Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries Read online

  The night fell. There was no moon, but the earth was not in darkness. The sky was clear and sown with stars like a seeded field. I did not go to bed in the cattle stall filled with clover hay under a handwoven blanket, as I was intended to do. A youngster at a certain age is a sort of jackal and loves nothing in this world so much as to prowl over the ground where a crowd of people has encamped. Besides, I wished to know what had become of the old mountebank, and it was a thing I soon discovered.

  His wagon stood on the edge of the ground among the trees near the river, with the door closed. His horse, tethered to a wheel, was nosing an armful of hay. The light of the stars filtered through the treetops, filled the wheels with shadows and threw one side of the wagon into the blackness of the pit. I went down to the fringe of trees; there I sat squatted on the earth until I heard a footstep and saw my Uncle Abner coming toward the wagon. He walked as I had seen him walking in the crowd, his hands behind him and his face lifted as though he considered something that perplexed him. He came to the steps, knocked with his clenched hand on the door, and when a voice replied, entered.

  Curiosity overcame me. I scurried up to the dark side of the wagon. There a piece of fortune awaited me; a gilded panel had cracked with some jolt upon the road, and by perching myself upon the wheel I could see inside. The old man had been seated behind a table made by letting down a board hinged to the wall. His knives were lying on the floor beside him, bound together in a sheaf with a twine string. There were some packets of old letters on the table and a candle. The little girl lay asleep in a sort of bunk at the end of the wagon. The old man stood up when my uncle entered, and his face, that had been dull and stupid before the justice of the peace, was now keen and bright.

  “Monsieur does me an honor,” he said. The words were an interrogation with no welcome in them.

  “No honor,” replied my uncle, standing with his hat on; “but possibly a service.”

  “That would be strange,” the mountebank said dryly, “for I have received no service from any man here.”

  “You have a short memory,” replied Abner; “the justice of the peace rendered you a great service on this day. Do you put no value on your life?”

  “My life has not been in danger, monsieur,” he said.

  “I think it has,” replied Abner.

  “Then monsieur questions the decision?”

  “No,” said Abner; “I think it was the very wisest decision that Randolph ever made.”

  “Then why does monsieur say that my life was in danger?”

  “Well,” replied my uncle, “are not the lives of all men in danger? Is there any day or hour of a day in which they are secure, or any tract or parcel of this earth where danger is not? And can a man say when he awakes at daylight in his bed, on this day I shall go into danger, or I shall not? In the light it is, and in the darkness it is, and where one looks to find it, and where he does not. Did Blackford believe himself in danger today when he passed before you?”

  “Ah, monsieur,” replied the man, “that was a terrible accident!”

  My uncle picked up a stool, placed it by the table and sat down. He took off his hat and set it on his knees, then he spoke, looking at the floor.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  I saw the old man rub his forehead with his hand and the ball of his first finger make a cross.

  “Yes, monsieur,” he said, “I do.”

  “Then,” replied Abner, “you can hardly believe that things happen out of chance.”

  “We call it chance, monsieur,” said the man, “when we do not understand it.”

  “Sometimes we use a better term,” replied Abner. “Now, today Randolph did not understand this death of Blackford, and yet he called it an act of God.”

  “Who knows,” said the man; “are not the ways of God past finding out?”

  “Not always,” replied my uncle.

  He gathered his chin into his hand and sat for some time motionless, then he continued:

  “I have found out something about this one.”

  The old mountebank moved to his stool beyond the table and sat down.

  “And what is that, monsieur?” he said.

  “That you are in danger of your life—for one thing.”

  “In what danger?”

  “Do you come from the south of Europe,” replied Abner, “and forget that when a man is killed there are others to threaten his assassin?”

  “But this Blackford has no kin to carry a blood feud,” said the mountebank.

  “And so,” cried Abner, “you knew that before you killed him. And yet, in spite of that precaution, there stood a man in the crowd before the justice of the peace who held your life in his hand. He had but to speak.”

  “And why did he not speak—this man?” said the mountebank, looking at Abner across the table.

  “I will tell you that,” replied Abner. “He feared that the justice of the law might contravene the justice of God. It is a fabric woven from many threads—this justice of God. I saw three of these threads today stretching into the great loom, and I feared to touch them lest I disturb the weaver at his work. I saw men see a murder and not know it. I saw a child see its father and not know it, and I saw a letter in the handwriting of a man who did not write it.”

  The face of the old mountebank did not whiten, but instead it grew stern and resolute, and the muscles came out in it so that it seemed a thing of cords under the tanned skin.

  “The proofs,” he said.

  “They are all here,” replied Abner.

  He stooped, lifted the sheaf of knives, broke the string and spread them on the table. He selected the one from which Blackford’s blood had been wiped off.

  “Randolph examined this knife,” he continued, “but not the others; he assumed that they are all alike. Well, they are not. The others are dull, but this one has the edge of a razor.”

  And he plucked a piece of paper from the table and sheared it in two. Then he put the knife down on the board and looked toward the far end of the wagon.

  “And the child’s face,” he said—“I was not certain of that until I saw Blackford’s ironed out under the hand of death, and then I knew. And the letter—”

  But the old man was on his feet straining over the table, his features twitching like a taut rope.

  “Hush! Hush!” he said.

  There came a little gust of wind that whispered in the dry grass and blew the dead leaves against the wagon and about my face. They fluttered like a presence, these dead leaves, and pecked and clawed at the gilded panel like the nails of some feeble hand. I began to be assailed with fear as I sat there alone in the darkness looking in upon this tragedy.

  My Uncle Abner sat down, and the old man remained with the palms of his hands pressed against the table. Finally he spoke.

  “Monsieur,” he said, “shall a man lead another into hell and escape the pit himself? Yes, she is his daughter, and her mother was mine, and I have killed him. He could not speak, but with those letters he persuaded her.”

  The man paused and turned over the packet of yellow envelopes tied up with faded ribbon.

  “And she believed what a woman will always believe. What would you have done, monsieur? Go to the law—your English law that gives the woman a pittance and puts her out of the court-house door for the ribald to laugh at! Diable! Monsieur, that is not the law. I know the law, as my father and my father’s father, and your father and your father’s father knew it. I would have killed him then, when she died, but for this child. I would have followed him into these hills, day after day, like his shadow behind him, until I got a knife into him and ripped him up like a butchered pig. But I could not go to the hangman and leave this child, and so I waited.”

  He sat down.

  “We can wait, monsieur. That is one thing we have in my country—patience. And when I was ready I killed him.”

  The old man paused and put out his hand, palm upward, on the table. It was a wonderful hand, like a
live thing.

  “You have eyes, monsieur, but the others are as blind men. Did they think that hand could have failed me? Cunning men have made machinery so accurate that you marvel at them; but there was never a machine with the accuracy of the human hand when it is trained as we train it. Monsieur, I could scratch a line on the door behind you with a needle, and with my eyes closed set a knife point into every twist and turn of it. Why, monsieur, there was a straw clinging to Blackford’s coat—a straw that had fallen on him as he passed some horse stall. I marked it as he came up through the crowd, and I split it with the knife.

  “And now, monsieur?”

  But my uncle stopped him. “Not yet,” he said. “I am concerned about the living and not the dead. If I had thought of the dead only, I should have spoken this day; but I have thought also of the living. What have you done for the child?”

  There came a great tenderness into the old man’s face.

  “I have brought it up in love,” he said, “and in honor, and I have got its inheritance for it.”

  He stopped and indicated the pack of letters.

  “I was about to burn these when you came in, monsieur, for they have served their purpose. I thought I might need to know Blackford’s hand and I set out to learn it. Not in a day, monsieur, nor a week, like your common forger, and with an untried hand—but in a year, and years—with a hand that obeys me, I went over and over every letter of every word until I could write the man’s hand, not an imitation of it, monsieur, not that, but the very hand itself—the very hand that Blackford writes with his own fingers. And it was well, for I was able to get the child all that Blackford had, beyond his debts, by a letter that no man could know that Blackford did not write.”

  “I knew that he did not write it,” said Abner.

  The old man smiled.

  “You jest, monsieur,” he said; “Blackford himself could not tell the writing from his own. I could not, nor can any living man.”

  “That is true,” replied Abner; “the letter is in Blackford’s hand, as he would have written it with his own fingers. It is no imitation, as you say; it is the very writing of the man, and yet he did not write it, and when I saw it I knew that he did not.”

  The old man’s face was incredulous.

  “How could you know that, monsieur?” he said.

  My uncle took the letter which my father had received out of his pocket and spread it out on the table.

  “I will tell you,” he said, “how I knew that Blackford did not write this letter, although it is in his very hand. When my brother Rufus showed me this letter, and I read it, I noticed that there were words misspelled in it. Well, that of itself was nothing for the deaf mute did not always spell correctly. It was the manner in which the words were misspelled. Under the old system, when a deaf mute was taught to write he was taught by the eye; consequently, he writes words as he remembers them to look, and not as he remembers them to sound. His mistakes, then, are mistakes of the eye and not of the ear. And in this he differs from every man who can hear; for the man who can hear, when he is uncertain about the spelling of a word, spells it as it sounds phonetically, using not a letter that looks like the correct one, but a letter that sounds like it—using ‘s’ for ‘c’ and ‘o’ for ‘u’—a thing no deaf mute would ever do in this world, because he does not know what letters sound like. Consequently, when I saw the words in this letter misspelled by sound—when I saw that the person who had written this letter remembered his word as a sound, and by the arrangement of the letters in it was endeavoring to indicate that sound—I knew he could hear.”

  The old man did not reply, but he rose and stood before my uncle. He stood straight and fearless, his long white hair thrown back, his bronzed throat exposed, his face lifted, and his eyes calm and level, like some ancient druid among his sacred oak trees.

  And I crowded my face against the cracked panel, straining to hear what he would say.

  “Monsieur,” he said, “I have done an act of justice, not as men do it, but as the providence of God does it. With care and with patience I have accomplished every act, so that to the eyes of men it bore the relation and aspect of God’s providence. And all who saw were content but you. You have pried and ferreted behind these things, and now you must bear the obligations of your knowledge.”

  He spread out his hands toward the sleeping girl.

  “Shall this child grow up to honor in ignorance, or in knowledge go down to hell? Shall she know what her mother was, and what her father was, and what I am, and be fouled by the knowledge of it, and shall she be stripped of her inheritance and left not only outlawed, but paupered? And shall I go to the hangman, and she to the street? These are things for you to decide, since you would search out what was hidden and reveal what was covered! I leave it in your hands.”

  “And I,” replied Abner, rising, “leave it in God’s.”

  Chapter 5

  The Treasure Hunter

  I remember very well when the sailor came to Highfield. It was the return of the prodigal—a belated return. The hospitalities of the parable did not await him. Old Thorndike Madison was dead. And Charlie Madison, in possession as sole heir, was not pleased to see a lost brother land from a river boat after twenty years of silence.

  The law presumes death after seven years, and for twenty Dabney Madison had been counted out of life—counted out by old Thorndike when he left his estate to pass by operation of law to the surviving son; and counted out by Charlie when he received the title.

  The imagination of every lad in the Hills was fired by the romantic properties of this event. The Negroes carried every detail, and they would have colored it to suit the fancy had not the thing happened in ample color.

  The estate had gone to rack with Charlie drunk from dawn until midnight. Old Clayborne and Mariah kept the Negro quarters, half a mile from the house. Clayborne would put Charlie to bed and then go home to his cabin. In the morning Mariah would come to get his coffee. So Charlie lived after old Thorndike, at ninety, had gone to the graveyard.

  It was a witch’s night when the thing happened—rain and a high wind that wailed and whooped round the pillars and chimneys of the house. The house was set on a high bank above the river, where the swift water, running like a flood, made a sharp bend. It caught the full force of wind and rain. It was old and the timbers creaked.

  Charlie was drunk. He cried out when he saw the lost brother and got unsteadily on his legs.

  “You are not Dabney!” he said. “You are a picture out of a storybook!” And he laughed in a sort of half terror, like a child before a homemade ghost. “Look at your earrings!”

  It was a good comment for a man in liquor; for if ever a character stepped out of the pages of a pirate tale, here it was.

  Dabney had lifted the latch and entered without warning. He had the big frame and the hawk nose of his race. He was in sea-stained sailor clothes, his face white as plaster, a red cloth wound tightly round his head, huge half-moon rings in his ears; and he carried a seaman’s chest on his shoulder.

  Old Clayborne told the story.

  Dabney put down his chest carefully, as though it had something precious in it. Then he spoke.

  “Are you glad to see me, brother?”

  Charlie was holding on to the table with both hands, his eyes bleared, his mouth gaping.

  “I don’t see you,” he quavered. Then he turned his head, with a curious duck of the chin, toward the old Negro. “I don’t see anything—do I?”

  Dabney came over to the table then; he took up the flask of liquor and a glass.

  “Clabe,” he said, “is this apple whiskey?”

  I have heard the ancient Negro tell the story a thousand times. He gave a great shout of recognition. Those words—those five words—settled it. He used to sing this part in a long, nasal chant when he reached it in his tale: “Marse Dabney! Oh, my Lord! How many times ain’t I heard ’im say dem words—jis’ lak dat: ‘Clabe, is dis apple whisky?’ Dem outlandish do
’s couldn’t fool dis nigger! I’d ‘a’ knowed Marse Dabney after dat if he’d been ‘parisoned in de garments ob Israel!’”

  But the old Negro had Satan’s time with Charlie, who held on to the table and cursed.

  “You’re not Dabney!” he cried. “… I know you! You’re old Lafitte, the Pirate, who helped General Jackson thrash the British at New Orleans. Grandfather used to tell about you!”

  He began to cry and blame his grandfather for so vividly impressing the figure that it came up now in his liquor to annoy him. Then he would get his courage and shake a trembling fist across the table.

  “You can’t frighten me, Lafitte—curse you! I’ve seen worse things than you over there. I’ve seen the devil, with a spade, digging a grave; and a horsefly, as big as a buzzard, perched on the highboy, looking at me and calling out to the devil: ‘Dig it deep! We’ll bury old Charlie deep!’”

  Clayborne finally got him to realize that Dabney was a figure in life, in spite of the chalk face under the red headcloth.

  And then Charlie went into a drunken mania of resentment. Dabney was dead—or if he was not dead he ought to be; and he started to the highboy for a dueling pistol. His fury and his drunken curses filled the house. The place belonged to him! He would not divide it.

  It was the devil’s night. About daybreak the ancient Negro got Charlie into bed and the sailor installed in old Thorndike’s room, with a fire and all the attentions of a guest.

  After that Charlie was strangely quiet. He suffered the intrusion of the sailor with no word. Dabney might have been always in the house for any indication in Charlie’s manner. There was peace; but one was impressed that it was a sort of armistice.

  Dabney went over the old estate pretty carefully, but he did not interfere with Charlie’s possession. He laid no claim that anybody heard of. Charlie seemed to watch him. He kept the drink in hand and he grew silent.

  There seemed no overt reason, old Clayborne said, but presently Dabney began to act like a man in fear. He made friends with the dog, a big old bearhound. He got a fowling piece and set it up by the head of his bed, and finally took the dog into the room with him at night. He kept out of the house by day.