“Did you ever hear your father, or grandfather—anyone in your family—talk of another barn behind the house?”
Martha stared at him. Then she cried: “Papa, that’s it! It was a different barn, in a different place, and the original Washington’s Grove was cut down, or died—”
“Nope,” said Tobias Clarke. “Never was but this one barn. Still got some of its original timbers. Ye can see the date burned into the crosstree — 1761.”
Nikki was up early. A steady hack-hack-hack borne on the frosty air woke her. She peered out of her back window, the coverlet up to her nose, to see Mr. Ellery Queen against the dawn, like a pioneer, wielding an ax powerfully.
Nikki dressed quickly, shivering, flung her mink-dyed muskrat over her shoulders, and ran downstairs, out of the house, and around it past the barn.
“Ellery! What do you think you’re doing? It’s practically the middle of the night!”
“Chopping,” said Ellery, chopping.
“There’s mountains of firewood stacked against the barn,” said Nikki. “Really, Ellery, I think this is carrying a flirtation too far.” Ellery did not reply. “And anyway, there’s something—something gruesome and indecent about chopping up trees George Washington planted. It’s vandalism.”
“Just a thought,” panted Ellery, pausing for a moment. “A hundred and fifty-odd years is a long time, Nikki. Lots of queer things could happen, even to a tree, in that time. For instance—”
“The copper case,” breathed Nikki, visibly. “The roots grew around it. It’s in one of these stumps!”
“Now you’re functioning,” said Ellery, and he raised the ax again.
He was still at it two hours later, when Martha Clarke announced breakfast.
At 11:30 A.M. Nikki returned from driving the Professor, the Baroness, and James Ezekiel Patch to the railroad station. She found Mr. Queen seated before the fire in the kitchen in his undershirt, while Martha Clarke caressed his naked right arm.
“Oh!” said Nikki faintly. “I beg your pardon.”
“Where you going, Nikki?” said Ellery irritably. “Come in. Martha’s rubbing liniment into my biceps.”
“He’s not very accustomed to chopping wood, is he?” asked Martha Clarke in a cheerful voice.
“Reduced those foul ‘oakes’ to splinters,” groaned Ellery. “Martha, ouch!”
“I should think you’d be satisfied now,” said Nikki coldly. “I suggest we imitate Patch, Shaw, and the Baroness, Ellery—there’s a 3:05. We can’t impose on Miss Clarke’s hospitality forever.”
To Nikki’s horror, Martha Clarke chose this moment to burst into tears.
“Martha!”
Nikki felt like leaping upon her and shaking the cool look back into her perfidious eyes.
“Here... here, now, Martha.” That’s right, thought Nikki contemptuously. Embrace her in front of me! “It’s those three rats. Running out that way! Don’t worry—I’ll find that sword and half disme for you yet.”
“You’ll never find them,” sobbed Martha, wetting Ellery’s undershirt. “Because they’re not here. They never were here. When you s-stop to think of it... burying that coin, his sword... if the story were true, he’d have given them to Simeon and Sarah...”
“Not necessarily, not necessarily,” said Ellery with a hateful haste. “The old boy had a sense of history, Martha. They all did in those days. They knew they were men of destiny and that the eyes of posterity were upon them. Burying ’em is just what Washington would have done!”
“Do you really th-think so?”
Oh... pfui.
“But even if he did bury them,” Martha sniffled, “it doesn’t stand to reason Simeon and Sarah would have let them stay buried. They’d have dug that copper box up like rabbits the minute G-George turned his back.”
“Two simple countryfolk?” cried Ellery. “Salt of the earth? The new American earth? Disregard the wishes of His Mightiness, George Washington, First President of the United States? Are you out of your mind? And anyway, what would Simeon do with a dress-sword?”
Beat it into a plowshare, thought Nikki spitefully — that’s what he’d do.
“And that half disme. How much could it have been worth in 1791? Martha, they’re here under your farm somewhere. You wait and see—”
“I wish I could b-believe it... Ellery.”
“Shucks, child. Now stop crying—”
From the door Miss Porter said stiffly: “You might put your shirt back on, Superman, before you catch pneumonia.”
Mr. Queen prowled about the Clarke acres for the remainder of that day, his nose at a low altitude. He spent some time in the barn. He devoted at least twenty minutes to each of the twelve holes in the earth. He reinspected the oaken wreckage of his axwork, like a paleontologist examining an ancient petrifaction for the impression of a dinosaur foot. He measured off the distance between the holes; and, for a moment, a faint tremor of emotion shook him. George Washington had been a surveyor in his youth; here was evidence that his passion for exactitude had not wearied with the years. As far as Ellery could make out, the twelve oaks had been set into the earth at exactly equal distances, in an equilaterial triangle.
It was at this point that Ellery had seated himself upon the seat of a cultivator behind the barn, wondering at his suddenly accelerated circulation. Little memories were knocking at the door. And as he opened to admit them, it was as if he were admitting a personality. It was, of course, at this time that the sense of personal conflict first obtruded. He had merely to shut his eyes in order to materialize a tall, large-featured man carefully pacing off the distances between twelve points—pacing them off in a sort of objective challenge to the unborn future. George Washington...
The man Washington had from the beginning possessed an affinity for numbers. It had remained with him all his life. To count things, not so much for the sake of the things, perhaps, as for the counting, had been of the utmost importance to him. As a boy in Mr. Williams’s school in Westmoreland, he excelled in arithmetic. Long division, subtraction, weights and measures—to calculate cords of wood and pecks of peas, pints and gallons and avoirdupois—young George delighted in these as other boys delighted in horseplay. As a man, he merely directed his passion into the channel of his possessions. Through his possessions he apparently satisfied his curious need for enumeration. He was not content simply to keep accounts of the acreage he owned, its yield, his slaves, his pounds and pence. Ellery recalled the extraordinary case of Washington and the seed. He once calculated the number of seeds in a pound troy weight of red clover. Not appeased by the statistics on red clover, Washington then went to work on a pound of timothy seed. His conclusions were: 71,000 and 298,000. His appetite unsatisfied, he thereupon fell upon the problem of New River grass. Here he tackled a calculation worthy of his prowess: his mathematical labors produced the great, pacifying figure of 844,800.
This man was so obsessed with numbers, Ellery thought, staring at the ruins of Washington’s Grove, that he counted the windows in each house of his Mount Vernon estate and the number of “Paynes” in each window of each house, and then triumphantly recorded the exact number of each in his own handwriting.
It was like a hunger, requiring periodic appeasement. In 1747, as a boy of fifteen, George Washington drew “A Plan of Major Law: Washingtons Turnip Field as Survey’d by me.” In 1786, at the age of fifty-four, General Washington, the most famous man in the world, occupied himself with determining the exact elevation of his piazza above the Potomac’s high-water mark. No doubt he experienced a warmer satisfaction thereafter for knowing that when he sat upon his piazza looking down upon the river he was sitting exactly 124 feet 10½ inches above it.