by Mike Ashley
“Very horrid!” said Mr Roger in hushed accents, viewing the dreadful thing with a very evident disgust. “Anything more, Shrig?”
“Sir, me and my comrade, Corporal Richard Roe, found all as was to be found – this! Number three! A clincher!”
And beside that murderous knife he laid the gold seal, beholding which Mr Roger started in sudden agitation, took it up, stared at it and, dropping it upon the desk, covered his eyes with his two hands.
“Aha, you reckernise it, eh, sir?” asked Mr Shrig, thrusting it back into his pocket, and wrapping up the knife again. “Yes, I see as you know it, eh, Mr Roger?”
“Beyond all doubt . . . to my sorrow! And you found it . . . near . . . the body?”
“Beneath its werry fingers, sir, looked as if it had fell out of its dyin’ grasp. Pretty conclusive, I think. And now, sir, ’aving dooly noted and brought along everything in the natur’ of evidence, I’ll be toddling – no, stop a bit – the cup!”
“Cup, Shrig? Pray, what cup?”
“The coffee cup used by deceased.”
“Why trouble to take that?”
“Well,” answered Mr Shrig dubiously, “I don’t ’ardly know except for the fact as ’twere used by deceased aforesaid and might come in as evidence.”
“How so, Shrig? Evidence of what?”
“Well,” answered Mr Shrig, more dubiously than ever, “I don’t ’ardly know that either, but I’d better take it along. Ye see, sir, there’s some coffee in it as they might like to examine.”
“But my poor uncle was stabbed, not poisoned.”
“No more ’e wasn’t!” nodded Mr Shrig. “And I ought to get my report in sharp. And then again if the said cup should be wanted I can fetch it tomorrow.”
“You locked the door, Shrig?”
“Seein’ as the key was a-missin’, I did not, sir, but I’ve took all as is needful and vot I’ve left ain’t a-goin’ to run away, no, ’twill stay nice an’ quiet till the undertaker –”
“Good night!” said Mr Roger, ringing the bell at his elbow.
“Sir, good night!” answered Mr Shrig, and, turning at the opening of the door, he and Corporal Dick followed the pallid butler, who presently led them out into a pitch-black night.
Whereupon Mr Shrig became imbued with a sudden fierce energy.
“Now Dick – at the double!”
“Eh, but Jarsper what . . . where –”
“Run!” hissed Mr Shrig, and seizing his companion’s arm, he broke into a heavy, though silent trot . . . In among shadowy trees, across smooth, dim lawns, along winding paths to a terrace whence a row of windows glinted down at them; which he counted in breathless whisper:
“Number five should be it . . . At Number five she is! After me, pal!” And, speaking, he opened this fifth window and clambered through with surprising agility. “Eh – back again?” whispered the corporal, glancing at the great chair before the dying fire. “What now, comrade?”
“The bed, Dick it’s big enough to hide us both, and – sharp’s the vord!” The heavy curtains of the huge sombre four-poster rustled and were still, a cinder fell tinkling to the hearth, and then came the corporal’s hoarse whisper:
“What are we waiting for, Jarsper?”
“The murderer.”
“Lord!” . . . A distant clock chimed the hour.
Silence, for the great house was very still; the clock chimed the quarter, the dying fire chinked, this room of death grew slowly darker; the clock chimed the half-hour . . . A faint, faint rattle at the door and into the room crept a sound of soft movement with another sound very strange to hear – a crunching rustle that stole across the carpet towards the hearth; a moving, shapeless blot against the feeble fire-glow, a faint tinkle of china, and then a voice sudden and harsh and loud:
“In the King’s name!” A leap of quick feet, a whirl of sudden movement, a flurry of desperate strife, an inhuman laugh of chuckling triumph, and then Mr Shrig’s gasping voice:
“Ecod, Dick, he’s done us! Catch that arm . . . no good! I’m diddled again, by Goles, I am! Get the candles a-goin’ – sharp!”
“Lord love us!” gasped Corporal Dick, the lighted candle wavering in his grasp, “Mr Roger!”
“Ay – but look – look at ’im!”
Roger Glendale lolled in his wheeled chair, his eyes fixed upon the speaker in awful glare, his lips upcurling from white teeth . . . and from these writhen lips issued a wheezing chuckle.
“Right, Shrig . . . you were right . . . I’m not . . . not so helpless . . . as I seemed. I was Master of Life . . . and Death. I’m . . . master still! I’m . . . away, Shrig, away . . . And so . . . Good night!” The proud head swayed aslant, drooped forward – the shapely hands fluttered and were still, and Corporal Dick, setting down the candle, wiped moist brow, staring with horrified eyes.
“Love us all!” he whispered. “Dead – eh?”
“As any nail, Dick! Pizen, d’ye see?”
“Comrade, how . . . how did ye know him for the killer?”
“ ’Twas very simple, Dick – in that bit ’o cigar ash as you p’inted out to me, I see the track of a veel, his foot-prints, so to speak, and – there ye are, pal!”
“Why then . . . what now, comrade?”
“Now, Dick, get back to them as is a-vaitin’ so werry patient in the coach and tell ’em as Jarsper says the shadder, being only a shadder, is vanished out o’ their lives and the sun is rose and a-shinin’ for ’em and so – let all be revelry and j’y!”
The Tenth Commandment
Melville Davisson Post
Melville Davisson Post (1869–1930) was both a lawyer and one of the most successful writers of magazine fiction of his day. He grew up in West Virginia, the setting for his best-known series of stories featuring Uncle Abner, which take place in the early years of the nineteenth century. Abner is one of those God-fearing upright citizens who believes that justice should prevail, even over man-made laws. He’s often a one-man detective, judge and jury, dispensing his own form of justice based on God’s laws. The stories were first collected in Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries (1918) whilst some later ones remained uncollected until The Methods of Uncle Abner (1974). The best-known Uncle Abner story is “The Doomdorf Mystery”, which I included in the first Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits. Francis M. Nevins, attorney and Professor of Law as well as a writer and biographer, has called the following story, which considers the whole basis of justice, “one of the finest of all the tales of Uncle Abner”.
The afternoon sun was hot, and when the drove began to descend the long wooded hill we could hardly keep them out of the timber. We were bringing in our stock cattle. We had been on the road since daybreak and the cattle were tired. Abner was behind the drove and I was riding the line of the wood. The mare under me knew as much about driving cattle as I did, and between us we managed to keep the steers in the road; but finally a bullock broke away and plunged down into the deep wood. Abner called to me to turn all the cattle into the grove on the upper side of the road and let them rest in the shade while we got the runaway steer out of the underbrush. I turned the drove in among the open oak trees, left my mare to watch them and went on foot down through the underbrush. The long hill descending to the river was unfenced wood grown up with thickets. I was perhaps three hundred yards below the road when I lost sight of the steer, and got up on a stump to look.
I did not see the steer, but in a thicket beyond me I saw a thing that caught my eye. The bushes had been cut out, the leaves trampled, and there was a dogwood fork driven into the ground. About fifty feet away there was a steep bank and below it a horse path ran through the wood.
The thing savoured of mystery. All round was a dense tangle of thicket, and here, hidden at a point commanding the horse path, was this cleared spot with the leaves trampled and the forked limb of a dogwood driven into the ground. I was so absorbed that I did not know that Abner had ridden down the hill behind me until I turned and saw him sitting there
on his great chestnut gelding looking over the dense bushes into the thicket.
He got down out of his saddle, parted the bushes carefully and entered the thicket. There was a hollow log lying beyond the dogwood fork. Abner put his hand into the log and drew out a gun. It was a bright, new, one-barrelled fowling-piece – a muzzle-loader, for there were no breech-loaders in that country then. Abner turned the gun about and looked it over carefully. The gun was evidently loaded, because I could see the cap shining under the hammer. Abner opened the brass plate on the stock, but it contained only a bit of new tow and the implement, like a corkscrew, which fitted to the ramrod and held the tow when one wished to clean the gun. It was at this moment that I caught sight of the steer moving in the bushes and I leaped down and ran to head him off, leaving Abner standing with the gun in his hands.
When I got the steer out and across the road into the drove Abner had come up out of the wood. He was in the saddle, his clenched hand lay on the pommel.
I was afraid to ask Abner questions when he looked like that, but my curiosity overcame me.
“What did you do with the gun, Uncle Abner?”
“I put it back where it was,” he said.
“Do you know who the owner is?”
“I do not know who he is,” replied Abner without looking in my direction, “but I know what he is – he is a coward!”
The afternoon drew on. The sun moved towards the far-off chain of mountains. Silence lay on the world. Only the tiny creatures of the air moved with the hum of a distant spinner, and the companies of yellow butterflies swarmed on the road. The cattle rested in the shade of the oak trees and we waited. Abner’s chestnut stood like a horse of bronze and I dozed in the saddle.
Shadows were entering the world through the gaps and passes of the mountains when I heard a horse. I stood up in my stirrups and looked.
The horse was travelling the path running through the wood below us. I could see the rider through the trees. He was a grazer whose lands lay westward beyond the wood. In the deep, utter silence I could hear the creak of his saddle-leather. Then suddenly as he rode there was the roar of a gun, and a cloud of powder smoke blotted him out of sight.
In that portentous instant of time I realized the meaning of the things that I had seen there in the thicket. It was an ambush to kill this man! The fork in the ground was to hold the gun-barrel so the assassin could not miss his mark.
And with this understanding came an appalling sense of my Uncle Abner’s negligence. He must have known all this when he stood there in the thicket, and when he knew it, why had he left that gun there? Why had he put it back into its hiding-place? Why had he gone his way thus unconcernedly and left this assassin to accomplish his murder? Moreover, this man riding there through the wood was a man whom Abner knew. His house was the very house at which Abner expected to stop this night. We were on our way there!
It was in one of those vast spaces of time that a second sometimes stretches over that I put these things together and jerked my head toward Abner, but he sat there without the tremor of a muscle.
The next second I saw the frightened horse plunging in the path and I looked to see its saddle empty, or the rider reeling with the blood creeping through his coat, or some ghastly thing that clutched and swayed. But I did not see it. The rider sat firmly in his saddle, pulled up the horse, and, looking idly about him, rode on. He believed the gun had been fired by some hunter shooting squirrels.
“Oh,” I cried, “he missed!”
But Abner did not reply. He was standing in his stirrups searching the wood.
“How could he miss, Uncle Abner,” I said, “when he was so near to the path and had that fork to rest his gun-barrel in? Did you see him?”
It was some time before Abner answered, and then his reply was to my final query.
“I did not see him,” he said deliberately. “He must have slipped away somehow through the thicket.”
That was all he said, and for a good while he was silent, drumming with his fingers on the pommel of his saddle and looking out over the distant treetops.
The sun was touching the mountains before Abner began to move the drove. We got the cattle out of the wood and started the line down the long hill. The road forked at the bottom of the hill – one branch of it, the main road, went on to the house of the grazer with whom we had expected to spend the night and the other turned off through the wood.
I was astonished when Abner turned the drove into this other road, but I said nothing, for I presently understood the reason for this change of plans. One could hardly accept the hospitality of a man when he had negligently stood by to see him murdered.
In half a mile the road came out into the open. There was a big new house on a bit of rising land and, below, fields and meadows. I did not know the crossroad, but I knew this place. The man, Dillworth, who lived here had been sometime the clerk of the county court. He had got this land, it was said, by taking advantage of a defective record, and he had now a suit in chancery against the neighbouring grazers for the land about him. He had built this great new house, in pride boasting that it would sit in the centre of the estate that he would gain. I had heard this talked about – this boasting, and how one of the grazers had sworn before the courthouse that he would kill Dillworth on the day that the decree was entered. I knew in what esteem Abner held this man and I wondered that he should choose him to stay the night with.
When we first entered the house and while we ate our supper Abner had very little to say, but after that, when we had gone with the man out on to the great porch that overlooked the country, Abner changed – I think it was when he picked up the county newspaper from the table. Something in this paper seized on his attention and he examined it with care. It was a court notice of the sale of lands for delinquent taxes, but the paper had been torn and only half of the article was there. Abner called our host’s attention to it.
“Dillworth,” he said, “what lands are included in this notice?”
“Are they not there?” replied the man.
“No,” said Abner, “a portion of the newspaper is gone. It is torn off at a description of the Jenkins’s tract –” and he put his finger on the line and showed the paper to the man “– what lands follow after that?”
“I do not remember the several tracts,” Dillworth answered, “but you can easily get another copy of the newspaper. Are you interested in these lands?”
“No,” said Abner, “but I am interested in this notice.”
Then he laid the newspaper on the table and sat down in a chair. And then it was that his silence left him and he began to talk.
Abner looked out over the country.
“This is fine pasture land,” he said.
Dillworth moved forward in his chair. He was a big man with a bushy chestnut beard, little glimmering eyes and a huge body.
“Why, Abner,” he said, “it is the very best land that a beef steer ever cropped the grass on.”
“It is a corner of the lands that Daniel Davisson got in a grant from George the Third,” Abner continued. “I don’t know what service he rendered the crown, but the pay was princely – a man would do king’s work for an estate like this.”
“King’s work he would do,” said Dillworth, “or hell’s work. Why, Abner, the earth is rich for a yard down. I saw old Hezekiah Davisson buried in it, and the shovels full of earth that the Negroes threw on him were as black as their faces, and the sod over that land is as clean as a woman’s hair. I was a lad then, but I promised myself that I would one day possess these lands.”
“It is a dangerous thing to covet the possession of another,” said Abner. “King David tried it and he had to do – what did you call it, Dillworth? – ‘hell’s work’.”
“And why not,” replied Dillworth, “if you get the things you want by it?”
“There are several reasons,” said Abner, “and one is that it requires a certain courage. Hell’s work is heavy work, Dillworth, and the weakling wh
o goes about it is apt to fail.”
Dillworth laughed. “King David didn’t fail, did he?”
“He did not,” replied Abner; “but David, the son of Jesse, was not a coward.”
“Well,” said Dillworth, “I shall not fail either. My hands are not trained to war like this, but they are trained to lawsuits.”
“You got this wedge of land on which your house is built by a lawsuit, did you not?” said Abner.
“I did,” replied Dillworth; “but if men do not exercise ordinary care they must suffer for that negligence.”
“Well,” said Abner, “the little farmer who lived here on this wedge suffered enough for his. When you dispossessed him he hanged himself in his stable with a halter.”
“Abner,” cried Dillworth, “I have heard enough about that. I did not take the man’s life. I took what the law gave me. If a man will buy land and not look up the title it is his own fault.”
“He bought at a judicial sale,” said Abner, “and he believed the court would not sell him a defective title. He was an honest man, and he thought the world was honest.”
“He thought wrong,” said Dillworth.
“He did,” said Abner.
“Well,” cried Dillworth, “am I to blame because there is a fool the less? Will the people never learn that the court does not warrant the title to the lands that it sells in a suit in chancery? The man who buys before the courthouse door buys a pig in a poke, and it is not the court’s fault if the poke is empty. The judge could not look up the title to every tract of land that comes into his court, nor could the title to every tract be judicially determined in every suit that involves it. To do that, every suit over land would have to be a suit to determine title and every claimant would have to be a party.”
“What you say may be the truth,” said Abner, “but the people do not always know it.”
“They could know it if they would inquire,” answered Dillworth; “why did not this man go before the judge?”