Daniel Plainway - Or The Holiday Haunting of the Moosepath League

by Van Reid

“On the contrary!” declared Mister Walton, even as he continued to laugh. “It is grand!”

  “I am honored to be part of such a good and forward-thinking society,” said Phileda sincerely, and she offered a firm handshake to each of them. She finished off by shaking Mister Walton’s hand. Thump, who had seen the conclusion of events in the kitchen the night before, blushed to such a degree that it could be seen past his beard and mustaches and bushy eyebrows; it looked like a forest on fire.

  But they were not finished with surprises yet, for when they were passing the end of Anderson Street, they heard a cheery “Heigh-ho!” rising from behind them, and watched as three familiar fellows clambered from a cab. The nearly complete membership of the Moosepath League were pleased to see the complete membership of the Dash-It-All Boys (all three of them) drawing near.

  “It’s the Bearhead Lodge!” declared Durwood.

  “They’re wearing hats,” corrected Waverley.

  “Gopherwood Club,” said Brink.

  “Do you think?” said Durwood.

  “Gentlemen!” said Ephram. He and Eagleton and Thump put themselves in the fore of the receiving line, and the Dashians looked a little unsure about offering their hands to the inevitable agitation.

  “Merry Chrisnnas!” was the general cry from the Moosepath League, and this seemed to engender a start from the Dash-It-All Boys.

  “Good heavens, is it?” said Durwood.

  “How very fitting that you should be here on such an occasion!” said Eagleton while he pumped Brink’s hand enthusiastically.

  “Exchanging presents?” wondered Brink.

  “We have just voted Miss McCannon in as a member of our club,” explained Ephram.

  “Drat!” said Waverley, a little indelicately.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Thump.

  “We were going to nominate her at our next meeting,” said Durwood,

  “Good heavens!” said Eagleton.

  “We had no idea!” said Ephram.

  “We didn’t know you knew Miss McCannon,” said Thump.

  “I don’t know if we do know her,” admitted Durwood, but he shook her hand briskly. “But someone very much like her, perhaps.”

  “You would have done very nicely,” assured Brink as he shook her hand.

  Phileda barely allowed a smile. “It is good of you to say so, Mr. -”

  “These fellows have clearly gotten the lead of us,” admitted Roderick Waverley.

  “It’s a good thing we acted when we did,” whispered Eagleton to Thump. They couldn’t imagine Miss McCannon in another club.

  “Mister Walton,” said Humphrey Brink.

  “Gentlemen,” said Mister Walton, “we are heading for the promenade where Sundry and I first met you.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Durwood. “I seem to recall.”

  “Would you like to come with us?” wondered the portly fellow. “Miss McCannon and I were hoping to join a toboggan on the hill.”

  Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump thought this an extraordinary idea. Durwood, Waverley, and Brink considered it with more gravity, however. “We appreciate the invitation,” said Durwood, upon visual consultation with his fellows, “but it took a lot out of us the first time we watched you.”

  “Of course,” said Mister Walton with a chuckle, and he instigated farewells. Handshakes went all around, but the Dash-It-All Boys, who might have been suffering from the previous night’s revels, bore up manfully. It was Durwood (in the act of shaking with Mister Walton) whose attention was suddenly taken by something dark sailing in the air above them.

  At first they thought it was a bird, then a kite.

  It’s too small for a kite, thought Mister Walton. It seemed to be descending directly toward him.

  “A I very much deceived in thinking that the object above us, just now, is a hat?” said Aldicott Durwood.

  EPILOGUE

  The Occupied Pocket

  new Year’s Day 1897

  At the eve of the New Year fell upon a Thursday [wrote Christopher Eagleton in his journal on the morning of January 1, 1897] the Moosepath League was free to combine its customary meeting with a celebration of the extraordinary months behind us and the promising days ahead.

  The Shipswood was a marvelous place to be, and this writer, for the first time, greeted the New Year in a wakeful state. It was an exhilarating moment when the hour of midnight was announced, although there was some confusion. Mr. Moss had been describing the manner in which his uncle customarily jumped into the New Year from the seat of a chair, and Thump was much taken with the idea. Unfortunately a waiter was passing by our table at the stroke of midnight, and Thump leaped into the man’s arms, surprising everyone. The waiter, unprepared for this activity, dropped himself and Thump into the next table, and there was an engrossing commotion…

  Eagleton peered from his study window and considered the day without.

  A new thought occurred to him then, and he fell to writing again.

  A unusual item in the papers this morning gave scant details about the disappearance of a large group of men in the western part of the state. One of the names attached to this troublesome business seems to be that of Miss Burnbrake’s cousin Roger Noble…

  Matthew Ephram was winding his clocks and setting his watches, an appropriate activity, he thought, on the first day of the year. Someone had told him that the operator on the telephone would inform a person of the time, if asked, and he tried this with some success, although the man on the other end seemed to be a minute or so fast.

  “If you ever are in need of the time,” said Ephram to the operator,

  “never hesitate to call.” He was a little flustered, however, when the man asked for a number, so he called Joseph Thump (of the Exeter Thumps), who was in the process (one might say, the ceremony) of laying to rest another year’s Almanac and Tide Calendar Thump thought of his almanacs as old friends and kept them in the tray of an old travel trunk at the foot of his bed.

  Thump assured Ephram that he had suffered no permanent damage from his leap into the New Year. He was preparing to visit Mr. Rhume, the waiter, who was recovering at his aunt’s, as a matter of fact, and it was while speaking with Ephram on the phone that Thump absently reached into a coat pocket and felt a small card there.

  “What an extraordinary year it has been!” Ephram was saying.

  “Hmm?” said Thump, more in reaction to the card in his pocket than to Ephram. Ephram repeated the assertion even as Thump pulled the card from his pocket and considered it. The first side said nothing, but when he turned it over, he was stunned (quite physically startled) by the name written upon it. “Hmm!” he said, a response that was not easy for Ephram to understand.

  “Yes, well,” said Ephram cheerfully.

  Thump turned the card over several times, and every time he came back to the second side the name of Mrs. Dorothea Roberto was still there, and every time it gave him the same extraordinary shock. He had never really gotten over the circumstances of their meeting, having unintentionally provided a landing site for the beautiful widow during her Fourth of July parachute drop from an ascended balloon and then (that very night) having danced with her at the Freeport Ball.

  “Would you like some company when you visit Mr. Rhume?” asked Ephram.

  “That would be very nice,” said Thump, hardly hearing his friend.

  “I’ll call Eagleton,” said Ephram, and he rang off.

  Thump stood with the earpiece of the phone against the side of his head for several minutes while he considered the card.

  What could it mean? he wondered. He didn’t remember having asked Mrs. Roberto for her card, nor did he recall her giving him one. I was never wearing this coat in July! he thought. He continued to turn the card over and to peruse it more closely, but there were no further clues to its history or purpose. Clues! he thought, and pawed through his pockets. There was nothing else to be found, however, and he decided to get out his summer suits and look through those.


  An hour so later, having appointed to meet with Ephram and Eagleton, he was walking down the sidewalk of India Street. Several times during his progress he stopped and pulled the card from his pocket and considered the fine handwriting there. What could it mean? he wondered for the hundredth time. Before he had a better idea, however, he decided to say nothing to anyone about the unexpected card.

  It was a brilliant day. Already they were experiencing something of a January thaw. He tipped his hat to an older woman who passed by and nodded to a boy, who stuck his tongue out at him.

  Thump glanced back at the boy. What did that mean? he wondered. The very notion of sticking one’s tongue out was strange to him and he practiced it tentatively (and to be truthful, half consciously) right there on the street corner.

  Another walker-one George Selby of Danforth Street-was passing by at the time, and Selby wrote in his journal (dated that evening, January the first, 1897), “Walking to my sister’s this afternoon, I encountered a well-dressed man with a remarkable beard who stood at the corner of India and Congress Streets with his tongue partially protruded. He had a piece of paper in his hand and he seemed to be concentrating with some force.”

  So, George Selby (by all accounts a cautious man) gave wide berth to the man with the remarkable beard and crossed the street. “When I turned back, a minute or so later,” continued Selby in his journal, “I could not see him past the holiday traffic.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I the fall of 1953 several newspapers in the northeastern United States were host to the following learned query: “For a book on secret societies: Requesting information-substantiated or anecdotal-regarding the disappearance of a group of men known as the Broumnage Club in western Maine in the winter of 1896-1897.”

  The address given was that of a small midwestem college, and the scholar making the request was a professor whose fascination with secret societies (and the Broumnage Club in particular) stemmed from his involvement with a WPA project in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1939. It was then that the brownstone that once housed the base of operations for the Broumnage Club was converted into an apartment building and a small trove of the order’s papers was discovered in a trunk in a corner of the attic.

  Henry Irvine, then working his way through college, rescued these documents and kept them at his parents’ home in Springfield, Massachusetts. Irvine’s work on this (admittedly esoteric) subject and his formal education were interrupted by a lack of funds, then by the war, but after returning to the States in 1946, he finished his degree on the GI Bill. His pet project continued to be delayed, however, for the sake of teaching and family. After his unexpected demise in 1964, the “Broumnage Papers” were inadvertently destroyed.

  For our purposes, however, the above query says it all, and one cannot help wondering about the efficacy of a thousand-year-old curse, written in Norse runes upon a stone in Skowhegan, Maine. Any good Yankee would tell us to “Take it with a grain of salt,” or perhaps “Just because it’s carved in stone…”

  Another document tells a different story entirely. It is a letter, dated July 5, 1906, and runs thusly:

  Dear Dad,

  The celebration here at Hiram was fine. I joined in several events, including the three-legged race with Mr. Plainway, which we won. The prize was the biggest watermelon. I thought that Mrs. Plainway would burst she laughed so hard, and Mr. Plainway grinned like a young boy when we returned to our place at the picnic, though he was out of breath. Nothing seems to please him more than what pleases her. I had a moment to watch them together, sitting on a blanket overlooking the village and the river, she in her white dress and hat, he in his white suit, and very little could be more ideal, with the flowers in the field and the two of them laughing. Their love for one another is so keen and so conspicuous that I would have been embarrassed if I didn’t love them so myself.

  Today we went to the cemetery and the house…

  The letter does continue at some length and includes the writer’s “strange sensation of walking into the scene of a play or the page of a book, but certainly not into a place that had affected my life.” The envelope enclosing the letter is addressed to Wyckford O’Hearn; the return address bears the name of Bertram O’Hearn.

  Wyckford Cormac O’Hearn did play baseball again, though he never returned to the glory days of his past and never again played in a professional capacity. His greatest accomplishment may have been forming some of the earliest boys’ baseball leagues in the towns of Veazie and Orono. Of interest to readers may be one of the last lines in Bertram’s letter. “Tell Mom and Grandma that I have presents for them. (And one for yourself.)”

  If in the preceding narratives, Bertram (that is, Bird) seems something of a cipher, then it is in keeping with the observations of those who knew him. Though well liked and admired throughout his life, Bird (as I like to think of him) became a man of few words and occasional surprises. Always a good and loyal friend-and that to many-he was perhaps only truly known by Wyck and one other person. In later years he reappeared in the annals of the Moosepath League in a very different role.

  Eustace Pembleton (his real name was none of those by which he was known in this story) spent twenty-two months in prison for his role in Bird’s kidnapping as well as other charges but was released for humanitarian reasons and boarded in a private hospital for the mentally ill. His care and room were paid for by an anonymous benefactor. As a young man, Bird visited Pembleton at the hospital at least four times a year (except in 1918-1919) until Pembleton’s death in 1924. Mister Walton did visit with Bird once and was impressed with the young man’s kindness and Pembleton’s amicable responses. Bird always brought Pembleton popcorn balls and dime novels.

  As stated in the narrative, Christopher Eagleton did not recall the business of the silver cross until he stumbled upon the December 5, 1896, entry of his journal months later. He and his fellows were much amazed by it all.

  In Moosepathian circles, the events of that December are variously thought of as “the Adventure of the Holiday Haunting,” “the Adventure of the Three Legacies,” and “the Adventure of the Mother’s Eyes.” It might also have been called “the Adventure of the Three Clubs.” The twenty-first of December is always the league’s tree-decorating day in memory of this exploit. St. Nicholas’s Day is also observed, so if you ever see boots outside a hotel room on the eve of December 6, they are not waiting for the bootblack.

  To my knowledge, the Broumnage Club was never heard from again.

  In the years to come, Aldicott Durwood, Roderick Waverley, and Humphrey Brink-the Dash-It-All Boys-occasionally deviated into the path of the Moosepath League, and something worth noting always seemed to occur from these encounters. In 1920, the year of National Prohibition, a club called the Dash-It-All Boys was formally founded in nearby Falmouth, coincidentally dissolving in 1933, when Prohibition ended. The minutes of their meetings are difficult to read.

  The false card placed ill Joseph Thump’s coat pocket by Aldicott Durwood had extraordinary consequences for the Moosepath League, though the possible (if imaginative) implications of that article did not fully accumulate in Thump’s mind till the following May. In the resultant bewilderment, the Moosepath League would meet the half-mad and thoroughly engaging Benjamin Granite Gunwight, and the brief era of the club’s beginnings would end in the wake of a letter from Mister Walton’s sister. Rumors concerning Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump and “the woman in room 12A” are universally considered capricious. This page in the history of the league is generally styled by Moosepathian historians as “the Adventure of the Pasteboard Card,” though some in the league prefer to remember it as “the Adventure of the Startled Ascensionist” or “the Adventure of the Widow’s Brigade.”

  Someday it may be told.

  I have had letters from folks who ask for a bibliography, and with that in mind I shall list some of the books that most affected this and the two preceding narratives. To my knowledge the following are stil
l in print and highly recommended: Coastal Maine by Roger Duncan; Dawn over the Kennebec and other works by Mary R. Calvert; Maine in the Making of the Nation 1783-1870 by Elizabeth Ring; History of Ancient Sheepscot and Newcastle by Rev. David Quimby Cushman (reprinted by the local historical society); Sermons in Stone, the Stonewalls of New England and New York by Susan Allport; a Day’s Work, a Sampler of Historic Maine Photographs 1860-1920, annotated and compiled by w H. Bunting; Portland, edited by Martin Dibner with photographs by Nicholas Dean; Along the Damariscotta, compiled by Dorothy A. Blanchard; No Pluckier Set of Men Anywhere, the Story of Ships and Men in Damariscotta and Newcastle, Maine by Mark Wyman Biscoe; Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans by Fanny Hardy Eckstorm; Wake of the Coaster by John F. Leavitt; Benjamin Browne Foster’ Down East Diary, edited by Charles H. Foster; Magnificent Mainers by Jef Hollingsworth; Saltwater Foodways, New Englanders and Their Food, at Sea and Shore in the Nineteenth Century by Sandra L. Oliver; Ancient Sagadahoc, a Story of the Englishmen Who Welcomed the Pilgrims to the New World by E.J. Chandler; Chras in America by Penne L. Restad; Madame Blavatsky’ Baboon, a History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America by Peter Washington; The Perpetual Almanak of Folklore by Charles Kightly; The Wordsworth Dictionary of the Occult by André Nataf; Rhyme’s Reason by John Hollander; a Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia and Lee McAlester; The American Language by H. L. Mencken; the Oxford and Bartlett’s books of quotations, the American Heritage Dictionary; the Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles; almost the entire range of Peterson guides to nature; and the Bible.

  Many of the authors to whom I owe a debt are (to my knowledge) out of print, and these include: Romantic and Historic Maine by A. Hyatt Verrill; Mysterious New England, edited by Austin N. Stevens; Clipper Ships and Captains by Jane D. Lyon; Captains of Industry by Bernard Weisberger;

  Maine Beautiful by Wallace Nutting; Confederates Downeast by Mason Philip Smith; The World of Washington Irving and subsequent volumes on American art and literature by Van Wyck Brooks; a History of Secret Societies by Arkan Daraul; Going Fishing, the Story of the Deep Sea Fishermen of New England by Wesley George Pierce; The Secret Country by Janet and Colin Bord.