Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries

by Melville Davisson Post

“Bowers thought Coopman was out showing the cattle to the man whom he had just seen ride off, so he went out to the pasture field to look for him. He could not find him and he could not find the cattle. He came back to the house to wait until Coopman should come in. He sat down on the porch. As he sat there he noticed that the porch had been scrubbed and was still wet. He looked at it and saw that it had been scrubbed only at one place before the door. This seemed to him a little peculiar, and he wondered why Coopman had scrubbed his porch only in one place. He got up and as he went toward the door he saw that the jamb of the door was splintered at a point about halfway up. He examined this splintered place and presently discovered that it was a bullet hole.

  “This alarmed him, and he went out into the yard. There he saw a wagon track leading away from the house toward the road. In the weeds he found Coopman’s watch. He picked it up and put it into his pocket. It was a big silver watch, with Coopman’s name on it, and attached to it was a buckskin string. He followed the track to the gate, where it entered the road. He discovered then that the cattle had also passed through this gate. It was now night. Bowers went back, got Coopman’s saddle horse out of the stable, rode him home, and followed the track of the cattle this morning, but he saw no trace of the drove until we met him.”

  “What did Shifflet and Twiggs say to this story?” inquired Abner.

  “They did not hear it,” answered Ward; “Bowers did not talk before them. He rode aside with us when we met him.”

  “Did Shifflet and Twiggs know Bowers?” said Abner.

  “I don’t know,” replied Ward; “their talk was so foul when we stopped the drove that we had to tie their mouths up.”

  “Is that all?” said Abner.

  Ward swore a great oath.

  “No!” he said. “Do you think we would hang men on that? From what Bowers told us, we thought Shifflet and Twiggs had killed Daniel Coopman and driven off his cattle; but we wanted to be certain of it, so we set out to discover what they had done with Coopman’s body after they had killed him and what they had done with the wagon. We followed the trail of the drove down to the Valley River. No wagon had crossed, but on the other side we found that a wagon and a drove of cattle had turned out of the road and gone along the basin of the river for about a mile through the woods. And there in a bend of the river we found where these devils had camped.”

  “There had been a great fire of logs very near to the river, but none of the ashes of this fire remained. From a circular space some twelve feet in diameter the ashes had all been shoveled off, the marks of the shovel being distinct. In the center of the place where this fire had burned the ground had been scraped clean, but near the edges there were some traces of cinders and the ground was blackened. In the river at this point, just opposite the remains of the fire, was a natural washout or hole. We made a raft of logs, cut a pole with a fork on the end and dragged the river. We found most of the wagon iron, all showing the effect of fire. Then we fastened a tin bucket to a pole and fished the washout. We brought lip cinders, buttons, buckles and pieces of bone.”

  Ward paused.

  “That settled it, and we came back here to swing the devils up.”

  My uncle had listened very carefully, and now he spoke.

  “What did the man pay Twiggs and Shifflet?” said my uncle. “Did they tell you that when you stopped the drove?”

  “Now that,” answered Ward, “was another piece of damning evidence. When we searched the men we found a pocket-book on Shifflet with a hundred and fifteen dollars and some odd cents. It was Daniel Coopman’s pocketbook, because there was an old tax receipt in it that had slipped down between the leather and the lining.

  “We asked Shifflet where he got it, and he said that the fifteen dollars and the change was his own money and that the hundred had been paid to him by the man who had hired them to drive the cattle. He explained his possession of the pocketbook by saying that this man had the money in it, and when he went to pay them he said that they might just as well take it, too.”

  “Who was this man?” said Abner.

  “They will not tell who he was.”

  “Why not?”

  “Now, Abner,” cried Ward, “why not, indeed! Because there never was any such man. The story is a lie out of the whole cloth. Those two devils are guilty as hell. The proof is all dead against them.”

  “Well,” replied my uncle, “what circumstantial evidence proves, depends a good deal on how you get started. It is a somewhat dangerous road to the truth, because all the signboards have a curious trick of pointing in the direction that you are going. Now, a man will never realize this unless he turns around and starts back, then he will see, to his amazement that the signboards have also turned. But as long as his face is set one certain way, it is of no use to talk to him, he won’t listen to you; and if he sees you going the other way, he will call you a fool.”

  “There is only one way in this case,” said Ward.

  “There are always two ways in every case,” replied Abner, “that the suspected person is either guilty or innocent. You have started upon the theory that Shifflet and Twiggs are guilty. Now, suppose you had started the other way, what then?”

  “Well,” said Ward, “what then?”

  “This, then,” continued Abner. “You stop Shifflet and Twiggs on the road with Daniel Coopman’s cattle, and they tell you that a man has hired them to drive this drove into Maryland. You believe that and start out to find the man. You find Bowers!”

  Bowers went deadly white.

  “For God’s sake, Abner!” he said.

  But my uncle was merciless and he drove in the conclusion.

  “What then?”

  There was no answer, but the faces of the men about my uncle turned toward the man whose trembling hands fingered the rope that he was preparing for another.

  “But the things we found, Abner?” said Ward.

  “What do they prove,” continued my uncle, “now that the signboards are turned? That somebody killed Daniel Coopman and drove off his cattle, and afterward destroyed the body and the wagon in which it was hauled away… But who did that?… The men who were driving Daniel Coopman’s cattle, or the man who was riding Daniel Coopman’s horse, and carrying Daniel Coopman’s watch in his pocket?”

  Ward’s face was a study in expression. “Ah!” cried Abner. “Remember that the signboards have turned about. And what do they point to if we read them on the way we are going now? The man who killed Coopman was afraid to be found with the cattle, so he hired Twiggs and Shifflet to drive them into Maryland for him and follows on another road.”

  “But his story, Abner?” said Ward.

  “And what of it?” replied my uncle. “He is taken and he must explain how he comes by the horse that he rides, and the watch that he carries, and he must find the criminal. Well, he tells you a tale to fit the facts that you will find when you go back to look, and he gives you Shifflet and Twiggs to hang.”

  I never saw a man in more mortal terror than Jacob Bowers. He sat in his saddle like a man bewildered.

  “My God!” he said, and again he repeated it, and again.

  And he had cause for that terror on him. My uncle was stern and ruthless. The pendulum had swung the other way, and the lawless monster that Bowers had allied was now turning on himself. He saw it and his joints were unhinged with fear.

  A voice crashed out of the ring of desperate men, uttering the changed opinion.

  “By God!” it cried, “we’ve got the right man now.”

  And one caught the rope out of Bowers’ hand.

  But my Uncle Abner rode in on them.

  “Are you sure about that?” he said.

  “Sure!” they echoed. “You have shown it yourself, Abner.”

  “No,” replied my uncle, “I have not shown it. I have shown merely whither circumstantial evidence leads us when we go hotfoot after a theory. Bowers says that there was a man on the hill above Daniel Coopman’s house, and this man will know th
at he did not kill Daniel Coopman and that his story is the truth.”

  They laughed in my uncle’s face.

  “Do you believe that there was any such person?”

  My uncle seemed to increase in stature, and his voice became big and dominant.

  “I do,” he said, “because I am the man!”

  They had got their lesson, and we rode out with Shifflet and Twiggs to a legal trial.

  Chapter 8

  The Age of Miracles

  The girl was standing apart from the crowd in the great avenue of poplars that led up to the house. She seemed embarrassed and uncertain what to do, a thing of April emerging into Summer.

  Abner and Randolph marked her as they entered along the gravel road.

  They had left their horses at the gate, but she had brought hers inside, as though after some habit unconsciously upon her.

  But half-way to the house she had remembered and got down. And she stood now against the horse’s shoulder. It was a black hunter, big and old, but age marred no beauty of his lines. He was like a horse of ebony, enchanted out of the earth by some Arabian magic, but not yet by that magic awakened into life.

  The girl wore a long, dark riding-skirt, after the fashion of the time, and a coat of hunter’s pink. Her dark hair was in a great wrist-thick plait. Her eyes, too, were big and dark, and her body firm and lithe from the out-of-doors.

  “Ah!” cried Randolph, making his characteristic gesture, “Prospero has been piping in this grove. Here is a daughter of the immortal morning! We grow old, Abner, and it is youth that the gods love.”

  My uncle, his hands behind him, his eyes on the gravel road, looked up at the bewitching picture.

  “Poor child,” he said; “the gods that love her must be gods of the valleys and not gods of the hills.”

  “Ruth amid the alien corn! Is it a better figure, Abner? Well, she has a finer inheritance than these lands; she has youth!”

  “She ought to have both,” replied my uncle. “It was sheer robbery to take her inheritance.”

  “It was a proceeding at law,” replied the Justice. “It was the law that did the thing, and we can not hold the law in disrespect.”

  “But the man who uses the law to accomplish a wrong, we can so hold,” said Abner. “He is an outlaw, as the highwayman and the pirate are.”

  He extended his arm toward the great house sitting at the end of the avenue.

  “In spite of the sanction of the law, I hold this dead man for a robber. And I would have wrested these lands from him, if I could. But your law, Randolph, stood before him.”

  “Well,” replied the Justice, “he takes no gain from it; he lies yonder waiting for the grave.”

  “But his brother takes,” said Abner, “and this child loses.”

  The Justice, elegant in the costume of the time, turned his ebony stick in his fingers.

  “One should forgive the dead,” he commented in a facetious note; “it is a mandate of the Scripture.”

  “I am not concerned about the dead,” replied Abner. “The dead are in God’s hands. It is the living who concern me.”

  “Then,” cried the Justice, “you should forgive the brother who takes.”

  “And I shall forgive him,” replied Abner, “when he returns what he has taken.”

  “Returns what he has taken!” Randolph laughed. “Why, Abner, the devil could not filch a coin out of the clutches of old Benton Wolf.”

  “The devil,” said my uncle, “is not the authority that I depend on.”

  “A miracle of Heaven, then,” said the Justice. “But, alas, it is not the age of miracles.”

  “Perhaps,” replied Abner, his voice descending into a deeper tone, “but I am not so certain.”

  They had come now to where the girl stood, her back against the black shoulder of the horse. The morning air moved the yellow leaves about her feet. She darted out to meet them, her face aglow.

  “Damme!” cried Randolph. “William of Avon knew only witches of the second order! How do you do, Julia? I have hardly seen you since you were no taller than my stick, and told me that your name was ‘Pete-George,’ and that you were a circus-horse, and offered to do tricks for me.”

  A shadow crossed the girl’s face.

  “I remember,” she said, “it was up there on the porch!”

  “Egad!” cried Randolph, embarrassed. “And so it was!”

  He kissed the tips of the girl’s fingers and the shadow in her face fled.

  For the man’s heart was good, and he had the manner of a gentleman. But it was Abner that she turned to in her dilemma.

  “I forgot,” she said, “and almost rode into the house. Do you think I could leave the horse here? He will stand if I drop the rein.”

  Then she went on to make her explanation. She wanted to see the old house that had been so long her home. This was the only opportunity, today, when all the countryside came to the dead man’s burial. She thought she might come, too, although her motive was no tribute of respect.

  She put her hand through Abner’s arm and he looked down upon her, grave and troubled.

  “My child,” he said, “leave the horse where he stands and come with me, for my motive, also, is no tribute of respect; and you go with a better right than I do.”

  “I suppose,” the girl hesitated, “that one ought to respect the dead, but this man—these men—I can not.”

  “Nor can I,” replied my uncle. “If I do not respect a man when he is living, I shall not pretend to when he is dead. One does not make a claim upon my honor by going out of life.”

  They went up the avenue among the yellow poplar leaves and the ragweed and fennel springing up along the unkempt gravel.

  It was a crisp and glorious morning. The frost lay on the rail fence. The spider-webs stretched here and there across the high grasses of the meadows in intricate and bewildering lace-work. The sun was clear and bright, but it carried no oppressive heat as it drew on in its course toward noon.

  The countryside had gathered to see Adam Wolf buried. It was a company of tenants, the idle and worthless mostly, drawn by curiosity. For in life the two old men who had seized upon this property by virtue of a defective acknowledgment to a deed, permitted no invasion of their boundary.

  Everywhere the lands were posted; no urchin fished and no schoolboy hunted. The green perch, fattened in the deep creek that threaded the rich bottom lands, no man disturbed. But the quail, the pheasant, the robin and the meadow-lark, Old Adam pursued with his fowling-piece. He tramped about with it at all seasons. One would have believed that all the birds of heaven had done the creature some unending harm and in revenge he had declared a war. And so the accident by which he met his death was a jeopardy of the old man’s habits, and to be looked for when one lived with a fowling-piece in one’s hands and grew careless in its use.

  The two men lived alone and thus all sorts of mystery sprang up around them, elaborated by the Negro fancy and gaining in grim detail at every story-teller’s hand. It had the charm and thrilling interest of an adventure, then, for the countryside to get this entry.

  The brothers lived in striking contrast. Adam was violent, and his cries and curses, his hard and brutal manner were the terror of the Negro who passed at night that way, or the urchin overtaken by darkness on his road home. But Benton got about his affairs in silence, with a certain humility of manner, and a mild concern for the opinion of his fellows. Still, somehow, the Negro and the urchin held him in a greater terror. Perhaps because he had got his coffin made and kept it in his house, together with his clothes for burial. It seemed uncanny thus to prepare against his dissolution and to bargain for the outfit, with anxiety to have his shilling’s worth.

  And yet, with this gruesome furniture at hand, the old man, it would seem, was in no contemplation of his death. He spoke sometimes with a marked savor and an unctuous kneading of the hands of that time when he should own the land, for he was the younger and by rule should have the expectancy of life.


  There was a crowd about the door and filling the hall inside, a crowd that elbowed and jostled, taken with a quivering interest, and there to feed its maw of curiosity with every item.

  The girl wished to remain on the portico, where she could see the ancient garden and the orchard and all the paths and byways that had been her wonderland of youth, but Abner asked her to go in.

  Randolph turned away, but my uncle and the girl remained some time by the coffin. The rim of the dead man’s forehead and his jaw were riddled with bird-shot, but his eyes and an area of his face below them, where the thin nose came down and with its lines and furrows made up the main identity of features, were not disfigured. And these preserved the hard stamp of his violent nature, untouched by the accident that had dispossessed him of his life.

  He lay in the burial clothes and the coffin that Benton Wolf had provided for himself, all except the gloves upon his hands. These the old man had forgot. And now when he came to prepare his brother for a public burial, for no other had touched the man, he must needs take what he could find about the house, a pair of old, knit gloves with every rent and moth-hole carefully darned, as though the man had sat down there with pains to give his brother the best appearance that he could.

  This little touch affected the girl to tears, so strange is a woman’s heart. “Poor thing!” she said. And for this triviality she would forget the injury that the dead man and his brother had done to her, the loss they had inflicted, and her long distress.

  She took a closer hold upon Abner’s arm, and dabbed her eyes with a tiny kerchief.

  “I am sorry for him,” she said, “for the living brother. It is so pathetic.”

  And she indicated the old, coarse gloves so crudely darned and patched together.

  But my uncle looked down at her, strangely, and with a cold, inexorable face.

  “My child,” he said, “there is a curious virtue in this thing that moves you. Perhaps it will also move the man whose handiwork it is. Let us go up and see him.”

  Then he called the Justice.

  “Randolph,” he said, “come with us.”