Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 60, No. 1, July 4, 1931

All through the stormy night the murderer’s victim pursued him down the raging flood of the Ohio River.

I

This weird story came out of a great flood in the Ohio River valley more than twenty-five years ago. A reporter covering the event at the time, I included it in my news dispatches, but it has never yet been as fully told as I mean to tell it here.

Knowledge of part of what actually happened is necessarily drawn from deduction in the uncanny tale — the deductions of a shrewd, practical and observant medical officer of the locality. I will call him Dr. Mason, but must frankly admit I cannot now recall his real name nor that of the little town from whence the strange tragedy came. But the circumstances of it, its details, and the grim, dramatic explanation the doctor gave of it remains clearly in memory. It is too powerful a story for any one to forget.

Most persons who have never looked on a flood of the mighty rivers of the Middle West picture the rivers as rushing turbulently along, slashing high waves into white foam. But that is only true of the mountain streams that come tumbling down into the broad valleys. A flood of the mighty Ohio is strangely deceptive in appearance. The waters spread out widely, but the broadened stream appears almost placid. Its surface is quite smooth. It is moving swiftly along to the great Mississippi, but how swiftly, with what enormous force you can only realize when you see entire houses, giant trees, barns, wagons, human bodies, struggling or drowned cattle being borne smoothly along in the quiet but mighty and devastating current.

In a small town not far from Day-ton lived Jed Granger — or so we shall call him. He was nearly eighty years old, and a miser. He had begun as a farmer and cattle raiser, but ended up as a money shark, a usurer. For five years he had been bed-ridden, his old body distorted and made helpless by a form of rheumatism that stiffened his joints so that his hips could not move in their sockets, his knees or his elbows bend. His fingers could only clasp halfway.

When he felt complete helplessness coming upon him he converted all his money into gold and silver dollars and placed it in an old leather satchel. This was stored under the bed from which old Jed could not longer arise. He had a heavy lock on the satchel and a leather strap passing from the handle of it to one of his wrists, around which it was securely buckled and bound. When he slept he drew the strap taut, and as the aged are light sleepers no one could touch that strap or satchel without Jed Granger being instantly aware of it.

He had a daughter who married a handsome, good-natured fellow who was always losing his jobs. They had three children. Old Jed was driven into deliriums of anger in those times when his daughter’s husband was out of work and he had to support the family. The older he grew the more miserly he became. And although he sorely needed the nursing his daughter could give him, in the end he turned her, her husband and the children out of the house to shift for themselves.

This occurred shortly before the big flood of which I am writing. But the old man had to have an attendant of some sort or surrender himself to the hospital at Dayton, where, when the value of the contents of the satchel was discovered — it contained sixty thousand dollars in gold and silver coin — they would, of course, make him pay for his board, nursing and doctoring.

As against an evil it shrivelled his miser’s heart to contemplate, he chose a lesser. He had a nephew come to care for him. This nephew, Pete Granger, was regarded as the most contemptible figure in the small river town. He was a tall, lanky fellow, with red hair as coarse and wiry as that of an Airedale dog. He had small, pink-rimmed, light blue eyes set closely together at the bridge of a long nose. Loose lips and a chin ridiculously small and shapeless, a long skinny neck to match his body, a shambling gait, clothing always shabby and stained completed the picture.

He skulked about sucking at a corncob pipe, taking odd jobs only when stark necessity demanded. He had been caught several times at petty thieveries. Twice he served short terms in prison for petty larceny.

Old Jed Granger knew of this. But he knew also that his lank, chinless nephew was afraid of him. And when Pete received word from Jed’s daughter he’d be wanted at the house to care for his uncle, she didn’t tell him that the last service she had done the hateful old man was to place a loaded shotgun at his right hand, strapped to his arm so that he could lift it, aim it and pull the trigger.

Pete went. It meant anyway a certain roof over his head and some sort of daily provender. He would stand out for an allowance of two dollars a week extra for tobacco and an occasional flask of white mule.

Pete took up his quarters with old Jed and did his best to please him. He began to have dreams of attaining such an ascendancy over the old man as age continued to weaken him that in the end Jed might leave him the dizzy riches that the worn leather satchel under the bed contained.

The waters of the Ohio began to rise and spread. Reports came to the valleys from the mountain regions that the streams there were smashing down the hillsides to the very tree tops, carrying everything before them. Each day the Ohio spread out farther, went up by inches, then by feet.

The good people with houses near the river bank did what they could to brace them against the pressure — the silent, smooth yet mighty pressure of the flood waters — and then retreated back into regions of safety. Tent colonies grew and welded into a small town overnight on territory known by past experiences to be beyond the sweep of the flood.

Pete Granger was obliged to come ashore from his uncle’s house on a rough raft, made of three planks, in order to buy supplies at the general store.

“You’d oughta git the old man out of that house,” the storekeeper said to him, and others there nodded agreement. “This here ain’t no baby flood. That dern old two-story affair ’ll be yanked into it and torn to pieces in no time.”

Pete snickered.

“Ain’t I bin tellin’ him that? But you jest try to git him to leave it! I did, an’ he aimed a shotgun at me. He said he’d shoot to kill any one that tried to take him out of the house. He said the house was strong an’ had stood up ag’in’ other floods without being torn adrift, an’ would weather this one all right.”

“But does he know what an extra sized flood this one is, an’ more yet to come?”

“Ain’t I told him? But it’s all right. Don’t worry none. He’s a mean old cuss and all that, but he’s my blood and I’ll stick to him. I bin workin’ on a raft — you can’t see it from here because it’s on the other side of the house. I got her pretty nearly done — a good big one with a tent shack built on. An’ I found an’ old oil stove. When the flood gits too bad I’ll just take matters in my own hands, I’ll yank that gun away from him and load him and that satchel full o’ money he keeps under his bed — though what the hell good the money does him I don’t know — an’ I’ll drift him down the river to the nearest big town and put him in a hospital proper like he should be.”

With that Pete departed with his parcels.

“I’m derned,” said the storekeeper. “I didn’t know that ginger-haired petty larceny beanpole hed thet much decency in him.”

“Well, like he said — the old man’s of his blood.”

“Huh,” observed a less sentimental member of the group, “mebbe he figures comin’ inter the money over the old man’s daughter what the old curmudgeon’s rowed with. Mebbe he figures gettin’ a will out of him favorin’ hisself.”

“Sounds more like him, thet does,” agreed the storekeeper.

“Oh, shucks,” some one protested. “Ain’t none of us thet’s all bad. Shouldn’t wonder he had a good streak in him.”

“Mebbe.”

II

That night the flood rose to its peak. A torrential downpour of rain with crashing thunder and blinding lightning made the night lurid and increased the might of the flowing waters.

At dawn every available police launch and volunteer boat was out on the river engaged in work of rescue. Women, children and men were plucked off the roofs of floating houses and barns, picked up clinging to the trunks of uprooted trees, or taken, soaked, shivering and half starved from hastily constructed rafts. Now and then a corpse was dragged out of the yellow muddy water.

Down the river, some miles from the small town where the miser had lived, was a bridge, and a police boat there came upon a raft held against a steel prop by a lashing of stout rope. It was a well constructed raft with a small shack built upon it, fitted with two bunks, an oil stove and a stock of canned provisions. There were also two empty whisky bottles and two bottles of whisky untouched.

But these details were a matter of after search.

What had brought the police launch hurrying toward the raft was the sight of two human feet incased in soggy woolen house shoes and showing skinny shanks that were naked, sticking out of the swift-flowing waters of the flood.

When the officers sought to drag the body fully into sight they looked at each other in surprise.

“What can make it so heavy?” demanded one.

“Good Lord — he’s got a rope knotted around his neck!”

When they finally got the withered, skinny corpse upon the raft they heaved mightily at the rope. Up came another human foot — bare — and a long, skinny leg. Around the ankle the same rope that was tied about the neck of the aged man on the raft had formed into a slip knot, water soaked so that the rope clung inexorably to the limb.

Now the weight beneath became heavier than ever.

“There’s something bulky tied to the other end of this rope — somethin’ darn weighty. Let’s get that up before we pull this feller’s body out. We’ve run into somethin’ darn queer.”

“Darn queer for certain!”

They heaved at the rope below the long skinny shank around which the rope was noosed and brought up a small black satchel. Old it was, worn and water soaked — a dead weight.

Their eyes grew staring when they had broken the lock and saw that the shabby thing was filled with silver dollars and five, ten and twenty dollar gold pieces! A fortune!

Then they drew the second body completely out of the water — its red hair matted on the gray-white, ugly face with its long nose and weak chin uplifted from the long, bony neck.

“Pete Granger!” exclaimed one of the policemen. “Had him once for pig stealin’. Put him away for three months. Comes from about twenty miles up the river. The old man with the rope around his neck, this bag chockful of money — what the devil do you make of it, anyhow?”

They pondered, but shook their heads, unable to guess.

It was the shrewd, white-haired medical examiner who obtained the first clew and who reconstructed the crime.

“The truth came at the autopsy,” he said. “I then discovered that the old man had not been drowned. He was dead when his body was cast into the water. There was no water in his lungs. And I discovered the fact that he had been strangled to death. But not by the rope tied around his neck. Beneath that were black and blue marks unquestionably made by the fingers of human hands. Strangled to death before he went overboard!

“Then I made inquiry regarding the old man and the nephew, an innate thief, left in sole charge of this old man with his bag of riches beneath the bed from which he couldn’t arise.

“In due course I got all the details. Learned of the statements of the nephew that he couldn’t get the old man to leave the house, although he was repeatedly warning him that the flood waters were creeping up to his very bedroom window. I heard of his assurance that he would stand by, and had built a raft, and when actual peril came-would remove the old man and his money to the raft and drift him down the river to a hospital. And I discovered how he dissuaded any of the townsmen from going out to warn the old man of his ever increasing peril by saying his uncle had a shotgun at his bedside and would certainly fire at them, thinking they had come to rob him of his money. Meanwhile he was probably telling the old man, who couldn’t get up to see for himself, that the flood was a small one.

“Pete Granger was lying all the way. He built the raft all right. And on it, when the time came that night, he forcibly placed the old man and his bag of money. There isn’t a doubt in my mind as to what he meant to do, and in part did. He meant to strangle the old man, chuck him overboard, sink him, and himself proceed down the river on the raft to some place where he could make a railroad connection and then light out for New Orleans and get a ship from there to — anywhere — as far as he could go. By the time the flood waters lifted the swollen body of the old man it would be, he figured, beyond recognition.

“I believe that no sooner had the raft floated a mile or so below the town from whence it started than Pete Granger strangled the old, helpless man, and flung him into the river. He thought he would sink. If he had simply flung him off the raft and let him drown the body would have gone under. But the old man was dead when cast into the river. No water got into his lungs. The body was, therefore, buoyant, and floated down with the flood, keeping pace with the raft.

“You will remember how the lightning flashed all night long. And in these flashes Pete Granger saw the body of the old man he had murdered following the raft. You can see what it did to his nerves. The two emptied whisky bottles will tell you that. Every flash of lightning showed him the corpse of his uncle relentlessly following him — the grim pursuit of a murderer by the corpse of his victim! It would shake the nerve of a man of steel, to say nothing of such a flabby creature as Pete Granger.

“But when the raft approached the bridge, Pete got an idea. He would tie the raft to a steep support of the bridge and let the corpse go floating onward. He would thus be rid of the horrid thing. So he drank his second quart of whisky and fell into a coma.

“Daylight awakened him. The putt-putt of the launches of the police searchers was beginning to sound around the bend in the river below the bridge.

“It was a good thing, he thought, that he had tied up the bridge. He was rid of that damned corpse! And then, to his horror, he found that he wasn’t!

“When he tied the raft it had swung partly around, with the result that the corpse was driven against it with the raft as a barrier to stop the body from floating onward on the flood tide. And Pete Granger saw the terrible thing staring at him, with the police boats not half a mile away!

“He must sink it, since it would not sink of itself, and damned quickly. It almost seemed as-if the thing knew this was the way to avenge itself! Why it would not sink he couldn’t tell. He was too ignorant to know. What harrowing superstitious dread must have attacked him!

“But, by God, it had to be sunk! It flashed upon him how to do it. There was an extra coil of rope in the raft shack and he got it out. He noosed one end around the neck of his uncle’s corpse and the other end he tied to the handle of the coveted satchel with its heavy burden of glittering coins.

“After the flood subsided, after he and his uncle were given up for lost, he would return and retrieve the satchel. He marked which of the steel supports he was by — the fourth one from the shore. That would tell him where to look when he returned.

“He cast the heavy satchel over. But in his haste he stepped into a loop of the rope which had formed into a slip knot. When the heavy satchel went overboard Pete Granger was yanked from his feet and went after it, and atop of him came, with dead, white fingers distended as if clutching at his throat, the corpse of his uncle!

“The body of Pete Granger, when found, had only been in the water a brief time — it showed scarcely any signs of immersion. But the body, hands and feet and face of old Judd Granger were water withered and puckered. His body had been in the river for many hours.”