Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries by Melville Davisson Post Page B

repay, saith the Lord.”
    â€œBut where shall I go, Abner?” the creature wailed; “I have no money and I am cold.”
    Abner took out his leather wallet and flung it toward the door.
    â€œThere is money,” he said—“a hundred dollars—and there is my coat. Go! But if I find you in the hills tomorrow, or if I ever find you, I warn you in the name of the living God that I will stamp you out of life!”
    I saw the loathsome thing writhe into Abner’s coat and seize the wallet and slip out through the door; and a moment later I heard a horse. And I crept back on to Roy’s heifer skin.
    When I came down at daylight my Uncle Abner was reading by the fire.

Chapter 4

An Act of God
    It was the last day of the County Fair, and I stood beside my Uncle Abner, on the edge of the crowd, watching the performance of a mountebank.
    On a raised platform, before a little house on wheels, stood a girl dressed like a gypsy, with her arms extended, while an old man out in the crowd, standing on a chair, was throwing great knives that hemmed her in with a steel hedge. The girl was very young, scarcely more than a child, and the man was old, but he was hale and powerful. He wore wooden shoes, travel-worn purple velvet trousers, a red sash, and a white blouse of a shirt open at the throat.
    I was watching the man, whose marvelous skill fascinated me. He seemed to be looking always at the crowd of faces that passed between him and the wagon, and yet the great knife fell to a hair on the target, grazing the body of the girl.
    But while the old man with his sheaf of knives held my attention, it was the girl that Abner looked at. He stood studying her face with a strange rapt attention. Sometimes he lifted his head and looked vacantly over the crowd with the eyelids narrowed, like one searching for a memory that eluded him, then he came back to the face in its cluster of dark ringlets, framed in knives that stood quivering in the poplar board.
    It was thus that my father found us when he came up.
    â€œHave you noticed Blackford about?” he said; “I want to see him.”
    â€œNo,” replied Abner, “but he should be here, I think; he is at every frolic.”
    â€œI sent him the money for his cattle last night,” my father went on, “and I wish to know if he got it.”
    Abner turned upon him at that. “You will always take a chance with that scoundrel, Rufus,” he said, “and some day you will be robbed. His lands are covered with a deed of trust.”
    â€œWell,” replied my father, with his hearty laugh, “I shall not be robbed this time. I have Blackford’s request over his signature for the money, with the statement that the letter is to be evidence of its payment.”
    And he took an envelope out of his pocket and handed it to Abner.
    My uncle read the letter to the end, and then his great fingers tightened on the sheet, and he read it carefully again, and yet again, with his eyes narrowed and his jaw protruding. Finally he looked my father in the face.
    â€œBlackford did not write this letter!” he said.
    â€œNot write it!” my father cried. “Why, man, I know the deaf mute’s writing like a book. I know every line and slant of his letters, and every crook and twist of his signature.”
    But my uncle shook his head.
    My father was annoyed.
    â€œNonsense!” he said. “I can call a hundred men on these fair grounds who will swear that Blackford made every stroke of the pen in that letter, even against his denial, and though he bring Moses and the prophets to support him.”
    Abner looked my father steadily in the face.
    â€œThat is true, Rufus,” he said; “the thing is perfect. There is no letter or line or stroke or twist of the pen that varies from Blackford’s hand, and every grazer in the hills, to a man, will swear upon the Bible that he wrote it. Blackford himself cannot tell this