The Sleuth of St. James's Square by Melville Davisson Post (black authors fiction txt) 📕

great, tall man, like Saul. In his anger, as he gesticulated by the hearth, his elbow crashed through the glass door of this secretary; the indigo boxes fell, burst open on the floor, and a hidden store of my father's money was revealed. The wooden boxes were full of gold pieces!”

He stopped and passed his fingers over his projecting chin.

“I was in fear, for I was alone in the house. Every negro was at a distant frolic. And I was justified in that fear. My brother leaped on me, struck me a stunning blow on the chest over the heart, gathered up the gold, took my horse and fled. At daybreak the negroes found me on the floor, unconscious. Then you came, Pendleton. The negroes had washed up the litter from the hearth where the indigo about the coins in the boxes had been shaken out.”

My father interrupted:

“The negroes said the floor had been scrubbed when they found you.”

“They were drunk,” continued the hunchback with no concern. “And, does one hold a drunken negro to his fact? But you saw for yourself the wooden boxes, round, three inches high, with tin lids, and of a diameter to hold a stack of golden eagles, and you saw the indigo still sticking about the sides of these boxes where the coins had lain.”

“I did,” replied my father. “I observed it carefully, for I thought the gold pieces might turn up sometime, and the blue indigo stain might be on them when they first appeared.”

Dillworth leaned far back in his chair, his legs tangled under him, his eyes on my father, in reflection. Finally he spoke.

“You are far-sighted,” he said.

“Or God is,” replied my father, and, stepping over to the table, he spun a gold piece on the polished surface of the mahogany board.

The hunchback watched the yellow disk turn and flit and wabble on its base and flutter down with its tingling reverberations.

“To-day, when I rode into the county seat to a sitting of the justices,” continued my father, “the sheriff showed me some gold eagles that your man from Maryland, Mr. Henderson, had paid in on court costs. Look, Dillworth, there is one of them, and with your thumb nail on the milled edge you can scrape off the indigo!”

The hunchback looked at the spinning coin, but he did not touch it. His head, with its long, straight hair, swung a moment uncertain between his shoulders. Then, swiftly and with a firm grip, he took his resolution.

“The coins appear,” he said. “My brother David must be in Baltimore behind this suit.”

“He is not in Baltimore,” said my father.

“Perhaps you know where he is,” cried the hunchback, “since you speak with such authority.”

“I do know where he is,” said my father in his deep, level voice.

The hunchback got on his feet slowly beside his chair. And the girl came into the protection of my father's arm, her features white like plaster; but the fiber in her blood was good and she stood up to face the thing that might be coming. After the one long abandonment to tears in my father's saddle she had got herself in hand. She had gone, like the princes of the blood, through the fire, and the dross of weakness was burned out.

The hunchback got on his feet, in position like a duelist, his hard, bitter face turned slantwise toward my father.

“Then,” he said, “if you know where David is you will take his daughter to him, if you please, and rid my house of the burden of her.”

“We shall go to him,” said my father slowly, “but he shall not return to us.”

The hunchback's eyes blinked and bated in the candlelight.

“You quote the Scriptures,” he said. “Is David in a grave?”

“He is not,” replied my father.

The hunchback seemed to advance like a duelist who parries the first thrust of his opponent. But my father met him with an even voice.

“Dillworth,” he said, “it was strange that no man ever saw your brother or the horse after the night he visited you in this house.”

“It was dark,” replied the man. “He rode from this door through the gap in the mountains into Maryland.”

“He rode from this door,” said my father slowly, “but not through the gap in the mountains into Maryland.”

The hunchback began to twist his fingers.

“Where did he ride then? A man and a horse could not vanish.”

“They did vanish,” said my father.

“Now you utter fool talk!” cried Dillworth.

“I speak the living truth,” replied my father. “Your brother David and your horse disappeared out of sound and hearing—disappeared out of the sight and knowledge of men—after he rode away from your door on that fatal night.”

“Well,” said the hunchback, “since my brother David rode away from my door—and you know that—I am free of obligation for him.”

“It is Cain's speech!” replied my father.

The hunchback put back his long hair with a swift brush of the fingers across his forehead.

“Dillworth,” cried my father, and his voice filled the empty places of the room, “is the mark there?”

The hunchback began to curse. He walked around my father and the girl, the hair about his lank jaws, his fingers working, his face evil. In his front and menace he was like a weasel that would attack some larger creature. And while he made the great turn of his circle my father, with his arm about the girl, stepped before the drawer of the table where the pistol lay.

“Dillworth,” he said calmly, “I know where he is. And the mark you felt for just now ought to be there.”

“Fool!” cried the hunchback. “If I killed him how could he ride away from the door?”

“It was a thing that puzzled me,” replied my father, “when I stood in this house on the morning of your pretended robbery. I knew what had happened. But I thought it wiser to let the evil thing remain a mystery, rather than unearth it to foul your family name and connect this child in gossip for all her days with a crime.”

“With a thief,” snarled the man.

“With a greater criminal than a thief,” replied My father. “I was not certain about this gold on that morning when you showed me the empty boxes. They were too few to hold gold enough for such a motive. I thought a quarrel and violent hot blood were behind the thing; and for that reason I have been silent. But now, when the coins turn up, I see that the thing was all ruthless, cold-blooded