American Sherlocks by Nick Rennison (reading like a writer .TXT) 📕

‘Who killed Doomdorf?’ he cried.

‘I killed him,’ replied the woman. ‘It was fair!’

‘Fair!’ echoed the justice. ‘What do you mean by that?’

The woman shrugged her shoulders and put out her hands with a foreign gesture.

‘I remember an old, old man sitting against a sunny wall, and a little girl, and one who came and talked a long time with the old man, while the little girl plucked yellow flowers out of the grass and put them into her hair. Then finally the stranger gave the old man a gold chain and took the little girl away.’ She flung out her hands. ‘Oh, it was fair to kill him!’ She looked up with a queer, pathetic smile.

‘The old man will be gone by now,’ she said; ‘but I shall perhaps find the wall there, with the sun on it, and the yellow flowers in the grass. And now, may I go?’

It is a law of the story-teller’s art that he does not tell a story. It is the listener who tells it. The story-teller does but provide him with the stimuli.

Randolph got up and walked about the floor. He was a justice of the peace in a day when that office was filled only by the landed gentry, after the English fashion; and the obligations of the law were strong on him. If he should take liberties with the letter of it, how could the weak and the evil be made to hold it in respect? Here was this woman before him a confessed assassin. Could he let her go?

Abner sat unmoving by the hearth, his elbow on the arm of his chair, his palm propping up his jaw, his face clouded 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