Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries (10 page)

“I am going in to arrange about the payment of the money,” replied my uncle.

The justice swore a great oath. If my uncle was setting out to interview desperate assassins—as his acts indicated—alone and unarmed, it was the extreme of foolhardy peril. Did he think murderers would parley with him and let him come away to tell it and to lead in a posse? It was a thing beyond all sane belief!

And it is evidence of the blood in Randolph that in this conviction, with the inevitable end of the venture before his face, he got down and went in with my uncle.

The path lay along a sort of dike, thrown up in some ancient time against the swamp. Now along the sides it was grown with great reeds, water beech and the common bush of wet lands.

They came to the old tobacco house noiselessly on the damp path. The tumbledown door had been set in place.

My uncle did not pause for any consideration of finesse or safety. He went straight ahead to the door and flung it open. It was rotten and insecurely set, and it fell with a clatter into the abandoned house.

At the sound a big, gaunt figure, asleep on the floor, sprang up.

In the dim light Randolph looked about for a weapon—a piece of the broken door would do. But my uncle was undisturbed.

“Dabney,” he said, “I came to arrange about the money. My agent, Mr. Gray, in Memphis, will hand it to you. There will be nothing to sign.”

Randolph said he cried out, because he was astonished: “Dabney Madison, by the living God! I thought you were dead!”

My uncle turned about. “How could you think that, Randolph?” he said. “You yourself pointed out how the dog was killed by somebody who knew him; and you must have seen that there was no blood on the floor where the dog lay—and consequently that the dog was killed in the bed to furnish blood for the pretended murder.”

“But the money, Abner!” cried Randolph. “Why do you pay Dabney Madison this money?”

“Because it is his share of his father's estate,” replied my uncle.

“So you were after that!” cried Randolph; “the half of your father's estate. Damme, man, you took a lot of hell-turns on the road to that! Why didn't you sue in the courts? Your right was legal.”

“Because a suit at law would have brought out his past,” replied my uncle.

The man roused thus abruptly out of sleep had got now some measure of control.

“Randolph,” he said, “no law of God or man runs on the sea. The trade of the sea south of the Bermudas is no business for a gentleman or to be told in the land of his father's honor. Abner knew where I'd been!”

“Yes,” replied my uncle. “When I saw your bleached face; when I saw your cropped head under the pirate cloth; when I saw you take three steps in your nervous walk, and turn—I knew.”

“That I had been in the Spanish Main?” said Dabney.

“That you had been in the penitentiary!” said my uncle.

We were on our way to the Smallwood place—Abner and I. It was early in the morning and I thought we were the first on the road; but at the Three Forks, where the Lost Creek turnpike trails down from the mountains, a horse had turned in before us.

It was a morning out of Paradise, crisp and bright. The spider-webs glistened on the fence rails. The timber cracked. The ragweed was dusted with silver. The sun was moving upward from behind the world. I could have whistled out of sheer joy in being alive on this October morning and the horse under me danced; but Abner rode looking down his nose. He was always silent when he had this trip to make. And he had a reason for it.

The pastureland that we were going on to did not belong to us. It had been owned by the sheriff, Asbury Smallwood. In those days the sheriff collected the county taxes. One night the sheriff's house had been entered, burned over his head and a large sum of the county revenues carried off. No one ever found a trace of those who had done this deed. The sheriff was ruined. He had given up his lands and moved to a neighboring county. His bondsmen had been forced to meet the loss. My father had been one of them; but it was not the loss to my father that bothered Abner.

“The thing does not hurt you, Rufus,” he said; “but it cripples Elnathan Stone and it breaks Adam Greathouse.”

Stone was a grazier with heavy debts and Greathouse was a little farmer. I remember how my father chaffed Abner when he paid his portion of this loss.

“‘The Lord gave,'” he said, “‘and the Lord hath taken away'—eh, Abner?”

“But, Rufus,” replied Abner, “did the Lord take? We must be sure of that. There are others who take.”

It was clear what Abner meant. If the Lord took he would be resigned to it; but if another took he would follow with a weapon in his hand and recover what had been taken. Abner's God was an exacting Overlord and His requisitions were to be met with equanimity; but He did not go halves with thieves and He issued no letters of marque.

When the sheriff failed Abner had put cattle on the land in an effort to make what he could for the bondsmen. It was good grazing land, but it was watered by springs, and we had to watch them. A beef steer does not grow fat without plenty of water. We went every week to give the cattle salt and to watch the springs.

As we rode I presently noticed that Abner was looking down at the horsetrack. And then I saw what I had not noticed before, that there were three horsetracks in the road—two going our way and one returning—but only one of the tracks was fresh. Finally Abner pulled up his big chestnut. We were passing the old burned house. The crumbled foundations and the blasted trees stood at the end of a lane. There had once been a gate before the house at the end of this lane, but it was now nailed up. The horse going before us had entered this lane for a few steps, then turned back into the road.

Abner did not speak. He looked at the track for a moment and then rode on. Presently we came to the bars leading from the road into the pasture. The horse had stopped here and its rider had got out of the saddle and let down the bars. One could see where the horse had gone through and the footprints of the rider were visible in the soft clay. The old horsetrack also went in and came out at these bars.

Abner examined the man's footprints with what I thought was an excess of interest. Travelers were always going through one's land; and, provided they closed the bars behind them, what did it matter? Abner seemed concerned about this traveler however. When we had entered the field he sat for some time in the saddle; and then, instead of going to the hills where the springs were, he rode up the valley toward a piece of woods. There was a little rivulet threading this valley and he watched it as he rode.

Finally, just before the rivulet entered the woods, he stopped and got down out of his saddle. When I came up he was looking at a track on the edge of the little stream. It was the footprint of a man, still
muddy where the water had run into it. Abner stood on the bank beside the rivulet, and for a good while I could not imagine what he was waiting for. Then, as he watched the track, I understood. He was waiting for the muddy water to clear so he could see the imprint of the man's foot.

“Uncle Abner,” I said, “what do you care about who goes through the field?”

“Ordinarily I do not care,” he said, “if the man lays up the fence behind him; but there is something out of the ordinary about this thing. The man who crossed there on foot is the same man who came in on the horse. The footprints here and at the bar show the same plate on the bootheel. He rode a horse that had been here before today, because it remembered the lane and tried to turn in there. Moreover, the man did not wish to be seen, because he came early, hid the horse and went on foot back toward the burned house.”

“How do you know that he had hidden the horse, Uncle Abner?”

For answer he beckoned to me and we rode into the woods. The leaves were damp and the horses made no sound. In a few moments Abner stopped and pointed through the beech trees, and I saw a bay horse tied to a sapling. The horse stood with his legs wide apart and his head down.

“The horse is asleep,” said Abner; “it has been ridden all night. We must find the rider.”

I was now alive with interest. The old story of the robbery floated before me in romantic colors. What innocent person would come here by stealth, ride his horse all night and then hide it in the woods? Moreover, as Abner said, this horse had been to the sheriff's house before today; and it had been there before the house was burned—because it had started to enter the old lane and had been turned back by its rider. We were all familiar with such striking examples of memory in horses. A horse, having once gone over a road and entered at a certain gate, will follow that road on a second trip and again enter that gate.

Then I remembered the old horsetrack that had preceded this one, and the solution of this thing appeared before me. The story had
gone about that two men had robbed the sheriff and these evidences tallied with that story. Two men had ridden into that pasture; that one track was older was because one of the men had gone to tell the other to meet him here—had ridden back—and the other had followed. The horse of the first robber was doubtless concealed deeper in the wood. And why had they returned? That was clear enough—they had concealed the booty until now and had just come back for it.

The thrill of adventure tingled in my blood. We were on the trail of the robbers and they could not easily escape us. The one who had ridden this horse could not be far away, since his track in the brook was muddy when we found it; but why had he crossed the brook in the direction of the burned house? The way over the hill toward the house was wholly in the open—clean sod, not even a tree. The man on foot could not have been out of sight of us when we rode across the brook and round the brow of the hill—but he was out of sight. We sat there in our saddles and searched the land, lying smooth and open before us. There was the burned house below, bare as my hand, and the meadows, all open to the eye. A rabbit could not have hidden—where was the rider of that worn-out, sleeping horse?

Abner sat there looking down at this clean, open land. A man could not vanish into the air; he could not hide in a wisp of blue grass; he could not cross three hundred acres of open country while his track in a running brook remained muddy. He could have reached the brow of the hill and perhaps gone down to the house, but he could not have passed the meadows and the pasture field beyond without wings on his shoulders.

The morning was on its way; the air was like lotus. The sun, still out of sight, was beginning to gild the hilltops. I looked up; away on the knob at the summit of the hill there was an old graveyard—that was a curious custom, to put our dead on the highest point of land. A patch of sunlight lay on this village of the dead—and as I looked a thing caught my eye.

I turned in the saddle.

“I saw something flash up there, Uncle Abner.”

“Flash,” he said—“like a weapon?”

“Glitter,” I said. And I caught up the bridle-rein.

But Abner put his hand on the bit.

“Quietly, Martin,” he said. “We will ride slowly round the hill, as though we were looking for the cattle, and go up behind that knob; there is a ridge there and we shall not be seen until we come out on the crest of the hill beside the graveyard.”

We rode idly away, stopping now and then, like persons at their leisure. But I was afire with interest. All the way to the crest of the hill the blood skipped in my veins. The horses made no sound on the carpet of green sod. And when we came out suddenly beside the ancient graveyard I fully expected to see there a brace of robbers—like some picture in a story—with bloody cloths around their heads and pistols in their belts; or two bewhiskered pirates before a heap of pieces-of-eight.

On the tick of the clock I was disillusioned, however. A man who had been kneeling by a grave rose. I knew him in the twinkling of an eye. He was the sheriff and in the twinkling of an eye I knew why he was there; and I was covered with confusion. His father was buried in this old graveyard. It was a land where men concealed their feelings as one conceals the practice of a crime; and one would have stolen his neighbor's goods before he would have intruded upon the secrecy of his emotions.

I pulled up my horse and would have turned back, pretending that I had not seen him, for I was ashamed; but Abner rode on and presently I followed in amazement. If Abner had cursed his horse or warbled a ribald song I could not have been more astonished. I was ashamed for myself and I was ashamed for Abner. How could he ride in on a man who had just got up from beside his father's grave? My mind flashed back over Abner's life to find a precedent for this conspicuous inconsiderate act; but there was nothing like it in all the history of the man.

When the sheriff saw us he wiped his face with his sleeve and went white as a sheet. And under my own shirt I felt and suffered with the man. I should have gone white like that if one had caught me thus. And in my throat I choked with bitterness at Abner. Had his heart tilted and every generous instinct been emptied out of it? Then I
thought he meant to turn the thing with some word that would cover the man's confusion and save his feelings inviolate; but he shocked me out of that.

“Smallwood,” said Abner, “you have come back!”

The man blinked as though the sun were in his eyes. He had not yet regained the mastery of himself.

“Yes,” he said.

“And why do you come?” said Abner.

A flush of scarlet spread over the man's white face.

“And do you ask me that?” he cried. “It is the tomb of my father!”

“Your father,” said Abner, “was an upright man. He lived in the fear of God. I respect his tomb.”

“I thank you, Abner,” replied the man. “I honor my father's grave.”

“You honor it late,” said Abner.

“Late!” echoed Smallwood.