The Transcendental Murder by Jane Langton

side of his face and falling in beaded drops on the ground.
    Arthur Furry, Honor Scout, had a badge on his sleeve awarded him for his knowledge of First Aid. He knew how to give artificial respiration, he knew where the pressure points were, he knew how to make and apply a tourniquet and how to care for a broken leg. But the Boy Scout manual didn’t say anything about people with blood coming out of their stomach or their mouth. The pictures just showed a well-built handsome man in a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up lying down in a sort of neat way, with a very calm Boy Scout kneeling neatly beside him, winding bandages around his arms or legs or putting on a splint. The man in the pictures didn’t look up at the Boy Scout with horrible eyes and bubble blood at him. Panic-stricken, Arthur knelt down like the Scout in the picture and wondered what to do. Should he turn the man so that his head was higher or lower than his feet? Which, higher or lower? Or apply a tourniquet? But where? You couldn’t put a tourniquet on a person if their stomach was bleeding, could you?
    â€œMusket …” gurgled the man at him. He tried to say something else.
    â€œI beg your pardon?” said Arthur, politely bowing closer. The man struggled to speak, with the blood coming up in gushes. He choked, and went into a sort of spasm. Arthur, horrified, could think of nothing to do but unknot his kerchief and use it to wipe at the man’s mouth, so that he could speak better. But the man’s strugglings ceased. He rolled his head to one side and lay still. Arthur got to his feet and ran. There was a house at the left of the walk to the bridge. He ran and pounded at the door and rang the bell. He started yelling, “Help, get a doctor, help!” There were people walking on Monument Street, a woman pushing a baby carriage. There was a bus unloading passengers over in the parking lot. A bunch of men in ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots were getting out. A policeman was talking to the driver. Arthur jumped off the porch of the house and ran across the road. “Help!” he said. “There’s a man dying back there, get a doctor!”
    Everyone turned to look at him. The policeman started to run toward him. “Where, sonny?” he said.

Chapter 15
I find letters from God dropt in the street — and every one is sign’d by God’s name …
WALT WHITMAN
    There was an old woman walking along Liberty Street, carrying a basket with a pink balloon tied to it. It was the Gosses’ housekeeper-cook, Mrs. Bewley, ambling home from the celebration. She had swiped the balloon nimbly from the balloon-man, but all the rest she had scavenged perfectly honestly: the half-pack of cigarettes, the three popsicle sticks, the wing from the plastic airplane, the nickel, the button, and, of course, innumerable messages from Jesus. She didn’t know what Jesus said, since she could neither read nor write, but sooner or later she would get someone to shout it in her ear. Those yellow ones probably said Juicy Fruit. It had something to do with the Garden of Eden.
    It would be such fun to add all these new things to her collection! It had been a grand morning. Mrs. Bewley looked down proudly at her dress and smiled. The dress was over thirty years old, but it was brand new to Mrs. Bewley. It had started its long and useful life as a second-hand article in 1932 when it was displayed for the first time in the Girl Scout Rummage Sale. Over the next ten years it had been handed down and sold and resold at the same sale, and then it had taken a new lease on life during a Clothe the Naked campaign conducted by the Evangelical Free Church. Sent to the remotest reaches of the Himalayas the dress that now belonged to Mrs. Bewley had become a part of the ceremonial wardrobe of a succession of tribal chieftains—until around 1950, when a resourceful chieftain with a large wardrobe and a flat tire traded it for a