Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries Read online

  “Smallwood,” Abner said presently, “how do you know that your house was robbed before it was burned? Might it not be that the county revenues were burned with the house?”

  “I will tell you how I know that, Abner,” replied the man. “The revenues of the county were all in my deerskin saddle-pockets, under my pillow; when I awoke in the night the house was dark and filled with smoke. I jumped up, seized my clothes, which were on a chair by the bed, and ran downstairs; but, first, I felt under the pillow for my saddle-pockets—and they were gone.”

  “But, Smallwood,” said Abner, “how can you be certain that the money was stolen out of your saddle-pockets if you did not find them?”

  “I did find them,” replied the sheriff; “I went back into the house and got the saddle-pockets and brought them out—and they were empty.”

  “That was a brave thing to do, Smallwood,” said Abner—“to go back into a burning house filled with smoke and dark. You could have had only a moment.”

  “You speak the truth, Abner,” replied the sheriff. “I had only a moment—the house was a pot of smoke. But the money was in my care, Abner. There was my duty—and what is a man’s life against that!”

  I saw Abner’s back straighten and I heard his feet grind on the iron of his stirrups.

  “And now, Smallwood,” he said, and his voice was like the menace of a weapon, “will you tell me how it was possible for you to go into a house that was dark and filled with smoke, and thus quickly—in a moment—find those empty saddle-pockets, unless you knew exactly where they were?”

  I saw that Abner’s question had impaled the man, as one pierces a fly through with a needle; and, like a fly, the man in his confusion fluttered.

  “Smallwood,” said Abner, “you are a thief and a hypocrite and a liar! And, like all liars, you have destroyed yourself! You not only stole this money but you tried to make your father an accomplice in that robbery. To conceal it, you hid it in this dead man’s house. And, behold, the dead man has held his house against you! When you came here last night to carry away the money you found that the slab over your father’s grave had fallen and wedged itself in against the limestone coping, and you could not lift it; and so you went back for that crowbar… But who knows, you thief, what influence, though he be dead, a just man has with God! I came in time to help your father hold his house—and against his son, with a weapon in his hand!”

  I saw the man cringe and writhe and shiver, as though he were unable to get out of his tracks; then the power came to him, and he vaulted over the fence and ran. He ran in fear down the hill and across the brook and into the wood; and a moment later he came out with his tired horse at a gallop.

  Abner looked down from the hilltop on the flying thief, but he made no move to follow.

  “Let him go,” he said, “for his father’s sake. We owe the dead man that much.”

  Then he got down from his horse, thrust the crowbar under the slab over the grave and lifted it up.

  Beneath it were the sheriff’s deerskin saddle-pockets and the stolen money!

  Chapter 7

  A Twilight Adventure

  It was a strange scene that we approached. Before a crossroad leading into a grove of beech trees, a man sat on his horse with a rifle across his saddle. He did not speak until we were before him in the road, and then his words were sinister.

  “Ride on!” he said.

  But my Uncle Abner did not ride on. He pulled up his big chestnut and looked calmly at the man.

  “You speak like one having authority,” he said.

  The man answered with an oath.

  “Ride on, or you’ll get into trouble!”

  “I am accustomed to trouble,” replied my uncle with great composure; “you must give me a better reason.”

  “I’ll give you hell!” growled the man. “Ride on!”

  Abner’s eyes traveled over the speaker with a deliberate scrutiny.

  “It is not yours to give,” he said, “although possibly to receive. Are the roads of Virginia held by arms?”

  “This one is,” replied the man.

  “I think not,” replied my Uncle Abner, and, touching his horse with his heel, he turned into the crossroad.

  The man seized his weapon, and I heard the hammer click under his thumb. Abner must have heard it, too, but he did not turn his broad back. He only called to me in his usual matter-of-fact voice:

  “Go on, Martin; I will overtake you.”

  The man brought his gun up to his middle, but he did not shoot. He was like all those who undertake to command obedience without having first determined precisely what they will do if their orders are disregarded. He was prepared to threaten with desperate words, but not to support that threat with a desperate act, and he hung there uncertain, cursing under his breath.

  I would have gone on as my uncle had told me to do, but now the man came to a decision.

  “No, by God!” he said; “if he goes in, you go in, too!”

  And he seized my bridle and turned my horse into the crossroad; then he followed.

  There is a long twilight in these hills. The sun departs, but the day remains. A sort of weird, dim, elfin day, that dawns at sunset, and envelops and possesses the world. The land is full of light, but it is the light of no heavenly sun. It is a light equal everywhere, as though the earth strove to illumine itself, and succeeded with that labor.

  The stars are not yet out. Now and then a pale moon rides in the sky, but it has no power, and the light is not from it. The wind is usually gone; the air is soft, and the fragrance of the fields fills it like a perfume. The noises of the day and of the creatures that go about by day cease, and the noises of the night and of the creatures that haunt the night begin. The bat swoops and circles in the maddest action, but without a sound. The eye sees him, but the ear hears nothing. The whippoorwill begins his plaintive cry, and one hears, but does not see.

  It is a world that we do not understand, for we are creatures of the sun, and we are fearful lest we come upon things at work here, of which we have no experience, and that may be able to justify themselves against our reason. And so a man falls into silence when he travels in this twilight, and he looks and listens with his senses out on guard.

  It was an old wagon-road that we entered, with the grass growing between the ruts. The horses traveled without a sound until we began to enter a grove of ancient beech trees; then the dead leaves cracked and rustled. Abner did not look behind him, and so he did not know that I came. He knew that someone followed, but he doubtless took it for the sentinel in the road. And I did not speak.

  The man with the cocked gun rode grimly behind me. I did not know whither we went or to what end. We might be shot down from behind a tree or murdered in our saddles. It was not a land where men took desperate measures upon a triviality. And I knew that Abner rode into something that little men, lacking courage, would gladly have stayed out of.

  Presently my ear caught a sound, or, rather, a confused mingling of sounds, as of men digging in the earth. It was faint, and some distance beyond us in the heart of the beech woods, but as we traveled the sound increased and I could distinguish the strokes of the mattock, and the thrust of the shovel and the clatter of the earth on the dry leaves.

  These sounds seemed at first to be before us, and then, a little later, off on our right hand. And finally, through the gray boles of the beech trees in the lowland, I saw two men at work digging a pit. They had just begun their work, for there was little earth thrown out. But there was a great heap of leaves that they had cleared away, and heavy cakes of the baked crust that the mattocks had pried up. The length of the pit lay at right angles to the road, and the men were working with their backs toward us. They were in their shirts and trousers, and the heavy mottled shadows thrown by the beech limbs hovered on their backs and shoulders like a flock of night birds. The earth was baked and hard; the mattock rang on it, and among the noises of their work they did not hear us.

  I saw Abne
r look off at this strange labor, his head half turned, but he did not stop and we went on. The old wagon-road made a turn into the low ground. I heard the sound of horses, and a moment later we came upon a dozen men.

  I shall not easily forget that scene. The beech trees had been deadened by some settler who had chopped a ring around them, and they stood gaunt with a few tattered leaves, letting the weird twilight in. Some of the men stood about, others sat on the fallen trees, and others in their saddles. But upon every man of that grim company there was the air and aspect of one who waits for something to be finished.

  An old man with a heavy iron-gray beard smoked a pipe, puffing out great mouthfuls of smoke with a sort of deliberate energy; another whittled a stick, cutting a bull with horns, and shaping his work with the nicest care; and still another traced letters on the pommel of his saddle with his thumbnail.

  A little to one side a great pronged beech thrust out a gray arm, and under it two men sat on their horses, their elbows strapped to their bodies and their mouths gagged with a saddlecloth. And behind them a man in his saddle was working with a colt halter, unraveling the twine that bound the headpiece and seeking thereby to get a greater length of rope.

  This was the scene when I caught it first. But a moment later, when my uncle rode into it, the thing burst into furious life. Men sprang up, caught his horse by the bit and covered him with weapons. Some one called for the sentinel who rode behind me, and he galloped up. For a moment there was confusion. Then the big man who had smoked with such deliberation called out my uncle’s name, others repeated it, and the panic was gone. But a ring of stern, determined faces were around him and before his horse, and with the passing of the flash of action there passed no whit of the grim purpose upon which these men were set.

  My uncle looked about him.

  “Lemuel Arnold,” he said; “Nicholas Vance, Hiram Ward, you here!”

  As my uncle named these men I knew them. They were cattle grazers. Ward was the big man with the pipe. The men with them were their renters and drovers.

  Their lands lay nearest to the mountains. The geographical position made for feudal customs and a certain independence of action. They were on the border, they were accustomed to say, and had to take care of themselves. And it ought to be written that they did take care of themselves with courage and decision, and on occasion they also took care of Virginia.

  Their fathers had pushed the frontier of the dominion northward and westward and had held the land. They had fought the savage single-handed and desperately, by his own methods and with his own weapons. Ruthless and merciless, eye for eye and tooth for tooth, they returned what they were given.

  They did not send to Virginia for militia when the savage came; they fought him at their doors, and followed him through the forest, and took their toll of death. They were hardier than he was, and their hands were heavier and bloodier, until the old men in the tribes of the Ohio Valley forbade these raids because they cost too much, and turned the war parties south into Kentucky.

  Certain historians have written severely of these men and their ruthless methods, and prattled of humane warfare; but they wrote nursing their soft spines in the security of a civilization which these men’s hands had builded, and their words are hollow.

  “Abner,” said Ward, “let me speak plainly. We have got an account to settle with a couple of cattle thieves and we are not going to be interfered with. Cattle stealing and murder have got to stop in these hills. We’ve had enough of it.”

  “Well,” replied my uncle, “I am the last man in Virginia to interfere with that. We have all had enough of it, and we are all determined that it must cease. But how do you propose to end it?”

  “With a rope,” said Ward.

  “It is a good way,” replied Abner, “when it is done the right way.”

  “What do you mean by the right way?” said Ward.

  “I mean,” answered my uncle, “that we have all agreed to a way and we ought to stick to our agreement. Now, I want to help you to put down cattle stealing and murder, but I want also to keep my word.”

  “And how have you given your word?”

  “In the same way that you have given yours,” said Abner, “and as every man here has given his. Our fathers found out that they could not manage the assassin and the thief when every man undertook to act for himself, so they got together and agreed upon a certain way to do these things. Now, we have indorsed what they agreed to, and promised to obey it, and I for one would like to keep my promise.”

  The big man’s face was puzzled. Now it cleared.

  “Hell!” he said. “You mean the law?”

  “Call it what you like,” replied Abner; “it is merely the agreement of everybody to do certain things in a certain way.”

  The man made a decisive gesture with a jerk of his head.

  “Well,” he said, “we’re going to do this thing our own way.”

  My uncle’s face became thoughtful.

  “Then,” he said, “you will injure some innocent people.”

  “You mean these two blacklegs?”

  And Ward indicated the prisoners with a gesture of his thumb.

  My uncle lifted his face and looked at the two men some distance away beneath the great beech, as though he had but now observed them.

  “I was not thinking of them,” he answered. “I was thinking that if men like you and Lemuel Arnold and Nicholas Vance violate the law, lesser men will follow your example, and as you justify your act for security, they will justify theirs for revenge and plunder. And so the law will go to pieces and a lot of weak and innocent people who depend upon it for security will be left unprotected.”

  These were words that I have remembered, because they put the danger of lynch law in a light I had not thought of. But I saw that they would not move these determined men. Their blood was up and they received them coldly.

  “Abner,” said Ward, “we are not going to argue this thing with you. There are times when men have to take the law into their own hands. We live here at the foot of the mountains. Our cattle are stolen and run across the border into Maryland. We are tired of it and we intend to stop it.

  “Our lives and our property are menaced by a set of reckless desperate devils that we have determined to hunt down and hang to the first tree in sight. We did not send for you. You pushed your way in here; and now, if you are afraid of breaking the law, you can ride on, because we are going to break it—if to hang a pair of murderous devils is to break it.”

  I was astonished at my uncle’s decision.

  “Well,” he said, “if the law must be broken, I will stay and help you break it!”

  “Very well,” replied Ward; “but don’t get a wrong notion in your head, Abner. If you choose to stay, you put yourself on a footing with everybody else.”

  “And that is precisely what I want to do,” replied Abner, “but as matters stand now, every man here has an advantage over me.”

  “What advantage, Abner?” said Ward.

  “The advantage,” answered my uncle, “that he has heard all the evidence against your prisoners and is convinced that they are guilty.”

  “If that is all the advantage, Abner,” replied Ward, “you shall not be denied it. There has been so much cattle stealing here of late that our people living on the border finally got together and determined to stop every drove going up into the mountains that wasn’t accompanied by somebody that we knew was all right. This afternoon one of my men reported a little bunch of about a hundred steers on the road, and I stopped it. These two men were driving the cattle. I inquired if the cattle belonged to them and they replied that they were not the owners, but that they had been hired to take the drove over into Maryland. I did not know the men, and as they met my inquiries with oaths and imprecations, I was suspicious of them. I demanded the name of the owner who had hired them to drive the cattle. They said it was none of my damned business and went on. I raised the county. We overtook them, turned their cattle
into a field, and brought them back until we could find out who the drove belonged to. On the road we met Bowers.”

  He turned and indicated the man who was working with the rope halter.

  I knew the man. He was a cattle shipper, somewhat involved in debt, but who managed to buy and sell and somehow keep his head above water.

  “He told us the truth. Yesterday evening he had gone over on the Stone-Coal to look at Daniel Coopman’s cattle. He had heard that some grazer from your county, Abner, was on the way up to buy the cattle for stockers. He wanted to get in ahead of your man, so he left home that evening and got to Coopman’s place about sundown. He took a short cut on foot over the hill, and when he came out he saw a man on the opposite ridge where the road runs, ride away. The man seemed to have been sitting on his horse looking down into the little valley where Coopman’s house stands. Bowers went down to the house, but Coopman was not there. The door was open, and Bowers says the house looked as though Coopman had just gone out of it and might come back any moment. There was no one about, because Coopman’s wife had gone on a visit to her daughter, over the mountains, and the old man was alone.