UNCLE ABNER, MASTER OF MYSTERIES: 18 Detective Tales in One Volume. Melville Davisson Post
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Название: UNCLE ABNER, MASTER OF MYSTERIES: 18 Detective Tales in One Volume
Автор: Melville Davisson Post
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 9788075833112
isbn:
"Yes," said Abner; "that is all true."
"And was there any mark or sign in that print," said Gaul, "by which you could know that it was made by any certain hand"-and he spread out his fingers-"as, for instance, my hand?"
"No," said Abner.
There was victory in Gaul's face.
He had now learned all that Abner knew and he no longer feared him. There was no evidence against him-even I saw that.
"And now," he cried, "will you get out of my house? I will have no more words with you. Begone!"
Abner did not move. For the last five minutes he had been at work at something, but I could not see what it was, for his back was toward me. Now he turned to the table beside Gaul and I saw what he had been doing. He had been making a pen out of a goosequill! He laid the pen down on the table and beside it a horn of ink. He opened out the deed that he had brought, put his finger on a line, dipped the quill into the ink and held it out to Gaul.
"Sign there!" he said.
The hunchback got on his feet, with an oath.
"Begone with your damned paper!" he cried.
Abner did not move.
"When you have signed," he said.
"Signed!" cried the hunchback. "I will see you and your brother Rufus, and Elnathan Stone, and all the kit and kittle of you in hell!"
"Gaul," said Abner, "you will surely see all who are to be seen in hell!"
By Abner's manner I knew that the end of the business had arrived. He seized the will and the envelope that Gaul had brought from his secretary and held them out before him.
"You tell me," he said, "that these papers were written at one sitting! Look! The hand that wrote that envelope was calm and steady, but the hand that wrote this will shook. See how the letters wave and jerk! I will explain it. You have kept that envelope from some old letter; but this paper was written in this house-in fear! And it was written on the morning that your brother died...Listen! When Elnathan Stone stepped back from your brother's bed he stumbled over a piece of carpet. The under side of that carpet was smeared with ink, where a bottle had been broken. I put my finger on it and it was wet."
The hunchback began to howl and bellow like a beast penned in a corner. I crouched under Abner's coat in terror. The creature's cries filled the great, empty house. They rose a hellish crescendo on the voices of the wind; and for accompaniment the sleet played shrill notes on the windowpanes, and the loose shingles clattered a staccato, and the chimney whistled-like weird instruments under a devil's fingers.
And all the time Abner stood looking down at the man-an implacable, avenging Nemesis-and his voice, deep and level, did not change.
"But, before that, we knew that you had killed your brother! We knew it when we stood before his bed. 'Look there,' said Rufus-'at that bloody handprint!'...We looked...And we knew that Enoch's hand had not made that print. Do you know how we knew that, Gaul?...I will tell you... The bloody print on your brother's right hand was the print of a right hand!"
Gaul signed the deed, and at dawn we rode away, with the hunchback's promise that he would come that afternoon before a notary and acknowledge what he had signed; but he did not come-neither on that day nor on any day after that.
When Abner went to fetch him he found him swinging from his elm tree.
Chapter 3
The Angel of the Lord
I always thought my father took a long chance, but somebody had to take it and certainly I was the one least likely to be suspected. It was a wild country. There were no banks. We had to pay for the cattle, and somebody had to carry the money. My father and my uncle were always being watched. My father was right, I think.
"Abner," he said, "I'm going to send Martin. No one will ever suppose that we would trust this money to a child."
My uncle drummed on the table and rapped his heels on the floor. He was a bachelor, stem and silent. But he could talk...and when he did, he began at the beginning and you heard him through; and what he said-well, he stood behind it.
"To stop Martin," my father went on, "would be only to lose the money; but to stop you would be to get somebody killed."
I knew what my father meant. He meant that no one would undertake to rob Abner until after he had shot him to death.
I ought to say a word about my Uncle Abner. He was one of those austere, deeply religious men who were the product of the Reformation. He always carried a Bible in his pocket and he read it where he pleased. Once the crowd at Roy's Tavern tried to make sport of him when he got his book out by the fire; but they never tried it again. When the fight was over Abner paid Roy eighteen silver dollars for the broken chairs and the table-and he was the only man in the tavern who could ride a horse. Abner belonged to the church militant and his God was a war lord.
So that is how they came to send me. The money was in greenbacks in packages. They wrapped it up in newspaper and put it into a pair of saddle-bags, and I set out. I was about nine years old. No, it was not as bad as you think. I could ride a horse all day when I was nine years old-most any kind of a horse. I was tough as whit'-leather, and I knew the country I was going into. You must not picture a little boy rolling a hoop in the park.
It was an afternoon in early autumn. The clay roads froze in the night; they thawed out in the day and they were a bit sticky. I was to stop at Roy's Tavern, south of the river, and go on in the morning. Now and then I passed some cattle driver, but no one overtook me on the road until almost sundown; then I heard a horse behind me and a man came up. I knew him. He was a cattleman named Dix. He had once been a shipper, but he had come in for a good deal of bad luck. His partner, Alkire, had absconded with a big sum of money due the grazers. This had ruined Dix; he had given up his land, which wasn't very much, to the grazers. After that he had gone over the mountain to his people, got together a pretty big sum of money and bought a large tract of grazing land. Foreign claimants had sued him in the courts on some old title and he had lost the whole tract and the money that he had paid for it. He had married a remote cousin of ours and he had always lived on her lands, adjoining those of my Uncle Abner.
Dix seemed surprised to see me on the road.
"So it's you, Martin," he said; "I thought Abner would be going into the upcountry."
One gets to be a pretty cunning youngster, even at this age, and I told no one what I was about.
"Father wants the cattle over the river to run a month," I returned easily, "and I'm going up there to give his orders to the grazers."
He looked me over, then he rapped the saddlebags with his knuckles. "You carry a good deal of baggage, my lad."
I laughed. "Horse feed," I said. "You know my father! A horse must be fed at dinner time, but a man can go till he gets it."
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