Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries (21 page)

And while he hung there between his plans, Abner spoke.

“Storm,” he said, “what does all this mean?”

The old man looked about him swiftly, furtively, I thought; then he spoke in a voice so low that we could hardly hear him.

“Let me put it this way, Abner,” he said: “One comes here, as you come; he is met as you are met; well, what happens from all this? … A suspicion enters the visitor's mind. There is peril to the host in that, and he is put to an alternative. He must explain or he must shoot the guest … Well, he chooses to make his explanation first, and if that fail, there is the other!”

“‘And,' he says, ‘you have done me a service to come in; I am glad to see you.' And you say, ‘What do you fear?' He answers, ‘Robbers.' You say, ‘What have you in this house to lose?' And he tells you this:

“Michael Dale owned this house. He was rich. When he was dying he sat here by this hearth, tapping the bricks with his cane, and peering at his worthless son. You remember that son, Abner; he looked like the Jupiter of Elis before the Devil got him. ‘Wellington,'
he said, ‘I am leaving you a treasure here.' He had been speaking of this estate, and one thought he meant the lands, and so gave the thing no notice. But later one remembered that expression and began to think it over. One recalled where it was that Michael Dale sat and the tapping of his stick. Well, when one is going down, any straw is worth the clutching. One slips into this house and looks.” He indicated the brick hearth with a gesture. “No, it is not there now. The gold is in that portmanteau.” He arose, opened the bag, and fumbled in it. Then he came to us with some pieces in his hand.

Abner took the gold and examined it carefully by the firelight. They were old pieces, and he rubbed them between his fingers and scraped something from their faces with his thumbnail. Then he handed them back, and Storm cast them into the portmanteau and buckled it together. Then he sat down and drew the stone jug over beside him.

“Now, Abner,” he said, “there is this evil about a treasure. It fills one full of fear. You must stand guard over it, and the thing gets on your nerves. The wind in the chimney is a voice, and every noise a footstep. At first one goes about with the weapon in his hand, and then, when he can bear it no more, he shoots at every sound.”

Abner did not move, and I listened to the man as to a tale of Bagdad. Every mystery was now cleared up—his presence in this house, his fear, the bullet holes, and why he was glad to see us, and yet disturbed that we had come. And I saw what he had been turning in his mind—whether he should trust us with the truth or leave us to our own conclusions. I understood and verified in myself every detail of this story. I should have acted as he did at every step, and I could realize this fear, and how, as the thing possessed him, one might come at last to shoot up the shadows. I looked at the man with a sort of wonder.

Abner had been stroking his bronze face with his great sinewy hand, and now he spoke.

“Storm,” he said, “Michael Dale's riddle is not the only one that has been read.” And he told of Christian Lance's death, and the Delphic sentence that had doubtless caused it. “You knew old Christian, Storm, and his curious life?”

“I did,” replied Storm, “and I knew the man who carried off the knob of the andiron. But how do you say that any man read his riddle, Abner, and how do you know that there was any riddle in it? I took the thing to be an idle taunt.”

“And so did Randolph,” said Abner, “but you were both wrong. The secret was in that scrawled sentence, and some one guessed it.”

“How do you know that, Abner?” said Storm.

Abner did not reply directly to the point.

“Old Christian loved money,” he went on. “He would have died before he told where it was hidden. And his straining toward the door, as though in death he would follow one who had gone out there, meant that his secret had been divined, and that his gold had gone that way.”

“You ride to a conclusion on straws, Abner,” said Storm, “if that is all the proof you have.”

“Well,” replied Abner, “I have also a theory.”

“And what is your theory?” said Storm.

“It is this,” continued Abner; “when old Christian wrote, ‘Why don't you look in the cow,' he meant a certain thing. There was a row of tallow cakes on a shelf. My theory is that each year when he got the gold from his cattle, he molded it into one of these tallow cakes, turned it out of the crock, and put it on the shelf. And there, in the heart of these tallow cakes, was the old man's treasure!”

“But you tell me that the cakes were there on this shelf when you found old Christian,” said Storm.

“They were,” replied Abner.

“Every one of them,” said Storm.

“Every one of them,” answered Abner.

“Had any one of them been cut or broken?”

“Not one of them; they were smooth and perfect.”

“Then your first conclusion goes to pieces, Abner. No man carried Christian's money through the door; it is there on the shelf.”

“No,” said Abner, “it is not there. The man who killed old Christian Lance got the gold out of those cakes of tallow.”

“And, now, Abner,” cried the man, “the bottom of your theory falls. How could one get the gold out of these cakes, and leave them perfect?”

“I will tell you that,” replied Abner. “There was a kettle on the crane and a crock beside the hearth, and every cake of tallow on the shelf was white … They had been remolded! Randolph did not see that, but I did.”

Storm got on his feet.

“Then you do not believe this explanation, Abner—that the gold comes from the hearth?”

“I do not,” replied Abner, and his voice was deep and level. “There is tallow on these coins!”

I saw Abner glance at the iron poker and watch Storm's hand.

But the old man did not draw his weapon. He laughed noiselessly, twisting his crooked mouth.

“You are right, Abner,” he said, “it is Christian's gold, and this tale a lie. But you are wrong in your conclusion. Lance was not killed by a little man like I am; he was killed by a big man like you!”

He paused and leaned over, resting his hands on the table.

“The man who killed him did not guess that riddle, Abner … Put the evidences together … Lance was tied into his chair before the assassin killed him. Why? That was to threaten him with death unless he told
where his gold was hidden … Well, Lance would not tell that, but the assassin found it out by chance. He stooped to put the poker into the fire to heat it, and torture Christian. The cakes of tallow were on a hanging shelf against the white-washed chimney; as the assassin arose, he struck this shelf with his shoulder, and one of the tallow cakes fell and burst on the hearth. Then he killed Christian with a blow of the heated poker. I know that because the hair about the wound was scorched!

“You saw a good deal in that house, Abner, but did you see a crease in the chimney where the shelf smote it, and the mark of a man's shoulder on the whitewash? And that shoulder, Abner,” he raised his hand above his head, “it was as high as yours!”

There was silence.

And as the two men looked thus at each other, there was a sound as of something padding about the house outside. For a moment I did not understand these sounds, then I realized that the wind was rising, and clumps of snow falling from the trees. But to another in that house these sounds had no such explanation.

Then a thing happened. One of the mahogany doors entering the hall leaped back, and a man stood there with a pistol in his hand. And in all my life I have never seen a creature like him! There was everything fine and distinguished in his face, but the face was a ruin. It was a loathsome and hideous ruin. Made for the occupancy of a god, the man's body was the dwelling of a devil. I do not mean a clean and vicious devil, but one low and bestial, that wallowed and gorged itself with sins. And there was another thing in that face that to understand, one must have seen it. There was terror, but no fear! It was as though the man advanced against a thing that filled him full of horror, but he advanced with courage. He had a spirit in him that saw and knew the aspect and elements of danger, but it could not be stampeded into flight.

I heard Abner say, “Dale!” like one who pronounces the name of some extraordinary thing. And I heard Storm say, “Mon dieu! With a teaspoonful of laudanum in him, he walks!”

The creature did not see us; he was listening to the sounds outside, and he started for the door.

“You there,” he bellowed, “again! … Damn you! … Well, I'll get you this time …. I'll hunt you to hell!” … And his drunken voice rumbled off into obscenities and oaths.

He flung the door open and went out. His weapon thundered, and by it and the drunken shouting, we could track him. He seemed to move north, as though lured that way. We stood and listened.

“He goes toward the river,” said Abner. “It is God's will.” Then far off there was a last report of the weapon and a great bellowing cry that shuddered through the forest.

That night over the fire, Storm told us how he had come in from the snow and found Dale drunk and fighting the ghost of Christian Lance; how he listened to his story, and slipped the drug into his glass, and how he got him hidden, when we came, on the promise to keep his secret; and how he had fenced with Abner, seeing that Abner suspected him. But it was the failure of his drug that vexed him. “It would put a brigadier and his horse to sleep—that much, if it were pure. I shall take ten drops tomorrow night and see.”

It was a day of early June in Virginia. The afternoon sun lay warm on the courthouse with its great plaster pillars; on the tavern with its two-story porch; on the stretches of green fields beyond and the low wooded hill, rimmed by the far-off mountains like a wall of the world.

It was the first day of the circuit court, which all the country attended. And on this afternoon, two men crossed the one thoroughfare that lay through the county seat, and went up the wide stone steps into the courthouse.

The two men were in striking contrast. One, short of stature and beginning to take on the rotundity of age, was dressed with elaborate care, his great black stock propping up his chin, his linen and the cloth of his coat immaculate. He wore a huge carved ring and a bunch of seals attached to his watch-fob. The other was a big, broad-shouldered, deep-chested Saxon, with all those marked characteristics of a race living out of doors and hardened by wind and sun. His powerful frame carried no ounce of surplus weight. It was the frame of the empire builder on the frontier of the empire. The face reminded one of Cromwell, the craggy features in repose seemed molded over iron, but the fine gray eyes had a calm serenity, like remote spaces in the summer sky. The man's clothes were plain and somber. And he gave one the impression of things big and vast.

As the two entered between the plaster pillars, a tall old man came out from the county clerk's office. But for his face, he might have been one of a thousand Englishmen in Virginia. There was nothing in the big, spare figure or the cranial lines of the man to mark.

But the face seized you. In it was an unfathomable disgust with life, joined, one would say, with a cruel courage. The hard, bony jaw protruded; bitter lines descended along the planes of the face, and the eyes circled by red rims were expressionless and staring, as though, by some abominable negligence of nature, they were lidless.
The two approached, and the one so elaborately dressed spoke to the old man.

“How do you do, Northcote Moore?” he said. “You know Abner?”

The old man stopped instantly and stood very still. He moved the stick in his hand a trifle before him. Then he spoke in a high-pitched, irascible voice.

“Abner, eh! Well, what the devil is Abner here for?”

The little pompous man clenched his fingers in his yellow gloves, but his voice showed no annoyance.

“I asked him to have a look at Eastwood Court.”

“Damn the justice of the peace of every county,” cried the old man, “and you included, Randolph! You never make an end of anything.”

He gave no attention to Abner, who remained unembarrassed, regarding the impolite old man as one regards some strange, new, and particularly offensive beast.

“Chuck the whole business, Randolph, that's what I say,” the irascible old man continued, “and forget about it. Who the devil cares? A drooling old paralytic is snuffed out. Well, he ought to have gone five and twenty years ago! He couldn't manage his estate and he kept me out. I was like to hang about until I rotted, while the creature played at Patience, propped up against the table and the wall. A nigger, on a search for shillings, knocks him on the head. Shall I hunt the nigger down and hang him? Damme! I would rather get him a patent of state lands!”

The face of Randolph was a study in expression.

“But, sir,” he said, “there are some things about this affair that are peculiar—I may say extraordinarily peculiar.”

Again the old man stood still. When he spoke his voice was in a lower note.

“And so,” he said, “you have nosed out a new clew and got Abner over, and we are to have another inquisition.”

He reflected, moving his stick idly before him. Then he went on in a petulant, persuasive tone.

“Why can't you let sleeping dogs lie? The country is beginning to forget this affair, and you set about to stir it up. Shall I always have the thing clanking at my heels like a ball and chain?”

Then he rang the paved court with the ferrule of his stick. “Damme, man!” he cried. “Has Virginia no mysteries, that you yap forever on old scents at Eastwood? What does it matter who did this thing? It was a public service. Virginia needs a few men on her lands with a bit of courage. This state is rotten with old timber. In youth, Duncan Moore was a fool. In age, he was better dead. Let there be an end to this, Randolph.”