Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries Read online

  “Dix,” replied Abner, “your words move somewhat near the truth.”

  “Upon my soul,” cried Dix, “you compliment me. If I had that trick of magic, believe me, you would be already some distance down.”

  Abner remained a moment silent.

  “Dix,” he said, “what does it mean when one finds a plot of earth resodded?”

  “Is that a riddle?” cried Dix. “Well, confound me, if I don’t answer it! You charge me with murder and then you fling in this neat conundrum. Now, what could be the answer to that riddle, Abner? If one had done a murder this sod would overlie a grave and Alkire would be in it in his bloody shirt. Do I give the answer?”

  “You do not,” replied Abner.

  “No!” cried Dix. “Your sodded plot no grave, and Alkire not within it waiting for the trump of Gabriel! Why, man, where are your little damned conclusions?”

  “Dix,” said Abner, “you do not deceive me in the least; Alkire is not sleeping in a grave.”

  “Then in the air,” sneered Dix, “with the smell of sulphur?”

  “Nor in the air,” said Abner.

  ‘Then consumed with fire, like the priests of Baal?”

  “Nor with fire,” said Abner.

  Dix had got back the quiet of his face; this banter had put him where he was when Abner entered. “This is all fools’ talk,” he said; “if I had killed Alkire, what could I have done with the body? And the horse! What could I have done with the horse? Remember, no man has ever seen Alkire’s horse any more than he has seen Alkire—and for the reason that Alkire rode him out of the hills that night. Now, look here, Abner, you have asked me a good many questions. I will ask you one. Among your little conclusions do you find that I did this thing alone or with the aid of others?”

  “Dix,” replied Abner, “I will answer that upon my own belief you had no accomplice.”

  “Then,” said Dix, “how could I have carried off the horse? Alkire I might carry; but his horse weighed thirteen hundred pounds!”

  “Dix,” said Abner, “no man helped you do this thing; but there were men who helped you to conceal it.”

  “And now,” cried Dix, “the man is going mad! Who could I trust with such work, I ask you? Have I a renter that would not tell it when he moved on to another’s land, or when he got a quart of cider in him? Where are the men who helped me?”

  “Dix,” said Abner, “they have been dead these fifty years.” I heard Dix laugh then, and his evil face lighted as though a candle were behind it. And, in truth, I thought he had got Abner silenced.

  “In the name of Heaven!” he cried. “With such proofs it is a wonder that you did not have me hanged.”

  “And hanged you should have been,” said Abner.

  “Well,” cried Dix, “go and tell the sheriff, and mind you lay before him those little, neat conclusions: How from a horse track and the place where a calf was butchered you have reasoned on Alkire’s murder, and to conceal the body and the horse you have reasoned on the aid of men who were rotting in their graves when I was born; and see how he will receive you!”

  Abner gave no attention to the man’s flippant speech. He got his great silver watch out of his pocket, pressed the stem and looked. Then he spoke in his deep, even voice.

  “Dix,” he said, “it is nearly midnight; in an hour you must be on your journey, and I have something more to say. Listen! I knew this thing had been done the previous day because it had rained on the night that I met Alkire, and the earth of this ant heap had been disturbed after that. Moreover, this earth had been frozen, and that showed a night had passed since it had been placed there. And I knew the rider of that horse was Alkire because, beside the path near the severed twigs lay my knife, where it had fallen from his hand. This much I learned in some fifteen minutes; the rest took somewhat longer.

  “I followed the track of the horse until it stopped in the little valley below. It was easy to follow while the horse ran, because the sod was torn; but when it ceased to run there was no track that I could follow. There was a little stream threading the valley, and I began at the wood and came slowly up to see if I could find where the horse had crossed. Finally I found a horse track and there was also a man’s track, which meant that you had caught the horse and were leading it away. But where?

  “On the rising ground above there was an old orchard where there had once been a house. The work about that house had been done a hundred years. It was rotted down now. You had opened this orchard into the pasture. I rode all over the face of this hill and finally I entered this orchard. There was a great, flat, moss-covered stone lying a few steps from where the house had stood. As I looked I noticed that the moss growing from it into the earth had been broken along the edges of the stone, and then I noticed that for a few feet about the stone the ground had been resodded. I got down and lifted up some of this new sod. Under it the earth had been soaked with that… red paint.

  “It was clever of you, Dix, to resod the ground; that took only a little time and it effectually concealed the place where you had killed the horse; but it was foolish of you to forget that the broken moss around the edges of the great flat stone could not be mended.”

  “Abner!” cried Dix. “Stop!” And I saw that spray of sweat, and his face working like kneaded bread, and the shiver of that abominable chill on him.

  Abner was silent for a moment and then he went on, but from another quarter.

  “Twice,” said Abner, “the Angel of the Lord stood before me and I did not know it; but the third time I knew it. It is not in the cry of the wind, nor in the voice of many waters that His presence is made known to us. That man in Israel had only the sign that the beast under him would not go on. Twice I had as good a sign, and tonight, when Marks broke a stirrup-leather before my house and called me to the door and asked me for a knife to mend it, I saw and I came!”

  The log that Abner had thrown on was burned down, and the fire was again a mass of embers; the room was filled with that dull red light. Dix had got on to his feet, and he stood now twisting before the fire, his hands reaching out to it, and that cold creeping in his bones, and the smell of the fire on him.

  Abner rose. And when he spoke his voice was like a thing that has dimensions and weight.

  “Dix,” he said, “you robbed the grazers; you shot Alkire out of his saddle; and a child you would have murdered!”

  And I saw the sleeve of Abner’s coat begin to move, then it stopped. He stood staring at something against the wall. I looked to see what the thing was, but I did not see it. Abner was looking beyond the wall, as though it had been moved away.

  And all the time Dix had been shaking with that hellish cold, and twisting on the hearth and crowding into the fire. Then he fell back, and he was the Dix I knew—his face was slack; his eye was furtive; and he was full of terror.

  It was his weak whine that awakened Abner. He put up his hand and brought the fingers hard down over his face, and then he looked at this new creature, cringing and beset with fears.

  “Dix,” he said, “Alkire was a just man; he sleeps as peacefully in that abandoned well under his horse as he would sleep in the churchyard. My hand has been held back; you may go. Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”

  “But where shall I go, Abner?” the creature wailed; “I have no money and I am cold.”

  Abner took out his leather wallet and flung it toward the door.

  “There is money,” he said—“a hundred dollars—and there is my coat. Go! But if I find you in the hills tomorrow, or if I ever find you, I warn you in the name of the living God that I will stamp you out of life!”

  I saw the loathsome thing writhe into Abner’s coat and seize the wallet and slip out through the door; and a moment later I heard a horse. And I crept back on to Roy’s heifer skin.

  When I came down at daylight my Uncle Abner was reading by the fire.

  Chapter 4

  An Act of God

  It was the last day of the County Fair,
and I stood beside my Uncle Abner, on the edge of the crowd, watching the performance of a mountebank.

  On a raised platform, before a little house on wheels, stood a girl dressed like a gypsy, with her arms extended, while an old man out in the crowd, standing on a chair, was throwing great knives that hemmed her in with a steel hedge. The girl was very young, scarcely more than a child, and the man was old, but he was hale and powerful. He wore wooden shoes, travel-worn purple velvet trousers, a red sash, and a white blouse of a shirt open at the throat.

  I was watching the man, whose marvelous skill fascinated me. He seemed to be looking always at the crowd of faces that passed between him and the wagon, and yet the great knife fell to a hair on the target, grazing the body of the girl.

  But while the old man with his sheaf of knives held my attention, it was the girl that Abner looked at. He stood studying her face with a strange rapt attention. Sometimes he lifted his head and looked vacantly over the crowd with the eyelids narrowed, like one searching for a memory that eluded him, then he came back to the face in its cluster of dark ringlets, framed in knives that stood quivering in the poplar board.

  It was thus that my father found us when he came up.

  “Have you noticed Blackford about?” he said; “I want to see him.”

  “No,” replied Abner, “but he should be here, I think; he is at every frolic.”

  “I sent him the money for his cattle last night,” my father went on, “and I wish to know if he got it.”

  Abner turned upon him at that. “You will always take a chance with that scoundrel, Rufus,” he said, “and some day you will be robbed. His lands are covered with a deed of trust.”

  “Well,” replied my father, with his hearty laugh, “I shall not be robbed this time. I have Blackford’s request over his signature for the money, with the statement that the letter is to be evidence of its payment.”

  And he took an envelope out of his pocket and handed it to Abner.

  My uncle read the letter to the end, and then his great fingers tightened on the sheet, and he read it carefully again, and yet again, with his eyes narrowed and his jaw protruding. Finally he looked my father in the face.

  “Blackford did not write this letter!” he said.

  “Not write it!” my father cried. “Why, man, I know the deaf mute’s writing like a book. I know every line and slant of his letters, and every crook and twist of his signature.”

  But my uncle shook his head.

  My father was annoyed.

  “Nonsense!” he said. “I can call a hundred men on these fair grounds who will swear that Blackford made every stroke of the pen in that letter, even against his denial, and though he bring Moses and the prophets to support him.”

  Abner looked my father steadily in the face.

  “That is true, Rufus,” he said; “the thing is perfect. There is no letter or line or stroke or twist of the pen that varies from Blackford’s hand, and every grazer in the hills, to a man, will swear upon the Bible that he wrote it. Blackford himself cannot tell this writing from his own, nor can any other living man; and yet the deaf mute did not write it.”

  “Well,” said my father, “yonder is Blackford now; we will ask him.”

  But they never did.

  I saw the tall deaf mute swagger up and enter the crowd before the mountebank’s wagon. And then a thing happened. The chair upon which the old man stood broke under him. He fell and the great knife in his hand swerved downward and went through the deaf mute’s body, as though it were a cheese. The man was dead when we picked him up; the knife blade stood out between his shoulders, and the haft was jammed against his bloody coat.

  We carried him into the Agricultural Hall among the prize apples and the pumpkins, summoned Squire Randolph from the cattle pens, and brought the mountebank before him.

  Randolph came in his big blustering manner and sat down as though he were the judge of all the world. He heard the evidence, and upon the word of every witness the tragedy was an accident clean through. But it was an accident that made one shudder. It came swift and deadly and unforeseen, like a vengeance of God in the Book of Kings. One passing among his fellows, in no apprehension, had been smitten out of life. There was terror in the mystery of selection that had thus claimed Blackford in this crowd for death. It brought our voices to a whisper to feel how unprotected a man was in this life, and how little we could see.

  And yet the thing had the aspect of design and moved with our stern Scriptural beliefs. In the pulpit this deaf mute had been an example and a warning. His life was profligate and loose. He was a cattle shipper who knew the abominations indexed by the Psalmist. He was an Ishmaelite in more ways than his affliction. He had no wife nor child, nor any next of kin. He had been predestined to an evil end by every good housewife in the hills. He would go swiftly and by violence into hell, the preachers said; and swiftly and by violence he had gone on this autumn morning when the world was like an Eden.

  He lay there among the sheaves of corn and the fruits and cereals of the earth, so fully come to the end predestined that those who had cried the prophecy the loudest were the most amazed. With all their vaporings, they could not believe that God would be so expeditious, and they spoke in whispers and crowded about on tiptoe, as though the Angel of the Lord stood at the entrance of this little festal hall, as before the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.

  Randolph could do nothing but find the thing an accident, and let the old man go. But he thundered from behind his table on the dangers of such a trade as this. And all the time the mountebank stood stupidly before him like a man dazed, and the little girl wept and clung to the big peasant’s hand. Randolph pointed to the girl and told the old man that he would kill her some day, and with the gestures and authority of omnipotence forbade his trade. The old mountebank promised to cast his knives into the river and get at something else. Randolph spoke upon the law of accidents sententiously for some thirty minutes, quoted Lord Blackstone and Mr. Chitty, called the thing an act of God, within a certain definition of the law, and rose.

  My Uncle Abner had been standing near the door, looking on with a grave, undecipherable face. He had gone through the crowd to the chair when the old man fell, had drawn the knife out of Blackford’s body, but he had not helped to carry him in, and he had remained by the door, his big shoulders towering above the audience. Randolph stopped beside him as he went out, took a pinch of snuff, and trumpeted in his big, many-colored handkerchief.

  “Ah, Abner,” he said, “do you concur in my decision?”

  “You called the thing an act of God,” replied Abner, “and I concur in that.”

  “And so it is,” said Randolph, with judicial pomp; “the writers on the law, in their disquisitions upon torts, include within that term those inscrutable injuries that no human intelligence can foresee; for instance, floods, earthquakes and tornadoes.”

  “Now, that is very stupid in the writers on the law,” replied Abner; “I should call such injuries acts of the devil. It would not occur to me to believe that God would use the agency of the elements in order to injure the innocent.”

  “Well,” said Randolph, “the writers upon the law have not been theologians, although Mr. Greenleaf was devout, and Chitty with a proper reverence, and my lords Coke and Blackstone and Sir Matthew Hale in respectable submission to the established church. They have grouped and catalogued injuries with delicate and nice distinctions with respect to their being actionable at law, and they found certain injuries to be acts of God, but I do not read that they found any injury to be an act of the devil. The law does not recognize the sovereignty and dominion of the devil.”

  “Then,” replied Abner, “with great fitness is the law represented blindfold. I have not entered any jurisdiction where his writs have failed to run.”

  There was a smile about the door that would have broken into laughter but for the dead man inside.

  Randolph blustered, consulted his snuffbox, and turned the conver
sation into a neighboring channel.

  “Do you think, Abner,” he said, “that this old showman will give up his dangerous practice as he promised me?”

  “Yes,” replied Abner, “he will give it up, but not because he promised you.”

  And he walked away to my father, took him by the arm, and led him aside.

  “Rufus,” he said, “I have learned something. Your receipt is valid.”

  “Of course it is valid,” replied my father; “it is in Blackford’s hand.”

  “Well,” said Abner, “he cannot come back to deny it, and I will not be a witness for him.”

  “What do you mean, Abner?” my father said. “You say that Blackford did not write this letter, and now you say that it is valid.”

  “I mean,” replied Abner, “that when the one entitled to a debt receives it, that is enough.”

  Then he walked away into the crowd, his head lifted and his fingers locked behind his massive back.

  The County Fair closed that evening in much gossip and many idle comments on Blackford’s end. The chimney corner lawyers, riding out with the homing crowd, vapored upon Mr. Jefferson’s Statute of Descents, and how Blackford’s property would escheat to the state since there was no next of kin, and were met with the information that his lands and his cattle would precisely pay his debts, with an eagle or two beyond for a coffin. And, after the manner of lawyers, were not silenced, but laid down what the law would be if only the facts were agreeable to their premise. And the prophets, sitting in their wagons, assembled their witnesses and established the dates at which they had been prophetically delivered.

  Evening descended, and the fair grounds were mostly deserted. Those who lived at no great distance had moved their live stock with the crowd and had given up their pens and stalls. But my father, who always brought a drove of prize cattle to these fairs, gave orders that we should remain until the morning. The distance home was too great and the roads were filled. My father’s cattle were no less sacred than the bulls of Egypt, and not to be crowded by a wagon wheel or ridden into by a shouting drunkard.