Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries

Uncle Abner, Master Of Mysteries
Melville Davisson Post
1918
Chapter 1
The Doomdorf Mystery
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 odors 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.
They rode alone, but they were worth an army of little men. Randolph
was vain and pompous and given over to extravagance of words, but he
was a gentleman beneath it, and fear was an alien and a stranger to him.
And Abner was the right hand of the land.
It was a day in early summer and the sun lay hot. They crossed through
the broken spine of the mountains and trailed along the river in the
shade of the great chestnut trees. The road was only a path and the
horses went one before the other. It left the river when the rock began
to rise and, making a detour through the grove of peach trees, reached
the house on the mountain side. Randolph and Abner got down,
unsaddled their horses and turned them out to graze, for their business
with Doomdorf would not be over in an hour. Then they took a steep
path that brought them out on the mountain side of the house.
A man sat on a big red-roan horse in the paved court before the door.
He was a gaunt old man. He sat bare-headed, the palms of his hands
resting on the pommel of his saddle, his chin sunk in his black stock,
his face in retrospection, the wind moving gently his great shock of
voluminous white hair. Under him the huge red horse stood with his
legs spread out like a horse of stone.

There was no sound. The door to the house was closed; insects moved
in the sun; a shadow crept out from the motionless figure, and swarms
of yellow butterflies maneuvered like an army.
Abner and Randolph stopped. They knew the tragic figure--a circuit
rider of the hills who preached the invective of Isaiah as though he
were the mouthpiece of a militant and avenging overlord; as though the
government of Virginia were the awful theocracy of the Book of Kings.
The horse was dripping with sweat and the man bore the dust and the
evidences of a journey on him.
"Bronson," said Abner, "where is Doomdorf?" The old man lifted his
head