The man glowered at me like a tiger, his eyes green and golden with excitement: I have since wondered that he did not tear me to pieces.
“On gaining the street,” I continued coolly, “I found that I had brought the knife with me. It should have been left in the chamber – it would have given the whole thing the aspect of suicide. It was too late to repair the blunder, so I threw the knife-”
“Into the river!” exclaimed Kenneth, involuntarily.
And then I smiled.
“How did you know it was I!” he shrieked.
“Hush! they will overhear you in the corridor. It was as plain as day. I knew it before I had been five minutes in the room. First, because you shrank instinctively from the corpse, though you seemed to be caressing it. Secondly, when I looked into the stove, I saw a glove and handkerchief, partly consumed; and then I instantly accounted for the faint close smell which had affected me before the room was ventilated. It was chloroform. Thirdly, when I went to open the window. I noticed that the paint was scraped off the brackets which held the spout to the next house. This conduit had been newly painted two days previously – I watched the man at work; the paint on the brackets was thicker than anywhere else, and had not dried. On looking at your feet, which I did critically, while speaking to you, I saw that the leather on the inner side of each boot was slightly chafed, paint-marked. It is a way of mine to put this and that together!”
“If you intend to betray me-”
“O, no, but I don’t or I should not be here – alone with you. I am, as you may allow, not quite a fool.”
“Indeed, sir, you are as subtle as-”
“Yes, I wouldn’t mention him.”
“Who?”
“The devil.”
Kenneth mused.
“May I ask, Mr Lynde, what you intend to do?”
“Certainly – remain here.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Kenneth with an air of perplexity.
“If you will listen patiently, you shall learn why I have acknowledged this deed, why I would bear the penalty. I believe there are vast, intense sensations from which we are excluded, by the conventional fear of a certain kind of death. Now, this pleasure, this ecstasy, this something, I don’t know what, which I have striven for all my days, is known only to a privileged few – innocent men, who, through some oversight of the law, are hanged by the neck! How rich is Nature in compensations! Some men are born to be hung, some have hanging thrust upon them, and some (as I hope to do) achieve hanging. It appears ages since I commenced watching for an opportunity like this. Worlds could not tempt me to divulge your guilt, nor could worlds have tempted me to commit your crime, for a man’s conscience should be at ease to enjoy, to the utmost, this delicious death! Our interview is at an end, Mr Kenneth. I held it my duty to say this much to you.”
And I turned my back on him.
“One word, Mr Lynde.”
Kenneth came to my side, and laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, that red right hand, which all the tears of the angels cannot make white again.
“Did you send this to me last month?” asked Kenneth, holding up a slip of paper on which was scrawled, Watch them – in my handwriting.
“Yes,” I answered.
Then it struck me that these few thoughtless words, which some sinister spirit had impelled me to write, were the indirect cause of the whole catastrophe.
“Thank you,” he said hurriedly. “I watched them!” Then, after a pause, “I shall go far from here. I can not, I will not die yet. Mary was to have been my wife, so she would have hidden her shame – O cruel! she, my own cousin, and we the last two of our race! Life is not sweet to me, it is bitter, bitter; but I shall live until I stand front to front with him. And you? They will not harm you – you are a madman?”
Julius Kenneth was gone before I could reply.
The cell door shut him out forever – shut him out in the flesh. His spirit was not so easily exorcised.
After all, it was a wretched fiasco. Two officious friends of mine, who had played chess with me, at my lodgings, on the night of the 3rd, proved an alibi; and I was literally turned out of the Tombs; for I insisted on being executed.
Then it was maddening to have the newspapers call me a monomaniac.
I a monomaniac?
What was Pythagoras, Newton, Fulton? Have not the great original lights of every age, been regarded as madmen? Science, like religion, has its martyrs.
THE DOOMDORF MYSTERY by Melville Davisson Post
In Uncle Abner, Melville Davisson Post(1871-1930)created one of the great unforgettable early American detectives. The stories are set in Virginia in the early days of the nineteenth century where Abner is a severe but just upholder of the law. Post was by profession a lawyer, out of which came the idea for his stories about the unscrupulous legal genius Randolph Mason, in The Strange Cases of Randolph Mason (1896). Uncle Abner did not appear until 1911 with the stories collected as Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries (1918). Abner had a near puritanical belief in divine justice, which is only too apparent in the following story, perhaps the most inventive of the whole series.
The pioneer was not the only man in the great mountains behind Virginia. Strange aliens drifted in after the Colonial wars. All foreign armies are sprinkled with a cockle of adventurers that take root and remain. They were with Braddock and La Salle, and they rode north out of Mexico after her many empires went to pieces.
I think Doomdorf crossed the seas with Iturbide when that ill-starred adventurer returned to be shot against a wall; but there was no Southern blood in him. He came from some European race remote and barbaric. The evidences were all about him. He was a huge figure of a man, with a black spade beard, broad, thick hands, and square, flat fingers.
He had found a wedge of land between the Crown’s grant to Daniel Davisson and a Washington survey. It was an uncovered triangle not worth the running of the lines; and so, no doubt, was left out, a sheer rock standing up out of the river for a base, and a peak of the mountain rising northward behind it for an apex.
Doomdorf squatted on the rock. He must have brought a belt of gold pieces when he took to his horse, for he hired old Robert Steuart’s slaves and built a stone house on the rock, and he brought the furnishings overland from a frigate in the Chesapeake; and then in the handfuls of earth, wherever a root would hold, he planted the mountain behind his house with peach trees. The gold gave out; but the devil is fertile in resources. Doomdorf built a log still and turned the first fruits of the garden into a hell-brew. The idle and the vicious came with their stone jugs, and violence and riot flowed out.
The government of Virginia was remote and its arm short and feeble; but the men who held the lands west of the mountains against the savages under grants from George, and after that held them against George himself, were efficient and expeditious. They had long patience, but when that failed they went up from their fields and drove the thing before them out of the land, like a scourge of God.
There came a day, then, when my Uncle Abner and Squire Randolph rode through the gap of the mountains to have the thing out with Doomdorf. The work of this brew, which had the odours of Eden and the impulses of the devil in it, could be borne no longer. The drunken Negroes had shot old Duncan’s cattle and burned his haystacks, and the land was on its feet.