Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries (9 page)

My uncle watched the man closely and with a strange expression.

“A clean death,” he said, “would be better than God's vengeance to follow on one's heels.”

The sailor swore a great oath.

“God's vengeance!” And he laughed. “I should not care how that followed on my heels. It's the vengeance of old Jules Le Noir and the damned Britisher, Barrett, following on a man's heels, that puts ice in the blood. God's vengeance! Why, Abner, a preacher could pray that off in a meeting-house; but can he pray the half-breed off? Or the broken-nosed Englishman?”

The man seemed caught in a current of passion that whirled him headlong into indiscretions from which a saner mood would have steered him clear.

“The Spanish Main is not Virginia!” he cried. “One does not live the life of a gentleman on it. Loot and murder are not the pastimes of a gentleman. The Spanish Main is not safe. But is Virginia safe? Is any spot safe? Eh, Abner? Show it to me if you know it!” And he plunged off into the deep broom sedge.

So it came about that an evil Frenchman with a cutlass in his teeth, and a vile old rum-soaked creature with a broken nose and a brace of pistols, got entangled in the common fancy with Dabney's legend.

Everybody in the Hills thought something was going to happen; but the wild thing that did happen came sooner than anybody thought.

One morning at sunrise a Negro house boy ran in, out of breath, to say that old Clayborne had gone by at a gallop on his way to Randolph, the justice of the peace, and shouted for my uncle to come to Highfield.

Randolph had the nearer road; but Abner met him at the Madison door and the two men went into the house together.

Old Charlie was sober; but he was drinking raw liquor and doing his best to get drunk. His face was ghastly, and his hands shook so that he could keep only a few spoonfuls of the white brandy in his big tumbler. My uncle said that if ever the terror of the damned was on a human creature in this world it was on old Charlie.

It was some time before they could get at what had happened. It was of no use to bother with Charlie until the liquor should begin to steady him. His loose underlip jerked and every faculty he could muster was massed on the one labor of getting the brandy to his mouth.

Old Mariah sat in the kitchen, with her apron over her head, rocking on the four legs of a split-bottomed chair. She was worse than useless.

My uncle and Randolph had got some things out of Clayborne on the way. There had been nothing to indicate the thing that night. Dabney had gone into old Thorndike's room, as usual, with the dog. Old Clayborne had put Charlie to bed drunk, snuffed out the candles and departed to his cabin, half a mile away. That was all old Clayborne could tell of the night before. Perhaps the sailor seemed a little more in fear than usual, and perhaps Charlie was a little more in liquor; but he could not be sure on those questions of degree. The sailor lately seemed to be in constant fear and Charlie had got back at his liquor with an increased and abandoned indulgence.

What happened after that my uncle and Randolph could see for themselves better than Clayborne could tell it.

Old Thorndike's room, like the other rooms of the house, had a door that opened on a long covered porch facing the river. This door now stood open. The ancient rusted lock plate, with its screws, was hanging to the frame. There were no marks of violence on the door. The sailor was gone. His pillow and the bedclothes were soaked with blood. All his clothes, including the red headcloth, were lying neatly folded on the arm of a chair.

The sailor's chest stood open and empty. There was a little sprinkling of blood drops from the bed to the door and into the weeds outside, but no blood anywhere else in the room. And from there, directly in a line to the river, the weeds and grass had been
trampled. The ground was hard and dry, and no one could say how many persons had gone that way from the house. The dog lay just inside the door of the room, with his throat cut. It was the slash of a knife with the edge of a razor, for the dog's head was nearly severed from the neck.

It was noiseless, swift work—incredibly noiseless and swift. Dabney had not wakened, for the fowling piece stood unmoved at the head of the bed. When the door swung open somebody had caught the dog's muzzle and slipped the knife across his throat… and then the rest.

“It must have happened that way,” Randolph said.

At any rate, the unwelcome sailor was gone. He had arrived in an abundance of mystery and he had departed in it, though where he went was clear enough. The great river, swinging round the high point of land, swallowed what it got. A lost swimmer in that deadly water was sometimes found miles below, months later—or, rather, a hideous, unrecognizable human flotsam that the Hills accepted for the dead man.

The means, too, were not without the indication Dabney had given in his wild talk to my uncle. Besides, the Negroes had seen a figure—or more than one—at dusk, about an abandoned tobacco house beyond the great meadow on the landward side of Highfield.

It was a tumbledown old structure in a strip of bush between the line of the meadow and the acres of morass beyond it—called swamps in the South. It was ghost land—haunted, the Negroes said; and so what moved there before the tragedy, behind the great elm at the edge of the meadow, old Clayborne had seen only at a distance, with no wish to spy on it.

Was it the inevitable irony of chance that Dabney scouted the river with his glass while the thing he feared came in through the swamps behind him?

By the time my uncle and Randolph had got these evidences assembled the liquor had steadied Charlie. At first he pretended to know nothing at all about the affair. He had not wakened, and had
heard nothing until the cries of old Mariah filled the house with bedlam.

Randolph said he had never seen my uncle so profoundly puzzled; he sat down in old Charlie's room, silent, with his keen, strong-featured face as immovable as wood. But the justice saw light in a crevice of the mystery and he drove directly at it, with no pretension.

“Charlie,” he said, “you were not pleased to see Dabney turn up!”

The drunken creature did not lie.

“No; I didn't want to see him.”

“Why not?”

“Because I thought he was dead.”

“Because you did not wish to divide your father's estate with him—wasn't that it?”

“Well, it was all mine—wasn't it—if Dabney was dead?”

The justice went on:

“You tried to shoot Dabney on the night he arrived!”

“I don't know,” said Charlie. “I was drunk. Ask Clabe.”

The man was in terror; but he kept his head—that was clear as light.

“Dabney knew he was in danger here, didn't he?”

“Yes; he did,” said Charlie.

“And he was in fear?”

“Yes,” said Charlie—“damnably in fear!”

“Of you!” cried the justice with a sudden, aggressive menace.

“Me?” Old Charlie looked strangely at the man. “Why, no—not me!”

“Of what, then?” said Randolph.

Old Charlie wavered; he got another measure of the brandy in him.

“Well,” he said, “it was enough to be afraid of. Look what it did to him!”

Randolph got up, then, and stood over against the man across the table.

“You Madisons are all big men. Now listen to me! It required force to break that door in, and yet there is no mark on the door; that means somebody broke it in with the pressure of his shoulder, softly. And there is another thing, Charlie, that you have got to face: Dabney was killed in his bed while asleep. The dog in the room did not make a sound. Why?”

The face of the drunken man took on a strange, perplexed expression.

“That's so, Randolph,” he said; “and it's strange—it's damned strange!”

“Not so very strange,” replied the justice.

“Why not?” said Charlie.

“Because the dog knew the man who did that work in your father's room!”

And again, with menace and vigor, Randolph drove at the shaken drunkard:

“Where's the knife Dabney was killed with?”

Then, against all belief, against all expectation in the men, old Charlie fumbled in a drawer beside him and laid a knife on the table.

Randolph gasped at the unbelievable success of his driven query, and my uncle rose and joined him.

They looked closely at the knife. It was the common butcher knife of the countryside, made by a smith from a worn-out file and to be found in any kitchen; but it was ground to the point, and whetted to the hair-shearing edge of a razor.

“Look on the handle!” said Charlie.

They looked. And there, burned in the wood crudely, like the imitative undertaking of a child, was a skull and cross-bones.

“Where did you get this knife?” said my uncle.

“It was sticking here in my table, in my room, beside my bed, when I woke up.” He indicated with his finger nail the narrow hole in the mahogany board where the point of the knife had been forced down. “And this was under it.”

He stooped again to the drawer and put a sheet of paper on the table before the astonished men. It was a page of foolscap, with words printed in blood by the point of the knife: “Chest empty! Put thousand in gold—elm-meadow. Or the same to you!”

And there was the puncture in the center of the sheet where the point of the knife had gone through. My uncle laid it on the table, over the narrow hole in the mahogany board, and pressed it down with the knife. The point fitted into the paper and the board.

There was blood on the knife; and the gruesome thing, thus reset, very nearly threw old Charlie back into the panic of terror out of which the brandy had helped him. His fingers twitched, and he kept puffing out his loose underlip like a child laboring to hold back his emotions.

He went at the brandy bottle. And the tale he finally got out was the wildest lie anybody ever put forward in his own defense—if it was a lie. That was the point to judge. And this was Randolph's estimate at the time.

Charlie said that, to cap all of Dabney's strange acts, about a week before this night he asked for a thousand dollars. Charlie told him to go to hell. He said Dabney did not resent either the refusal or the harsh words of it. He simply sat still and began to take on an appearance of fear that sent old Charlie, tumbler in hand, straight to his liquor bottle. Dabney kept coming in every day or two to beg for money; so Charlie got drunk to escape the thing.

“Where was I to get a thousand dollars?” he queried in the tale to my uncle and Randolph.

He said the day before the tragedy was the worst. Dabney got at him in terror for the money. He must have it to save his life, he went on desperately, Charlie said. And then he cried!

Charlie spat violently at the recollection. There was something gruesome, helpless and awful in the memory—in the way Dabney quaked; the tears, and the jingle of the earrings; all the appearance of the man so set to a part of brutal courage—and this shattering fear! The flapping of the big half-moon earrings against the man's white quivering jowls was the worst, Charlie said.

Randolph thought old Charlie colored the thing if he was lying about it. If it was the truth the delusions of liquor would account for these overdrawn impressions. At any rate, the justice promptly spoke out what he thought.

“Charlie,” he said, “you're trying to stage a sea yarn by the penny writers. It won't do!”

The man reflected, looking Randolph in the face.

“Why, yes,” he said; “you're right—that's what it sounds like. But it isn't that. It's the truth.” And he turned to my uncle. “You know it's the truth, Abner.”

Randolph said that just here, at this point in the affair, all the established landmarks of common sense and sane credibility were suddenly jumbled up.

What my uncle answered was:

“I think it's all true.”

Charlie took a big linen handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face. Then he said simply, quite simply, like a child: “I'm afraid!”

One could doubt everything else, Randolph said; but not this. The man was in fear, beyond question.

“I've got it all figured out,” Charlie continued. “They were after Dabney for something they thought he had in the chest. They offered to take a thousand dollars for their share and let him off. That's why he was so crazy to raise the money. When they found the chest empty they thought I had the thing, or knew where Dabney had concealed it; and now they are after me!”

Old Charlie stopped again and wiped his face. “I don't want to die, Abner,” he added, “like Dabney—in the bed. What shall I do.”

“There is only one thing to do,” replied my uncle. “Put the money by the elm in the meadow.”

“But, Abner,” replied the man, “where would I get a thousand dollars, as I said to Dabney?”

“I will lend it to you,” replied my uncle.

“But, Abner,” said Charlie, “you haven't got a thousand dollars in gold in your pocket.”

“No,” replied my uncle; “but if you will give me a lien on the land I will undertake to pay the money. The estate is in ruin, but it's worth double that sum.”

And Randolph said that, among the other strange, mad, ridiculous things of that memorable, extraordinary day, he wrote a deed of trust on the Madison lands to secure Charlie's note to my uncle for a thousand dollars.

So great virtue was there in my uncle's word, and such power had he to inspire the faith of men, that he rode away, leaving old Charlie at peace and confident that he had escaped from peril—whether, as
Randolph wondered, it was the peril of the pirate assassins in the great swamp or the gibbet of Virginia.

Two hundred yards from the house, where the strip of bush, skirting the meadow, touched the road, my uncle got down from his horse and tied the bridle rein to a sapling.

“What now, Abner?” cried Randolph, like a man swept along in a current of crazy happenings.