Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries | Page 5

in deep lines. Randolph
was consumed with vanity and the weakness of ostentation, but he
shouldered his duties for himself. Presently he stopped and looked at
the woman, wan, faded like some prisoner of legend escaped out of

fabled dungeons into the sun.
The firelight flickered past her to the box on the benches in the hall,
and the vast, inscrutable justice of heaven entered and overcame him.
"Yes," he said. "Go! There is no jury in Virginia that would hold a
woman for shooting a beast like that." And he thrust out his arm, with
the fingers extended toward the dead man.
The woman made a little awkward curtsy.
"I thank you, sir." Then she hesitated and lisped, "But I have not shoot
him."
"Not shoot him!" cried Randolph. "Why, the man's heart is riddled!"
"Yes, sir," she said simply, like a child. "I kill him, but have not shoot
him."
Randolph took two long strides toward the woman.
"Not shoot him!" he repeated. "How then, in the name of heaven, did
you kill Doomdorf?" And his big voice filled the empty places of the
room.
"I will show you, sir," she said.
She turned and went away into the house. Presently she returned with
something folded up in a linen towel. She put it on the table between
the loaf of bread and the yellow cheese.
Randolph stood over the table, and the woman's deft fingers undid the
towel from round its deadly contents; and presently the thing lay there
uncovered.
It was a little crude model of a human figure done in wax with a needle
thrust through the bosom.
Randolph stood up with a great intake of the breath.

"Magic! By the eternal!"
"Yes, sir," the woman explained, in her voice and manner of a child. "I
have try to kill him many times-oh, very many times!-with witch words
which I have remember; but always they fail. Then, at last, I make him
in wax, and I put a needle through his heart; and I kill him very
quickly."
It was as clear as daylight, even to Randolph, that the woman was
innocent. Her little harmless magic was the pathetic effort of a child to
kill a dragon. He hesitated a moment before he spoke, and then he
decided like the gentleman he was. If it helped the child to believe that
her enchanted straw had slain the monster-well, he would let her
believe it.
"And now, sir, may I go?"
Randolph looked at the woman in a sort of wonder.
"Are you not afraid," he said, "of the night and the mountains, and the
long road?"
"Oh no, sir," she replied simply. "The good God will be everywhere
now."
It was an awful commentary on the dead man-that this strange
half-child believed that all the evil in the world had gone out with him;
that now that he was dead, the sunlight of heaven would fill every nook
and corner.
It was not a faith that either of the two men wished to shatter, and they
let her go. It would be daylight presently and the road through the
mountains to the Chesapeake was open.
Randolph came back to the fireside after he had helped her into the
saddle, and sat down. He tapped on the hearth for some time idly with
the iron poker; and then finally he spoke.

"This is the strangest thing that ever happened," he said. "Here's a mad
old preacher who thinks that he killed Doomdorf with fire from Heaven,
like Elijah the Tishbite; and here is a simple child of a woman who
thinks she killed him with a piece of magic of the Middle Ages-each as
innocent of his death as I am. And, yet, by the eternal, the beast is
dead!"
He drummed on the hearth with the poker, lifting it up and letting it
drop through the hollow of his fingers.
"Somebody shot Doomdorf. But who? And how did he get into and out
of that shut-up room? The assassin that killed Doomdorf must have
gotten into the room to kill him. Now, how did he get in?" He spoke as
to himself; but my uncle sitting across the hearth replied:
"Through the window."
"Through the window!" echoed Randolph. "Why, man, you yourself
showed me that the window had not been opened, and the precipice
below it a fly could hardly climb. Do you tell me now that the window
was opened?"
"No," said Abner, "it was never opened."
Randolph got on his feet.
"Abner," he cried, "are you saying that the one who killed Doomdorf
climbed the sheer wall and got in through a closed window, without
disturbing the dust or the cobwebs on the window frame?"
My uncle looked Randolph in the face.
"The murderer of Doomdorf