in the dark with her armed assailant. He spoke no word,. but strove to free his right hand, and went whirling about the room in deadly wrestle with his victim, who now, faint with loss of blood, tried to escape from the room. Two heavy blows laid her moaning and senseless on the threshold, with a gash in the shoulder, and others on the arms and face. In the room within a deadlier tragedy had already been enacted. Milligan was even now lying there prostrate on. the floor from blows of the same axe ; and when, a quartet of an hour later, the horror-struck villagers burst into a house filled with smoke and flame, they were too late to rescue the old man But Grace recovered conscious- ness, and fought with death for six weeks as she had fought with the murderer, till, long before our meeting, the Grim Feature confessed himself badly beaten. And now she sat bolt upright on one side of her fire, her black cat winking on the other, a wiry Meg Merrilies figure, gaunt and grey, and told the story with a slow emphasis which passed into shudder when speaking of her own experiences, and into hot anger when speaking of her mangled master and his blood un- avenged. For Grace was not only angry, but suspicions. It was not clear to her what interest an unknown gentleman from the South had in making all those inquiries; so when he at last said farewell, assuring her that there was no reason why the murderer should not yet be found out, the old Scotchwoman did not indeed refuse his five shillings, but she rose to her full height and looked through him with keen unbribeable eyes as she replied,—" Sir, it canna be ower soon 1" But the story as told by Grace McCredie (who now rests in peace near her old master's grave) was as nothing compared with the thrilling narrative of that midnight's work by another witness, who is still alive. Most readers remember De Quincey's description, in the postscript to his essay on the ;esthetic view of murder, of the second London butchery by Williams; and in particular of that situation, " tremendous beyond any that is on record," where the young journeyman descends the stairs in his shirt, and watches, petrified, while the human blood-
hound paces through the room, after slaughtering one and another of the inmates of the parlour. " A sneeze, a cough, almost a breathing, and the young man would be a corpse,
without a chance or a struggle for his life." But the Glenluce situation, though very like the other, was more extraordinary and critical still; and while no one exactly knows how much to trust of the piled-up paradoxes of the essayist, you could not listen to the Scotch lassie without instantaneously believing her. Mary —, whose name we conceal, for, though no longer in Wigtonshire, she is still a young woman in opening life, was at the time of the tragedy about fifteen ; and she told her story with that rude, blunt, breathless simplicity which makes you feel as if you were going through the crisis yourself. And what a crisis it was ! The girl had been asleep at the back of the bed when she was wakened by the midnight blows descending on the old woman, and in an agony of fear she climbed in the dark over the edge, and before the struggle was ended had scrambled tender the bed, which, as is usual in Scotch cottages, was sunk into a recess in the wall. In a few seconds the fight was over, and nothing was heard but the convulsive breathing of her late protectress, lying in the door- way. Then soft steps pushed through the darkness—the man was moving about in his stockings, but still trailing the heavy axe in his right hand. Suddenly there was a pause—a noise— a spark ; he had struck a match, and with it spattering in his left hand he searched round the room and actually prised open a locked cup board in the wall, and swept some eighteen shillings into his pocket. (There was £200 in a room upstairs, which he missed.) Then another match was struck ; and the girl, gazing with fascinated eyes from under the bed-curtain, saw the assassin move towards the inner room, through the open door of which she now for the first time observed, with a spasm of renewed horror, her master's body lying on the floor. What was the deadly stranger doing? For some time she could not tell ; but soon it was plain. He was throwing down the bed-furniture, pillows, sheets, blankets, in a heap beside the body of its late owner. And having done so, he lighted another match, and stooping down set fire to the pile here and there, and stood back to watch the result. But at this point there happened something more fall of urgent terror than anything in De Quincey's London narrative. While the girl was gazing at the side-face of the assassin—gazing so fixedly that she was able to give the writer a fair general descrip- tion of him—the fellow suddenly turned round and walked straight across the room to where she crouched under the bed. " Why I did not scream out," she said, wringing her hands as she spoke, " I don't know to this hour. I only know I could uot." For half a minute, which seemed like half an eternity, he stood above her, his stockinged feet actually within six inches of her face. And then again there was a scratch, a sputter, a flash of light; and slowly and coolly—all his motions were deliberate—he applied the match and set fire to the hangings and coverlet of the bed under which the unseen witness at the moment crouched. The tension and agony of the scene could not last much longer. By this time, thick volumes of smoke poured from the inner room. The murderer, who was short and thick-set, with a slight moustache, and dressed like an ordinary working man, put down his axe and looked round through the reflection. of the rising fires, to find his cap. He missed it, but it was no time to delay. In another second he was striding along the passage to the back-door of the house, which led to the garden and the moor behind; and the girl, all ear, bent breathlessly forward from her den. But the moment she heard the back- door slammed softly, she leaped up, rushed out into the passage, over Grace lying in her blood, and through the front door, and thing herself in a hysterical heap on the door-step of the opposite house. In half a minute the whole inhabitants of Glenluce were at their windows, and in three minutes more they were crowding round the burning house amid wailing of the women and mutterings of `murder' by the men.
But where was their dark visitor who had retired into the back garden P Where is he P Or, where are they? For it became probable before long that more than one was con- cerned in the transaction. The girl, as we have said, told us she saw the man leave his axe behind him. Next day the police of the county reported that a few hours before the Glentuce murder, in a little village six miles off, a carpenter's shop had been broken into, and four heavy tools stolen. On f•Yamination the axe turned out to be one of these, and another, a strong crowbar, was found in the room above that of the murder, where, therefore, the assailants must have been before descending into the rooms below. And, as if to complete the chain, the two remaining tools were found flung over a wall half-way between the village of the burglary and the village of the murder. Farther, at the very crisis of the crime, in the dead stillness of the night, just after the butchery had taken place within, wheels were heard passing outside along the winding street of the village. And no part of the girl's story was more impressive than the way in which she told how her heart leaped up at the sound, and how it died again within her when she saw the man with the axe exhibit not the least alarm as the vehicle came up to the front door and rolled away in the other direction. Lastly, not only was the undoubted murderer seen, not only did he leave behind the tools of his "art," but his cap was found in the room and recognised. A shopkeeper in the next town alleged he had sold it to some one—to whom, he could not say—within a few months. And yet, with all this mass of suggestion, down to the time of our visit, and, so far as we know, to this hour, the actor has never been found or even traced. The house on fire in the centre of a village, and the necessity of saving the still breathing victims from the flames, would give him ten minutes clear on the moor behind—if he went there at all, and did not rather leap into the vehicle and join a confederate. But neither the boasted efficiency of the Scottish criminal law, nor the frenzied suspicion of the village and country-side, have ever lifted the veil that covers the Glenluce murder. The Crown, we were told, made all the wheeled vehicles of the region give an account of themselves for that night, and clapped half-a-dozen loose fellows into prison until they should show that they did not kill James Milligan. The Public Prosecutor—so-called, apparently, because he conducts his inquiries in private— received innumerable suggestions, but never found his man Long before we wandered through its streets, Genluce, we were assured, had made up its mind that it must find him for itself, and must also protect itself. The little village formed committees of its own, and got amateur detectives to dwell in its cottages ; and as the dark nights of the first winter after the murder came on, it hired an amateur police- man to patrol the long single street which in 1880 had become the avenue from burglary to murder. But the unofficial inquiries, like the official, seemed to be coining to Grace's conclusion—that while the discovery could not be " ower soon," it was more likely not to be at all. Somewhere around this globe, somewhere amid the shifting masses of our Anglo- American race, there is a middle-aged, thick-set, imperturbable man, who carries in his hot heart the secret of that mid- glimmer night of June.
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