The Remittance Man by Ambrose Pratt — Read

The week following Jan Digby's quarrel with Major Reay, supplied Ballina with three unusual sensations and consequent topics of public and private conversation. The memories of the oldest inhabitants were racked in vain in search of precedent. Old Jimmie du Clos, who was generally regarded as a centenarian, declared that in the early sixties a murder had been committed, and the murderer arrested within seven days, but if true, that was merely a double event and unworthy of comparison with the present phenomenon. Angus Beale, the manager of the local saw mill, aged 72, also pretended to remember a black week of storm, during which two ships had been lost on the bar, and a man killed in the main street of the town by a thunderbolt. The public records, however, were at variance with Mr. Beale's contention, and some suspicious busy-body having turned them up, proved that the thunderbolt had claimed its victim 24 hours after the week had expired.

Major Reay was intimately concerned with the two more important of the three sensations first above referred to. The paymaster of his sugar refining factory disappeared one morning, leaving a deficit in his accounts of several hundred pounds. The whole town knew at once, and everyone expected the Major to issue a warrant for the defaulter's arrest. The same evening, however, the unfortunate man's dead body was discovered floating in a backwash of the river, in one of his pockets a lugubrious and repentant letter offering to his late employer his life in expiation of his crime.