He had an old man, now dead, whose family had preserved for six generations a piece of metal that vibrated in the hand, and that had, upon its keeper's death, vanished from a locked chest. He had three separate accounts from three unrelated men of intrusions into subterranean spaces whose construction did not match anything the county's mining engineers had ever seen. And he had the direct testimony of the boy himself, delivered in the same calm voice night after night in the parlor, that the ones below were now aware of what had been done, and that they were preparing a response, and that the response would not be limited to Prosper Aling Clauss, Reynolds, and Borland. It would extend, according to Thaniel, to everyone who had heard the story, including the sheriff, Dr. Cade, and Silas Corwin, the young mining engineer who had climbed the ridge with Wickham and who had heard the movement beneath the stone slab.
All of them had been marked, Thaniel said, from the moment they had been told. On the 16th of April, Prosper Aling Clauss was found dead in his study in the small house he had built on the outskirts of Pickens. He had been dead for approximately 18 hours when his housekeeper, arriving to prepare his breakfast, discovered him sitting upright in the leather chair behind his writing desk. His eyes were open, and his hands were folded in his lap. There was no sign of struggle, no sign of an intruder, no sign of poison in the coffee cup that stood half empty on the desk beside him.
Dr. Cade, acting as coroner, ruled the cause of death cardiac failure, though he noted in the private journal that he kept alongside his official reports that Clauss had been 49 years old and in apparent good health when Wickham had interviewed him 3 days earlier. Cade also noted that the locked cabinet in which Clauss had kept his collection of artifacts was standing open when the housekeeper arrived and that the cabinet was empty and that the key to the cabinet was still on the ring at Clauss's belt and that there was no indication that the lock had been forced. The following night, Silas Corwin, the young mining engineer, boarded an eastbound train at the Beverly depot with the stated intention of returning to his mother's home in Pittsburgh. He never arrived.
The train reached Pittsburgh on the morning of the 18th of April. Corwin's trunk was on it. His compass and his leather-bound notebook were in the trunk. His seat, according to the porter, who was interviewed by the county sheriff in Randolph County 2 weeks later, had been occupied when the train left Beverly, unoccupied when the train stopped at Grafton, and had not been observed to be occupied by Corwin at any point between those two stations.
There were no witnesses to his departure from the train. There was no sign that he had jumped, been thrown, or otherwise left the car. He was, in the phrase used by the Pittsburgh Detective Agency his family hired to investigate his disappearance, simply not on the train when it arrived. His body was never recovered. His notebook, which contained his sketches of the ridge above the flat stone, along with his notes on the stone slab and the iron ring, remained in the trunk, and was, according to his mother's later correspondence, eventually deposited with the family papers at the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, where it can, in theory, still be consulted, though a researcher who requested it in 1979 was informed that the notebook had been lost in the archives sometime in the previous two decades.
and could not be located. Wickham, upon learning of Clauss's death and Corwin's disappearance, took two immediate actions. First, he wrote out in longhand a full account of everything the boy had told him, everything Kettle had told him, everything he had seen at the top of the ridge, and everything that had happened since. This document ran, according to his sister's letter of the 28th of April, to 62 pages.
He sealed it in an oilskin packet and gave it to Cassie Peele with instructions that she was to hide it in a specific location he had chosen in the wall of the smokehouse and that she was in the event of his own death to remove it from the smokehouse and send it by trusted courier to his sister in Ohio. Second, he wrote a shorter document, only three pages, which was addressed to the governor of West Virginia and which he sent by registered mail through the post office at Beverly on the morning of the 19th of April. That document has never been recovered from any archive. The postal receipt survives; the document does not.
On the 22nd of April, the boy Thaniel stopped speaking. He did not become ill. He did not appear distressed.
He simply refused to answer any question Wickham put to him that morning, and he continued in that refusal for the next four days. He ate his meals. He sat in the parlor. He watched the fire, but he did not speak and he did not, according to Cassie Peele, appear to be listening when spoken to.
On the morning of the 26th of April, Wickham entered the parlor to find the boy standing by the front window looking out at the road. Wickham asked him what he was watching for. The boy did not turn from the window. He said in the same calm voice he had used from the beginning that they were coming today.
He said Wickham should send Cassie away and lock the doors and load the shotgun and wait. Wickham, according to Peele's WPA interview, did exactly what the boy told him to do. He sent Peele out of the house with a made-up errand that took her all the way to Beverly. He locked the doors.
He loaded the shotgun that stood in the umbrella stand by the front hall and he sat down in the parlor across from the boy and he waited. What happened in the parlor between approximately 11:00 in the morning and approximately 4:00 in the afternoon of the 26th of April 1902 has never been established with any certainty. Wickham did not enter it in the ledger. The ledger at that point had only 3 days of entries left in it before the entries stopped altogether.