Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries

by Melville Davisson Post

  The man declaimed, his wonderful fouled face, his Adonis head with its thick curled hair, virile and spirited with the liquor and the momentum of his words. Old Storm gave no attention. Randolph listened as to the periods of an oration. And my uncle sat, puzzled, before the articles on the table. The girl now and then, when the speaker’s eyes were on my uncle, by slight indicatory signs affirmed the speech, and continued strongly to indicate the chessmen.

  My uncle began to turn the pieces over under the protection of his hand, idly, like one who fingers about a table in abstraction. Presently he stopped and covered one of the pieces with his hand. It was a pawn, large, like the other chessmen, but the round ivory knob at the top of it was gone. It had been sawed off!

  The man Flornoy, consumed with his idea, failed to mark the incident, and moved by the tenor of his speech, went on:

  “This is the Greek plan for a tragedy. It is the plan of Athens in the fifth century. It is the plan of Sophocles and Aeschylus. Mark how it turns upon the Hellenic idea of a dominating Fate: a Fate in control over the affairs of men, pagan and not good. The innocent and virtuous have no gain above the shrewd and wicked. The good Sheppard dies, and the evil Vespatian takes his daughter, his goods and lands to enjoy in a gilded life, long and happy!”

  He thought the deep reflection in my uncle’s face was confusion at his wit.

  “That ending would not please you, Abner. Luther and Calvin and John Wesley have lived after Aristotle assembled this formula in his ‘Poetics.’ And they will have the evil punished—a dagger in the wicked Vespatian’s heart, and the virgin slave, by the interposition of the will of Heaven, preserved in her virginity. And so you come, like the Providence of God, to set the thing in order!”

  My uncle looked up at the man, his hand covering the mutilated pawn, his face calm in its profound reflection.

  “You quote the tragic poets, with much pedantry,” he said. “Well, I will quote them too: ‘Ofttimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truth!’ How much truth, in all this discourse, have you told us?”

  “Now, Abner,” cried the man, “if it is truth you seek, and not the imaginations of a theory, how much could there be in it? If it were not for the granite ledges of reality, one might blow iris-colored bubbles of the fancy and watch them, in their beauty, journey to the stars! But alas, they collide with the hard edges of a fact and puff out.

  “To begin with, the pistols have not been fired!”

  “One could reload a pistol,” replied my uncle.

  “But one could not shoot a man, Abner, and leave no mark of the bullet on his body!”

  He paused and addressed the old doctor.

  “I sent for Storm, when I sent for Randolph, to rid me of every innuendo of a gossip. Ask him if there is a mark of violence on my brother’s body.”

  The old man lifted his lined, withered face.

  “There is no mark on him!” he said.

  Vespatian Flornoy leaned across the table.

  “Are you sure?” he said. “Perhaps you might be mistaken.”

  The words were in the taunting note of Elijah to the priests of Baal.

  The old man made a decisive gesture. “Voila!” he said, “I have handled a thousand dead men! I am not mistaken!”

  Vespatian Flornoy put up his hands as in a great, hopeless gesture.

  “Alas, Abner,” he said, “we must give up this pretty theory. It does honor to your creative instinct, and save for this trifle, we might commend it to all men. But you see, Abner, Storm and the world will unreasonably insist that a bullet leaves a mark. I do not think we can persuade them against their experience in that belief. I am sorry for you, Abner. You have a reputation in Virginia to keep up. Let us think; perhaps there is a way around this disconcerting fact.”

  And he put his extended palm across his forehead, in mock reflection.

  It was at this moment, when for an instant the man’s face was covered, that the girl standing before the door made a strange indicatory signal to my Uncle Abner.

  Vespatian Flornoy, removing his hand, caught a glimpse of the girl’s after-expression. And he burst out in a great laugh, striking the table with his clenched hand.

  “Egad!” he cried. “By the soul of Satan! the coy little baggage is winking at Abner!”

  He saw only the final composition of the girl’s face. He did not see the stress and vigor of the indicatory sign. He roared in a pretension of jealous anger.

  “I will not have my property ogle another in my house. You shall answer for this, Abner, on the field of honor. And I warn you, sir: I have the surest eye and the steadiest hand in the mountains of Virginia.”

  It was the truth. The man was the wonder of the countryside. He could cut a string with a pistol at ten paces; he could drive in a carpet-tack with his bullet, across the room. With the weapon of the time, the creature was sure, accurate to a hair, and deadly.

  “No man,” he cried, “shall carry off this dainty baggage. Select your weapon, Abner; let us duel over this seduction!”

  He spoke in the flippancies of jest. But my uncle’s face was now alight with some great comprehensive purpose. It was like the face of one who begins to see the bulk and outlines of a thing that before this hour, in spite of every scrutiny, was formless.

  And to Flornoy’s surprise and wonder, my uncle put out his hand, took up one of the pistols and suddenly fired it into the wood of the mantelpiece beyond the table. He got up and looked at the mark. The bullet was hardly bedded in the veneer.

  “You use a light charge of powder, Flornoy,” said my uncle.

  The man was puzzled at this act, but he answered at once.

  “Abner,” he said, “that is a secret I have learned. A pistol pivots on the grip. In firing, there are two things to avoid: a jerk on the trigger, and the tendency of the muzzle to jump up, caused by the recoil of the charge. No man can control his weapon with a heavy charge of powder behind the bullet. If one would shoot true to a hair, one must load light.”

  It seemed a considerable explanation. And not one of the men who heard it ever knew whether it was, in fact, the controlling cause, or whether another and more subtle thing inspired it.

  “But, Flornoy,” said my uncle, “if to kill were the object of a duelist, such a charge of powder might defeat the purpose.”

  “You are mistaken, Abner,” he said. “The body of a man is soft. If one avoids the bony structure, a trifling charge of powder will carry one’s bullet into a vital organ. There is no gain in shooting through a man as though one were going to string him on a thread. Powder enough to lodge the bullet in the vital organ is sufficient.”

  “There might be a point in not shooting through him,” said Abner.

  The man looked calmly at my uncle; then he made an irrelevant gesture.

  “No object, Abner, but no use. The whole point is to shoot to a hair, to lodge the bullet precisely in the point selected. Look how a light charge of powder does it.”

  And taking up the other pistol, he steadied it a moment in his hand, and fired at Abner’s bullet-hole. No mark appeared on the mantel board. One would have believed that the bullet, if the barrel held one, had wholly vanished. But when they looked closely, it was seen that my uncle’s bullet, struck precisely, was driven a little deeper into the wood. It was amazing accuracy. No wonder the man’s skill was a byword in the land.

  My uncle made a single comment.

  “You shoot like the slingers of Benjamin!” he said.

  Then he came back to the table and stood looking down at the man. He held the mutilated ivory pawn in his closed left band. The girl, like an appraised article, was in the doorway; Storm and Randolph looked on, like men before the blind moving of events.

  “Flornoy,” said Abner, “you have told us more truth than you intended us to believe. How did your brother Sheppard die?”

  The man’s face changed. His fingers tightened on the pistol. His eyes became determined and alert.

 
“Damme, man,” he cried, “do you return to that! Sheppard fell and died, where you stand, beside the table in this room. I am no surgeon to say what disorder killed him. I sent for Storm to determine that.”

  My uncle turned to the old eccentric doctor.

  “Storm,” he said, “how did Sheppard Flornoy die?”

  The old man shrugged his shoulders and put out his nervous hands.

  “I do not know,” he said, “the heart, maybe. There is no mark on him.”

  And here Randolph interrupted.

  “Abner,” he said, “you put a question that no man can answer: something snaps within the body, and we die. We have no hint at the cause of Sheppard’s death.”

  “Why yes,” replied my uncle, “I think we have.”

  “What hint?” said Randolph.

  “The hint,” said Abner, “that the eloquent Vespatian gave us just now in his discourse. I think he set out the cause in his apt recollection from the Book of Samuel.”

  He paused and looked down at the man.

  Vespatian Flornoy got on his feet. His face and manner changed. There was now decision and menace in his voice.

  “Abner,” he said, “there shall be an end to this. I have turned your ugly hint with pleasantry, and met it squarely with indisputable facts. I shall not go any further on this way. I shall clear myself now, after the manner of a gentleman.”

  My uncle looked steadily at the man.

  “Flornoy,” he said, “if you would test your innocence by a device of the Middle Ages, I would suggest a simpler and swifter method of that time. Wager of battle is outlawed in Virginia. It is prohibited by statute, and we cannot use it. But the test I offer in its place is equally medieval. It is based on the same belief, old and persistent, that the Providence of God will indicate the guilty. And it is not against the law.”

  He paused.

  “The same generation of men who believed in Wager of Battle, in the Morsel of Execration, in the red-hot plowshares, as a test of the guilt of murder, also believed that if the assassin touched his victim, the body of the murdered man would bleed!

  “Flornoy,” he said, “if you would have recourse to one of those medieval devices, let it be the last.… Go in with me and touch the body of your brother Sheppard, and I give you my word of honor that I will accept the decision of the test.”

  It was impossible to believe that my Uncle Abner trifled, and yet the thing was beyond the soundings of all sense.

  Storm and Randolph, and even the girl standing in the door, regarded him in wonder.

  Vespatian Flornoy was amazed.

  “Damme, man!” he cried, “superstitions have unhinged your mind. Would you believe in a thing like that?”

  “I would rather believe it,” replied my uncle, “than to believe that in a duel God would direct the assassin’s bullet.”

  Then he added, with weight and decision in his voice:

  “If you would be clear of my suspicion, if you would be free to take and enjoy the lands and properties that you inherit, go in before these witnesses and touch the dead body of your brother Sheppard. There is no mark appearing on him. Storm has found no wound to bleed. You are innocent of any measure in his death, you tell us. There’s no peril to you, and I shall ride away to assure every man that Sheppard Flornoy died, as Randolph has written, by the ‘Providence of God.’”

  He extended his arm toward the adjacent chamber, and across the table he looked Flornoy in the face.

  “Go in before us and touch the dead man.”

  “By the soul of Satan!” cried the man, “if you hang on such a piece of foolery, you shall have it. The curse of superstition sticks in your fleece, Abner, like a burr.”

  He turned and flung open the door behind him and went in. The others followed—Storm and Randolph behind the man, the girl, shaken and fearful, and my Uncle Abner.

  Sheppard Flornoy lay prepared for burial in the center of the room. The morning sun entering through the long windows flooded him with light; his features were sharply outlined in the mask of death, his eyelids closed.

  They stood about the dead man, at peace in this glorious shroud of sun, and the living brother was about to touch him when my uncle put out his hand.

  “Flornoy,” he said, “the dead man ought to see who comes to touch him. I will open his eyes.”

  And at the words, for no cause or reason conceivable to the two men looking on, Vespatian Flornoy shouted with an oath, and ran in on my uncle.

  He was big and mad with terror. But even in his youth and fury he was not a match for my Uncle Abner. Liquor and excess failed before wind and sun and the clean life of the hills. The man went down under my uncle’s clenched hand, like an ox polled with a hammer.

  It was Randolph who cried out, while the others crowded around the dead man and his brother unconscious on the floor.

  “Abner, Abner,” he said, “what is the answer to this ghastly riddle?”

  For reply my uncle drew back the eyelids of the dead man. And stooping over, Randolph and old Storm saw that Sheppard Flornoy had been shot through the eye, and that the head of the ivory pawn had been forced into the bullet-hole to round out the damaged eyeball under the closed lid.

  The girl sobbed, clinging to my uncle’s arm. Randolph tore the bill of sale into indistinguishable bits. And the old doctor Storm made a great gesture with his hands extended and crooked.

  “Mon Dieu!” he cried, in a consuming revulsion of disgust. “My father was surgeon in the field for Napoleon, I was raised with dead men, and a drunken assassin fools me in the mountains of Virginia!”

  Chapter 18

  Naboth’s Vineyard

  One hears a good deal about the sovereignty of the people in this republic; and many persons imagine it a sort of fiction, and wonder where it lies, who are the guardians of it, and how they would exercise it if the forms and agents of the law were removed. I am not one of those who speculate upon this mystery, for I have seen this primal ultimate authority naked at its work. And, having seen it, I know how mighty and how dread a thing it is. And I know where it lies, and who are the guardians of it, and how they exercise it when the need arises.

  There was a great crowd, for the whole country was in the courtroom. It was a notorious trial.

  Elihu Marsh had been shot down in his house. He had been found lying in a room, with a hole through his body that one could put his thumb in. He was an irascible old man, the last of his family, and so, lived alone. He had rich lands, but only a life estate in them, the remainder was to some foreign heirs. A girl from a neighboring farm came now and then to bake and put his house in order, and he kept a farm hand about the premises.

  Nothing had been disturbed in the house when the neighbors found Marsh; no robbery had been attempted, for the man’s money, a considerable sum, remained on him.

  There was not much mystery about the thing, because the farm hand had disappeared. This man was a stranger in the hills. He had come from over the mountains some months before, and gone to work for Marsh. He was a big blond man, young and good looking; of better blood, one would say, than the average laborer. He gave his name as Taylor, but he was not communicative, and little else about him was known.

  The country was raised, and this man was overtaken in the foothills of the mountains. He had his clothes tied into a bundle, and a long-barreled fowling-piece on his shoulder. The story he told was that he and Marsh had settled that morning, and he had left the house at noon, but that he had forgotten his gun and had gone back for it; had reached the house about four o’clock, gone into the kitchen, got his gun down from the dogwood forks over the chimney, and at once left the house. He had not seen Marsh, and did not know where he was.

  He admitted that this gun had been loaded with a single huge lead bullet. He had so loaded it to kill a dog that sometimes approached the house, but not close enough to be reached with a load of shot. He affected surprise when it was pointed out that the gun had been discharged. He said that he had not fi
red it, and had not, until then, noticed that it was empty. When asked why he had so suddenly determined to leave the country, he was silent.

  He was carried back and confined in the county jail, and now, he was on trial at the September term of the circuit court.

  The court sat early. Although the judge, Simon Kilrail, was a landowner and lived on his estate in the country some half dozen miles away, he rode to the courthouse in the morning, and home at night, with his legal papers in his saddle-pockets. It was only when the court sat that he was a lawyer. At other times he harvested his hay and grazed his cattle, and tried to add to his lands like any other man in the hills, and he was as hard in a trade and as hungry for an acre as any.

  It was the sign and insignia of distinction in Virginia to own land. Mr. Jefferson had annulled the titles that George the Third had granted, and the land alone remained as a patent of nobility. The Judge wished to be one of these landed gentry, and he had gone a good way to accomplish it. But when the court convened he became a lawyer and sat upon the bench with no heart in him, and a cruel tongue like the English judges.

  I think everybody was at this trial. My Uncle Abner and the strange old doctor, Storm, sat on a bench near the center aisle of the courtroom, and I sat behind them, for I was a half-grown lad, and permitted to witness the terrors and severities of the law.

  The prisoner was the center of interest. He sat with a stolid countenance like a man careless of the issues of life. But not everybody was concerned with him, for my Uncle Abner and Storm watched the girl who had been accustomed to bake for Marsh and red up his house.

  She was a beauty of her type; dark haired and dark eyed like a gypsy, and with an April nature of storm and sun. She sat among the witnesses with a little handkerchief clutched in her hands. She was nervous to the point of hysteria, and I thought that was the reason the old doctor watched her. She would be taken with a gust of tears, and then throw up her head with a fine defiance; and she kneaded and knotted and worked the handkerchief in her fingers. It was a time of stress and many witnesses were unnerved, and I think I should not have noticed this girl but for the whispering of Storm and my Uncle Abner.